Withered Refuse to be Confined on 'Grief Relic,' Their "Extremely Emotional" New Album

When guitarist Mike Thompson founded Withered with drummer Beau Brandon in 2003, they sounded nothing like most of their hometown contemporaries. At that point, Atlanta, Georgia (alongside Savannah) was about to churn out a bumper crop of melodic and progressive sludge acts like Mastodon, Baroness, Kylesa, and Black Tusk, but Withered always had more in common with classic Florida death metal and obscure Norwegian black metal. Neither the bands they came up alongside nor their own musical influences shared Thompson's elegiac sound and introspective lyrics, though, and so Withered remained a wholly separate entity, caught between two worlds and sworn to none.

Not that it mattered. A rising tide raises all boats, and Withered went on to release three well-received records, culminating in 2010's cult classic Dualitas. Lineup changes kept the band from polishing off new material for longer than anticipated, but now, six years later, Thompson has solidified the Withered lineup with the addition of bassist and producer Colin Marston (also of Dysrhythmia and Gorguts), and Primitive Man guitarist and vocalist Ethan McCarthy (who also pitched in lyrics). Together, they've just finished the fourth Withered album, Grief Relic, which is due on May 27th via Season of Mist—right in time for their upcoming North American tour with fellow Southern malcontents Inter Arma.

Fitting its title, Grief Relic sounds old and gloomy. With McCarthy's aid, Thompson has written an emotional death metal record that meditates on the inevitability of human suffering, drawing on the warmth of an analog production to drive its point home. In 2016, Withered remains one of the few bands willing to take the power inherent in extreme metal and focus it not on bloody escapism, but on the grinding reality that is daily life for most people. Grief Relic is a death metal soundtrack to many evenings of insomnia spent staring at the ceiling recounting the little regrets, failures and indignities that follow us all.

I called Thompson at home in Atlanta to dig deeper into their redemption narrative, and find out what's still bubbling beneath the surface.

Noisey: Withered has come back after a long break between albums—six years. Why did it take so long to get this new album out there?
Mike Thompson: We were rehearsing, writing recording, wheeling and dealing all along the way. It just took that long to get our feet back under us. But it didn't take us any longer than normal to write this album. We had the first four songs done by the middle of 2013. After that we did our first tour with Ethan while supporting Goatwhore. Then we got to work on a live DVD that we had already begun. Then we wrote four more songs in the last half of 2013. It was done before the holidays of that year, that's when we started tracking drums.

That's surprising. Your music is so technical that I can imagine it taking longer to compose.
To be honest with you I think the technicality comes from the fact that Beau and I wrote the foundations of the songs by ourselves, whereas every other record was written as a full band in rehearsal. We didn't have that luxury this time. I think we found ourselves unintentionally compensating for the sonic void of not having a second guitar and a bass player. The fact that that wasn't there forced us to try and fill the gaps. So by the time we got Colin's and Ethan's layers on there, we had a more solid foundation.

In contrast to all that technicality, the lyrics on Grief Relic seem fairly minimal.
Lyrics are always the last thing we write so we're always trying to fit them to the music. We won't focus vocals in a place where they don't belong, and we're also fairly selfish with the music itself. If we really love a part we have problems with not doing any vocals. We won't do vocals for half a song if that's what we feel. If we're vibing on the music we don't want to break it up or distract from it. We just try to be very careful about putting them where they belong. The biggest problem I face with is that I can be wordy but that's contradictory to my vocal style. I like long, drawn-out vocal notes. That's probably why you only see a few words in a lot of places. In performance I like those howling, distant vocals portraying desperation. What I end up having to do is chopping the lyrics significantly. We write the lyrics separately from the music, match it to the mood of a song and then cut them down to fit. There's actually more words in the lyric book than on the album. In the performances, we hit all the nouns and verbs and that's pretty much it.

These lyrics are also pretty emotional for death metal.
It's extremely emotional. For us, that's what it's always been about: trying to get into that emotional space and encouraging the listener to achieve that as well alongside us. Obviously, there's no better theme for extreme metal than torment, but rather than making it violent and inflicting it upon others, we go introspective. Ethan's lyrics tend to be extremely raw and very direct about what he's trying to communicate, whereas I come from a more philosophical perspective and work around it. I try to make a rationale, and couple that with the emotional experience. I want to make the music, if not educational, then something that you can grow from. It really is about epiphany for me. I'm always crossing an emotional threshold when I write these lyrics, so they're about growth and self-exploration for me.

Some of these lyrics also conjure images of urban decay. For example, on "Withdraw" you say "Binding me to this darkening corner / My toenails pry the cracked floorboards."Ethan would definitely relate to it more on that level. To me, it's more metaphorical. When I talk about an empty room or a cracked floorboard, I'm not recalling necessarily anything from my personal experience—it's more of a theoretical space. And for my lyrics this time around, I was pushing to be more visual. In the past, my lyrics were more abstract. This time, I wanted to paint more of a picture and grow as a songwriter. On "Distort, Engulf," the opening line is, "As I dwell in the confines of this box." I wrote that in my bunk while we were on tour with Danzig. It's inspired by touring as a series of existential moments, a whirlwind that you walk through.

What prompts your existential musings?
Specifics might be tough to get into. Every song that I've written is a result of some experience, and usually they're written in isolation. A lot of my lyrics I write on airplanes. I travel for work, and take long flights to China or Taiwan. You spend twenty hours or so flying, and don't know a single person around, so there's no connection or expectations, along with being thirty thousand some feet away from the earth. It's about as isolated as you can be—at least that's how it feels, especially at nighttime. I'll listen to music, usually demo versions of what we've been writing. I'll read a book, usually on metaphysics, just to get into that headspace. I'll have some recent emotional experience in mind, and start to peel back its layers and try to get to some sort of root driving force of humanity.

Where do you work?
I work for an electronics company. I design mostly electronics for cars and I'm also the head of marketing. My official title is Product Development Manager. I design car alarms, remote car starters and things like that. I'm a big car buff. That's my second largest passion next to music. I think there's a lot of parallels in those two subjects because I'm just curious about how things work, be that technology or people. For the longest time, it was just electronics. I took things apart as a kid. It wasn't until we started Withered, shortly after my father died, that I began musing about philosophy. I got super curious about how people work and then more specifically how I work. I try not to stop analyzing myself. That's what encourages the growth for me and the genuine reward that I get out of the music.

People talk about how technology separates us, but the interesting thing about playing music is that it's literally a point where expressing oneself emotionally and physically manipulating electronics intersect.
That's an interesting viewpoint. Obviously we use electronics, but that's really limited to the guitars and amplifiers. We're actually fairly analog. Anything that we do on record that might sound like it's done with some digital device actually is not. We just use distortion pedals and delay pedals, that's a digital as it will ever get for us. I'm actually anti-technology when it comes to music, aside from the history of what it takes to be in a death metal band. Obviously you don't have death metal without a distorted electric guitar. But give us a pass on those things… [laughs] It's very important for the music to be very organic and not manufactured for us. We want to share the physical limits that we have, and exemplify them, even.

In the past, we did larger productions with bigger budgets, with all the things everybody does on metal records. This time around I was like, "For better or for worse we aren't doing a single edit, a single sound replacement. We're going to do it old school and perform everything in one take." Luckily for me, Beau is one of the greatest drummers I've ever worked with; he plays better when he's being monitored. I don't think we did more than four takes of any song on this record and probably half of them are first takes. It really paid off. I'm super happy with it, and I definitely argued with the engineer a few times about things he wanted to do to make Grief Relic sound quote-unquote better, but I just wanted it to sound real.

When you released your first album in 2005 the analog approach was not the most popular thing, but now it seems like the analog aesthetic is making a comeback.
You think so? I see it as sort of a 1970s classic rock throwback. With the market flooded with so many bands, it's easy to manufacture a perfect performance, but it obviously strips all of the humanity from the performance. Now, some bands are going for that cold, mechanical feel, but I've never enjoyed it. Deep down we've always had the spirit of an arena rock band. That's what made my eyes huge as a kid. That was true talent. Those guys did not have sound correction—you had to nail it. We pride ourselves a a live band. The only reason we do any of this is to play live and connect with fans in person. My biggest fear is putting out a record that we can't replicate in a live situation. That's a huge pet peeve of mine, seeing a band that put out a record I love but are disappointing live.

In adding new members to your band, Ethan and Colin, you've picked people who not only predicted the analog aesthetic in their other bands, but who also play a great deal, so it seemd like you've tailored the rest of your band to your aesthetic.
Well I thank you for the credit! [laughs] They're friends. I picked them because I know who they are, which honestly probably has a lot to do with us being friends. We value a lot of the same things when it comes to music. Colin is definitely the antithesis of a technology lover when it comes to being a music nerd. He finds something that works good enough, runs with it, and does incredible things. And Ethan basically doesn't give a fuck about anything! [Laughs] Other than he loves playing music. That's why when he reached out about playing with us I couldn't have been happier. He's such a terrorizing and intimidating vocalist that it's a dream come true to have him on board. That's not to downplay Colin. We couldn't find anybody else who could break our songs down and write bass lines that were consistent with what we saw for the album.

Catch Withered on tour with Inter Arma:

Jul. 5 Washington DC @ DC9
Jul. 6 Philadelphia, PA @ Boot & Saddle
Jul. 8 NYC/Brooklyn, NY @ St Vitus
Jul. 9 Boston, MA @ Great Scott
Jul. 10 Buffalo, NY @ Waiting room
Jul. 11 Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
Jul. 12 Detroit, MI @ Pike Room
Jul. 13 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
Jul. 14 Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club
Jul. 15 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
Jul. 16 Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
Jul. 19 Seattle, WA @ Barboza
Jul. 20 Portland, OR @ Dour Fir
Jul. 21 Eugene, OR @ TBD
Jul. 22 San Francisco, CA @ Thee Parkside
Jul. 23 Glendale, CA @ Complex
Jul. 24 San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar
Jul. 25 Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge
Jul. 27 El Paso, TX @ The Sandbox
Jul. 28 San Antonio, TX @ Limelight
Jul. 29 Austin, TX @ Sidewinder
Jul. 30 Dallas, TX @ Three Links
Jul. 31 New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa
Aug. 1 Birmingham, AL @ Spring Street Firehouse
Aug. 2 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
Aug. 3 Asheville, NC @ Mothlight

Joseph Schafer is withering away on Twitter.