Photo courtesy of Eternal SleepIt’s always the dude that can beat your ass six ways to Sunday that is the most modest, down-to-earth guy in the room. In both stature and sound, Pittsburgh hardcore band Eternal Sleep is just that guy. They have been quietly touring and releasing records for the last three years, creeping up on everyone’s radar, not unlike that Italian grad student at the party who starts off sitting silent in a corner and by the end of the night is sitting on a couch next to your girlfriend ranting about American excesses. With their newest EP Belief in the Truth of Nothing (out now on Harm Reduction and available for purchase via Deathwish), Eternal Sleep have not so subtly claimed their spot as one of the more dynamic bands in the genre.Noisey sat down with vocalist Joe Sanderson to finally get some answers about the band, and more importantly, about why he’s never home.Noisey: How did Eternal Sleep come about?
Joe Sanderson: Colin and Travis were in the band Deathright before, and I ended up playing bass for them. I'm not a fantastic musician, so I was only doing it to help out those guys and because my other band Unreal City wasn't doing much. Deathright broke up and immediately after, Colin wrote these Merauder-like songs and was just going to record and sing on everything himself. He was having trouble with placing the vocals and how to write them, so I helped him out. I had ghost written all these lyrics for Colin from his perspective. Then they said, "Let's play a show," and we did it with basically the Deathright lineup with me on bass. We played a handful of shows with Colin as the frontman and they were kind of goofy. Travis took over and wrote four more songs, and I switched places with Colin—he went to bass and I started singing. So we started playing the songs live, but shortly after, we parted ways with Ethan, as he had his own band with Steel Nation. So Colin switched to drums, his most natural instrument. We went through a few bassists and found Ben finally. We recorded a demo called Lessons and have been going hard since then.Eternal Sleep sounds rooted in early 90s death metal; it's got the Entombed guitar sound with Obituary riffs. structured like a 9's hardcore song. Was that intentional, or was it an instance of the influences being digested equally?
I think it's the latter. We didn't really set out to do anything specific like that. Since Deathright, Travis had been toying around with guitar tones to get that Entombed Left Hand Path nasty guitar sound. When they were writing that stuffwith Deathright, it was probably more conscious then, but I don't think that intent carried over into Eternal Sleep. He's really heavily influenced by a lot of grunge and rock bands like Tad and Melvins in how he structures his songs. Did you ever notice the Melvins will play two parts, and they won't repeat it after that? If you listen to Eternal Sleep's songs, you'll notice that it's more rock-oriented in song structure similar to that, but like you said before, sonically it touches upon something much rawer.I noticed the songwriting took a directional change on the new record; the songs are longer, and more unprecidtable. The songs morph into something else halfway through, whereas on your previous record, they would have stopped to become a new song.
We're all huge, huge Damnation AD marks. They way they would write is that they would stop the song and go into some weird part that built back into the original riff, but it would be a whole minute trip. I think that undeniably there is a big Damnation influence in everything we do, and especially the new stuff. It’s Travis’ favorite band.You guys decided to put out a few EPs instead of saving up all of your songs for a full length. Was that intentional, or was it just a case of, “Here, we wrote three more songs"?
We’ve all been in a ton of bands. I'll use Unreal City as an example; we put a full-length record out which took several years, and it should have been three different eps. It wasn’t an album as much as a compilation of the first three years of that band. I dont know if this is something an outside listener would notice, but I felt like, “This does not fit with this” and so on. I personally conceptualize music in release formats. When someone puts on Spotify or shuffle, I can’t do it. I think ,“That song’s cool but it doesn’t exist to me without the song before it or the song after.” So, I always wanted our stuff to work together as a piece. We were in no rush to write a full length. As a hardcore band, you only get one chance to put that first full-length out. That makes or breaks you for hardcore kids. I don’t have a lot of experience releasing music in other genres, and it might be more lenient elsewhere, but in hardcore it seems like, “Oh, their first record was on this label and it was just okay," and then you’re dismissed. So we figured we’ll play Europe, California and all these other places now to lay the seeds for this thing.Was that the motivation for touring so much? I mean, you're always on the road.
Yeah, the internet is a great thing for music, obviously. It eliminates the middleman and puts us right in people’s houses, but it also lets every kid do the same thing. In hardcore, there is so much shit to be in people's faces—just a million different bands. Some of them are great, a lot are good, and a lot of it is bad. You just can’t keep up. I think we are a sick band, and I feel that if you see it, you’re gonna like it, so we said ,“Let’s go,” grind it hard, and get it in front of as many people as possible. It has worked exactly like that. We’ll play some little town in Texas and there will be twelve people there. The next time we play the bigger town in the area, those same twelve kids are there. I feel like you have to do it that way in this kind of music to catch anyone’s attention. The other thing is, music is free now. We're pushing collectibles and T-shirts. We're not selling the music. We can only sell the live performance and that’s the only thing worth anything anymore, so we can’t sit at home.So, what the fuck does the phrase “belief in truth of nothing” mean?
Almost everything I’ve written has come back to the fact that I have a difficult time finding meaning in a lot of things. I have never had the prettiest outlook on things. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned not to be depressed about it. For years, finding the truth seemed impossible. A lot of thinking, “What difference does it make?” You don’t get a lot done that way. You spend a lot of sleepless nights contemplating walking away from everything. Obviously I don’t think nihilism is a super practical world view, and wouldn't consider myself an actual nihilist—far from it really, but when I write music that seems to be what I gravitate towards. I find a lot of what people do to be really senseless, and I have an issue with people over that. Belief in Truth of Nothing is kind of an ode to that. Over time, I realized that when you strip everyone's biases away, you start to find what is true. So in absolute nothingness, you can find pure truth. To be honest, that’s what a lot of our last record Dead Like Me is about too. It’s more complex than it sounds. I don’t truly believe there’s absolutely nothing to give.What’s the plan for now?
We just did this tour to Austin with Harm’s Way and Code Orange to play South by Southwest. We have some plans for other tours coming up. We’re gonna try to hit it hard and get this record into everybody’s hands. It’s now time to do a full-length. We have a lot of the songs written, and have started to demo stuff. We’ve been trying to get someone to bite on it, and agree to put it out [laughs]. The new record is going to slay. It’s the most dynamic stuff we’ve done, but still rocks.
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Joe Sanderson: Colin and Travis were in the band Deathright before, and I ended up playing bass for them. I'm not a fantastic musician, so I was only doing it to help out those guys and because my other band Unreal City wasn't doing much. Deathright broke up and immediately after, Colin wrote these Merauder-like songs and was just going to record and sing on everything himself. He was having trouble with placing the vocals and how to write them, so I helped him out. I had ghost written all these lyrics for Colin from his perspective. Then they said, "Let's play a show," and we did it with basically the Deathright lineup with me on bass. We played a handful of shows with Colin as the frontman and they were kind of goofy. Travis took over and wrote four more songs, and I switched places with Colin—he went to bass and I started singing. So we started playing the songs live, but shortly after, we parted ways with Ethan, as he had his own band with Steel Nation. So Colin switched to drums, his most natural instrument. We went through a few bassists and found Ben finally. We recorded a demo called Lessons and have been going hard since then.Eternal Sleep sounds rooted in early 90s death metal; it's got the Entombed guitar sound with Obituary riffs. structured like a 9's hardcore song. Was that intentional, or was it an instance of the influences being digested equally?
I think it's the latter. We didn't really set out to do anything specific like that. Since Deathright, Travis had been toying around with guitar tones to get that Entombed Left Hand Path nasty guitar sound. When they were writing that stuffwith Deathright, it was probably more conscious then, but I don't think that intent carried over into Eternal Sleep. He's really heavily influenced by a lot of grunge and rock bands like Tad and Melvins in how he structures his songs. Did you ever notice the Melvins will play two parts, and they won't repeat it after that? If you listen to Eternal Sleep's songs, you'll notice that it's more rock-oriented in song structure similar to that, but like you said before, sonically it touches upon something much rawer.
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We're all huge, huge Damnation AD marks. They way they would write is that they would stop the song and go into some weird part that built back into the original riff, but it would be a whole minute trip. I think that undeniably there is a big Damnation influence in everything we do, and especially the new stuff. It’s Travis’ favorite band.You guys decided to put out a few EPs instead of saving up all of your songs for a full length. Was that intentional, or was it just a case of, “Here, we wrote three more songs"?
We’ve all been in a ton of bands. I'll use Unreal City as an example; we put a full-length record out which took several years, and it should have been three different eps. It wasn’t an album as much as a compilation of the first three years of that band. I dont know if this is something an outside listener would notice, but I felt like, “This does not fit with this” and so on. I personally conceptualize music in release formats. When someone puts on Spotify or shuffle, I can’t do it. I think ,“That song’s cool but it doesn’t exist to me without the song before it or the song after.” So, I always wanted our stuff to work together as a piece. We were in no rush to write a full length. As a hardcore band, you only get one chance to put that first full-length out. That makes or breaks you for hardcore kids. I don’t have a lot of experience releasing music in other genres, and it might be more lenient elsewhere, but in hardcore it seems like, “Oh, their first record was on this label and it was just okay," and then you’re dismissed. So we figured we’ll play Europe, California and all these other places now to lay the seeds for this thing.Was that the motivation for touring so much? I mean, you're always on the road.
Yeah, the internet is a great thing for music, obviously. It eliminates the middleman and puts us right in people’s houses, but it also lets every kid do the same thing. In hardcore, there is so much shit to be in people's faces—just a million different bands. Some of them are great, a lot are good, and a lot of it is bad. You just can’t keep up. I think we are a sick band, and I feel that if you see it, you’re gonna like it, so we said ,“Let’s go,” grind it hard, and get it in front of as many people as possible. It has worked exactly like that. We’ll play some little town in Texas and there will be twelve people there. The next time we play the bigger town in the area, those same twelve kids are there. I feel like you have to do it that way in this kind of music to catch anyone’s attention. The other thing is, music is free now. We're pushing collectibles and T-shirts. We're not selling the music. We can only sell the live performance and that’s the only thing worth anything anymore, so we can’t sit at home.So, what the fuck does the phrase “belief in truth of nothing” mean?
Almost everything I’ve written has come back to the fact that I have a difficult time finding meaning in a lot of things. I have never had the prettiest outlook on things. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned not to be depressed about it. For years, finding the truth seemed impossible. A lot of thinking, “What difference does it make?” You don’t get a lot done that way. You spend a lot of sleepless nights contemplating walking away from everything. Obviously I don’t think nihilism is a super practical world view, and wouldn't consider myself an actual nihilist—far from it really, but when I write music that seems to be what I gravitate towards. I find a lot of what people do to be really senseless, and I have an issue with people over that. Belief in Truth of Nothing is kind of an ode to that. Over time, I realized that when you strip everyone's biases away, you start to find what is true. So in absolute nothingness, you can find pure truth. To be honest, that’s what a lot of our last record Dead Like Me is about too. It’s more complex than it sounds. I don’t truly believe there’s absolutely nothing to give.What’s the plan for now?
We just did this tour to Austin with Harm’s Way and Code Orange to play South by Southwest. We have some plans for other tours coming up. We’re gonna try to hit it hard and get this record into everybody’s hands. It’s now time to do a full-length. We have a lot of the songs written, and have started to demo stuff. We’ve been trying to get someone to bite on it, and agree to put it out [laughs]. The new record is going to slay. It’s the most dynamic stuff we’ve done, but still rocks.