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Music

Brooklyn Death Trip: Talking About the End with Tombs

The groundbreaking metal group's frontman Mike Hill talks psychedelics, Black Flag, and death.

Photo by Jason Hellmann

Tombs’ last album, Path Of Totality, landed on the year-end best list of pretty much every metal publication and website of note in 2011. There’s a reason for that: The band play a seamless blend of black metal, post-punk, and bruising death metal that’s highly atmospheric and has few equals on the contemporary stage. The Brooklyn outfit’s third and latest, Savage Gold, which came out June 10 on Relapse, is even more focused and satisfying. Recorded by Hate Eternal ringleader and all-around death metal guru Erik Rutan at Mana Recording Studios in St. Petersburg, Florida, the album sees Tombs guitarist/vocalist/mastermind Mike Hill and drummer Andrew Hernandez playing alongside newcomers Ben Brand (bass) and Garett Bussanick (guitar). Noisey recently caught up with Hill to discuss the dark inspiration behind it.

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Noisey: Your last album, Path Of Totality, was the metal critics’ darling in 2011. Did that put more pressure on you when you started writing for Savage Gold?
Mike Hill: Nah, that doesn’t even enter my mind. It’s an honor to be recognized like that and I’m happy that people responded to that record that way. But if I got hit by a bus the day after I found out we got “Album Of The Year” in Decibel—I mean, you gotta be prepared for the end. If that’s all we accomplished, that’s cool. But fortunately I didn’t get killed in an accident or murdered or anything like that. When you start worrying about what people think of your record—especially critics—it takes away from the work, I think.

So you don’t think about reviews, but you do think about possibly getting hit by a bus or possibly murdered.
Actually, someone was killed in my neighborhood recently. I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and someone was struck by an automobile and killed a couple of weeks ago. So it’s a risk, man. People drive like maniacs in this town. And that’s the second pedestrian who’s been killed in an automotive accident since I’ve been living here, which is about 15 years at this point.

Do you find that thinking about death motivates you to get shit done?
Yeah, absolutely. I always try to get after things in general, but I think about death and dying all the time. There’s been a lot of death surrounding our camp in the last couple of years. That stuff is very real to me these days. It puts a lot of things in perspective about how short life is and how fragile it is. One day someone’s alive, and the next day they’re gone, and you’re never gonna see them again. So I try to apply that to myself. Fortunately, I don’t have any bad habits. I try to live a healthy lifestyle and be as positive as I can, but things still happen. You can always be the victim of an accident. So there’s fear of not being able to accomplish everything I want to accomplish and finish everything that I start.

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Does that only apply to music, or other parts of your life as well?
Oh, it’s small things, too. There’s tons of books I wanna read. I think, 'Am I really gonna be able to read all these?' I mean, how much time do we all really have left? There’s that Neurosis song where’s there’s a spoken passage talking about how many summers you have left in your life. I think about that stuff now. I never did when I was 25. Back then, I thought I was immortal. I never thought I was gonna get gray hair or anything, but now it’s a real thing. You see your parents getting older, and it becomes tangible. You can see the finish line in the distance.

You mentioned deaths in the Tombs camp. What happened?
One of the guys had a family member die recently. And I had two really close friends die within the last two years—one very recently, and one almost two years ago. They were both guys in their 30s. They were young, but they made a lot of stupid decisions in their lives, and I guess they succumbed to the pain and depression of living. Suicide by chemical negligence is probably the best way I can describe it. They’re no longer with us now, and that’s really hard for me to fathom because when I met these guys we were all very young and full of life. I still feel like I’m gonna see these guys again, but they’re gone. Even the guy who died almost two years ago—it hasn’t really set in. So that puts things in perspective. There’s this thin membrane between living and dying, and at some point we all cross over into that other world. That’s just the way it is. You’re no longer part of this reality.

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Did any of this seep into the writing of Savage Gold?
Yeah. Well, one of the guys passed away very recently, like I said, so by that time the record was done. But the other guy was actually gonna join the band. We started out as a three-piece, and somewhere along the line we started picking up these other guys to play in the band. We went through a bunch of second guitar players, and this guy was gonna be a touring member, possibly a writing member, and possibly someone who was gonna play on the record. When he died, it just sort of put a spin on things. I think that maybe was sort of the beginning of this meditation on death I’ve been exploring, this passing from one state to another. I started having those ideas when he passed away.

Were these guys we might know?
Yeah. The guy who passed away recently was Jason McCash from The Gates Of Slumber. He was also in Burn It Down and The Dream Is Dead. The guy who was gonna join Tombs was Jared Southwick, who was also in The Dream Is Dead. I met those guys in ’98 or something like that, when I was in Anodyne. They booked our first shows in the Midwest because they were sort of the kings of that whole scene out there. Burn It Down and Anodyne were both on Escape Artist, so we all helped each other out, and I’ve been tight with those guys for years. When Jared first started coming out to New York, I noticed something was off about him. But I don’t know anything about hard drugs. I’m pretty naïve when it comes to that kind of stuff. I don’t know anything about heroin or cocaine or anything like that. But Jared developed a problem over the years and it got the better of him. I’d seen a few other people who were older than me die, but Jared was actually younger. The fact that his life could just end like that was really heavy. I started writing about it mainly to get the ideas off my chest. I’m a big journal and notebook guy, and some of those ideas started manifesting into songs.

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What is the title Savage Gold a reference to?
I’m interested in things like alchemy, just as a curiosity. Gold is a noble metal, and the objective of alchemy is to take baser materials and convert them into gold. That’s sort of the beginning of that idea. The first song on the record, “Thanatos,” has the phrase “savage gold” in it, and Thanatos is the Greek god of the underworld and death and transformation. So that tied into my idea of transcending into a more noble state. That sort of connected the transformation from physical reality into another reality. That’s one of the big topics on the record. It all came from meditating on death. But “savage” is one of my favorite words of all time, and I tend to attack things in a sort of intense, savage way. So I just put those two words together. But apparently there’s a movie from the 30s called Savage Gold. I think it has to do with ivory poaching or something like that.

It sounds like the title of a spaghetti western.
I was hoping it would be that. I started doing searches online to see if those words actually meant anything, but the only thing that came up was this film. I was hoping it would be this killer western that I never saw, but it’s an African Queen-style boat movie.

Alchemy could be a metaphor for making music in a lot of ways. You’re creating something greater out of base materials. And you’re striving for gold—maybe not gold records, but music of a high quality.
Absolutely. Regardless of what other people think of the music on the record, to me it’s a pretty huge accomplishment because I feel really solid about the material. So to me, I succeeded. (Laughs) I know that sounds a little egotistical, but it is what it is.

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When we spoke prior to Path Of Totality, you had an experience with psychedelics that greatly influenced that record. Did psychedelics play a part in Savage Gold as well?
That same experience I had years ago is the same experience that continues to inform the work I’m doing now. It’s not like I take psychedelics or mushrooms every weekend. Even Terence McKenna, one of the gurus of psychedelics, recommends that you take them “infrequently but in heroic doses.” So that’s what I do—like maybe every couple of years. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s more of a ritualistic consciousness expansion. I wouldn’t wanna be going on these journeys every few weeks. But the experience I had a few years ago is one that I’m still learning things from regularly. It was a very pivotal thing for me, and it continues to bear fruit creatively.

Last but not least, let’s talk about your blog, Everything Went Black. You do an interview podcast there, you review classic records, and now you’ve started another podcast about horror and sci-fi movies called “Necromaniacs.”
Everything Went Black has been going really well lately. The nice thing is that I’m starting to get feedback. When I ask people to be on the podcast, they actually know what it is. I’ve had a lot of interesting people on it—Eugene Robinson from Oxbow, Matt Staggs who writes for Disinfo.com; Laina Dawes, who wrote a book about being a black woman in metal. She was great. I don’t really have any agenda or message other than to encourage people to lead a life that’s good for you.

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You also talk about Black Flag a lot.
(Laughs) The complete failure of Greg Ginn and Black Flag over the past year has been a huge topic for me. People say Keith Morris was awesome and Henry Rollins was the worst part of Black Flag, but really I think Ginn was the worst part because he completely dishonored himself by doing that shitty new record. Which saddens me, because Greg Ginn was someone I really looked up to before this fiasco happened.

J. Bennett is going to go watch some spaghetti westerns now.

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