Ritual's Matt Tobin on Horror, Heaviness, and Hamilton

“I’ve been into horror films since I was a kid,” Matt Tobin says as he takes a drag of his Americano, the words “HOME SICK” tattooed on his knuckles. “First horror film I ever saw was Pet Sematary, and it’s still one of my favourites.” His band Ritual will be releasing their inaugural full-­length record on October 30, Devil’s Night. While the timing was coincidental, as they had hoped to get the record out months earlier, it is a fortunate foray for cashing in on the seasonal relationship between the holiday and their genre.

“I think for some reason heavy music and horror movies always kind of went together,” he says. “Metal has always been very taboo and horror movies have been taboo.“ It was a crisp fall day, threatening rain, when we met up in downtown Hamilton, just a cigarette butt flick away from Club Absinthe where Ritual made their live debut a little over a year earlier. Tobin, who grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, has long called Steel City home and continues to draw motivation from the streets.

“It’s a really dark record, and it’s a really honest record,” Tobin says. “It’s like a calm, calculated mess, and that’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to sound like I was throwing up everywhere the whole time.”

Tobin made a name for himself in music through Dead and Divine, a post-­hardcore band out of Burlington that hit international acclaim and Billboard charts. He compares the final falling-out of the band to the Amityville Horror House: a picturesque exterior plagued with internal arguments and dysfunction.

After the band broke up, Tobin fumbled with reality for a bit and ended up falling into a graphic design career. Designing logos and merchandise, Tobin eventually found his niche reimagining old movie posters. “If I was always doing posters all the time I would be happy as a pig in shit,” he says. Cashing in once again on the love for horror themes, Tobin has worked on commissions for the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Child’s Play franchises including a recent memorial piece for the late great American­ slasher auteur Wes Craven.

However, Tobin insists on keeping his muses segregated and tries to focus on the passion at hand. After a strenuous recording process riddled with uncertainty and plagued by its own future, Tobin along with his brothers in arms Aaron Le Tual, Matthew Rigg, Tim Busa and Dillon Forret, are all too ready for the world to hear their sound. “If people can appreciate honesty and the whole wearing your heart on your sleeve and your guts on the outside, that’s what this album is.”

After the interview we parted ways, Tobin hopped on his chopper hoping to get home before the rain started, back to his month­long October horror movie marathon. And so the saga persists, Horror and Heavy plague the minds of those righteous beings that refuse to subscribe to contradictory mainstream beliefs, and Ritual will continue to tango with the Devil’s brood.

Noisey: What was the difference writing for the band that was going to be Ritual compared to writing with Dead and Divine?
Matt Tobin: It’s kind of similar. I mean, I was the main songwriter for Dead and Divine. That was my baby. By the end of the band’s career I was the only original member. So it’s kind of been similar. I wrote most of the music in Dead and Divine but when it came down to studio time that’s when I really stepped away ha ha, I have the worst patience and tolerance for repetition. That’s the difference with this Ritual record: we banged everything out in one or two takes, all the little imperfections that are there, there’s a little bit of things that are out of tune, and just left it, I didn’t want to nitpick, and that’s probably the biggest difference between those two things. I didn’t really record on the Dead and Divine records, I recorded some guitar parts and did my vocals obviously. Whereas Ritual was pretty much all me, then when members started flowing in and I started meeting all these awesome dudes that are in the band now, we went back and they got to re­track the parts that they wanted to. So we did have that balance of different kinds of playing on the record, again to keep it more real, it’s not just all me doing everything.

So at the end of the summer you guys announced some pretty sweet record deals, Distort (Fontana North) in Canada, Bullet Tooth worldwide, and Halfcut (Shock) in Australia. At what point did you know that was going to happen and how did if affect the recording process?
You know what man, that’s probably been the longest part of this whole thing. I know the record has taken forever to come out. Things surprise you. You have this idea of how you want something to happen and then something else happens, for the better. And you’re like ‘Wait this makes a lot more sense.’ That’s where we’re at now. It was just this long process and we were unsure what was going to go on. It was getting to the point where, if we didn’t find the homes we need were just going to put it out ourselves, we just needed to get the record out. And luckily right at that turnaround moment everything lined up, the stress was taken off. We had these labels reach out to us, Distort, who I worked with before in Dead and Divine, and Bullet Tooth. Josh at Bullet Tooth, he’s a fantastic dude and he believes in the record. All the labels believe in the record and I think that’s the most important thing. A lot of bands do DIY stuff now and everyone is going that route, but it’s nice to have people who are outside of the band, have that outside perspective and care about the music as much as the people in the band.

Continued below…

Excellent, what do you think is the biggest difference between starting a band in the early 2000s and starting a band now?
Back in the 2000s you had to tour. That was the most important thing you could do as a band. You had to go out there, you had to play shows, you had to put yourself out there not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing who’s going to show up. When I was growing up in Dead and Divine we had no money, we couldn’t afford anything, we just had to play, play, play, sometimes the same club twice a week, just to hope that the right person would be there or someone would hear something and then you bank off those opportunities. There was not really a lot of digital networking or social networking, MySpace was relevant back in those days but you didn’t really use that other than as an exposure tool. A lot of bands banked off that and that helped a lot of bands out as well. Now you can just go online and open a YouTube channel or post on Facebook and word of mouth just spreads like wildfire. You can get exposed easier but in that regard to the market it's so oversaturated. There’s so many bands, so many musicians, so many artists, you can get lost in it. It has its perks and its downsides, both eras, but I definitely think the legwork, the man work, the experience that you had to put in back in the day isn’t as relevant now.

Moving on a little bit, you’re obviously a pretty big Halloween fan. As a musician and graphic design artist, what inspires you about Halloween?
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, I was showing them some poster work I was doing, and they’re like ‘How are you able to focus on the two creative processes, do they ever crossover?’ And they’re actually completely different for me. It’s two different parts of my brain that satisfy those passions. When I sit down and I’m working at home or in my office, and I’m drawing, sometimes I don’t listen to music at all. It’s really weird. I find it’s like having a conversation with somebody but then you hear a song you really like in the background and you’re listening to the song and not paying attention to the person talking, that’s kind of what happens. So before I know it I’ll be drawing for six hours and not have listened to a song and then I feel really weird about it because music is my life, that’s my first and foremost. But that’s why I need to separate them.

As a graphic designer, how have you gone about breaking into that industry? And what are you trying to get out of designing movie posters?
I started doing merch designs, years ago, for the band, through word of mouth and being on tour meeting people. I did one poster for a client, someone saw that and it just kind of kept going. That’s that exposure thing happening online. The right person sees it then that’s it. All it took was someone from CBS Films or Universal to see my work and be like, ‘Hey this is great do you wanna do an alternative movie poster for us?’ Really kind of lucky I guess. But in the same way I applied myself to art as I did with the band. I went full tilt with art when I wasn’t doing music full time and I was broke half the time not making any money just working my ass off, and it paid off. Now I’m doing that full time. I’m really beyond grateful that I’m able to do it.

What do you love about Hamilton?
It’s a melting pot of culture and art and great food and funny, weird, bizarre things and people. It has a lot of characteristics of Toronto but just smaller more community based, and I think a little bit less snooty than Toronto can tend to be sometimes. I love it and the town is bustling right now, it’s coming up. There’s great restaurants and art everywhere all the time, and great music.

Do you think it has a sound to it? Would you be able to pick out a band that’s from Hamilton?
Maybe. Outer things always inspire any sort of creative person at all. So there’s probably like a tinge that you could pick up. Like I can for sure tell when a band is Canadian. Me and Skylar, our producer, had this conversation the other day, you can just kind of tell when a band is Canadian, there’s something in the sound. There’s something that connects, from Tragically Hip to Barenaked Ladies to Alexisonfire to Big Wreck to I Mother Earth to Ritual, there’s just something. I don’t know if it’s production, I don’t know what it is. But there’s a vibe.

You said Pet Sematary was the first horror film to get you into that genre. What was the first song that you heard that really made you fall in love with mus…
“Disarm” by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Yeah?
Yeah. I heard the Pumpkins before, but this was 1994 when I heard this song. I was super young and, you might not believe it but I remember my parents wouldn’t let me buy the CD because there was a song on it called “Silverfuck”. So I was forced to buy the single, when people bought single CDs, it would have the single and like a B­side or a remix on it. I bought the single for “Disarm” and I had this little Discman, I sat and listened to that in my aunt’s house on vacation, while I was going to bed on her couch, and I probably listened to “Disarm” not joking, twenty times in a row before I fell asleep. I remember, that’s the first time I listened to a song and got cold shivers and a lump in my throat. There was something that attached me to that song. I had listened to music before then, it was my cousin who got me into the Pumpkins but it was that song specifically. Then I realized music can do things, and it can transcend, and it really is a universal language. It’s fucked up how just sound and melody can make you feel.

One last thing, what bands were you listening to when you were writing the album? Or even right now, what are you into?
I delve back into older stuff but right now as far as new bands that I’m listening to, Prophets is one. Honestly, all the new shit that they’re putting out is amazing. Gutter is another one, also amazing­ two local bands from Hamilton. [The Dirty Nil – added by Tobin after the fact] On another scale is Dead Sara from LA, love them to death play them incessantly. The new Stray record is pretty awesome; it’s a pretty fun record. Yeah much new stuff I don’t know, I divert back and forth, listening to old Silverchair records or… Lot of 90s grunge man, that’s always on my turntable in my house.

Griffin J. Elliot is a writer in Ottawa. Follow him on Twitter.