Live With Undeath!
Look, death metal is not for everyone I get it. But sometimes there are bands in a genre that go beyond that genre and become one of those, you HAVE to check these guys out kind of acts.
Undeath is one of those bands and the boys, Kyle Beam (guitars), Alexander Jones (vocals), Tommy Wall (bass), Jared Welch (guitars), and Matt Browning (drums), are headed to Broken Goblet this Thursday the 17th to support their new album “More Insane“.
The band formed in Rochester, New York back in the fall of 2018. Kyle and Matt were kicking around the idea of doing a death metal band and needed a vocalist. Kyle came out to see Jone’s old band Bone Mask open for Defeated Sanity, “They asked me if I wanted to try out shortly afterward, and I suppose the rest is history!” says Alexander Jones.
Asked about the Rochester metal scene, Jones says “It’s small but very close-knit. Because it’s such an intimate community of people everybody generally sticks together and lifts each other up. It’s a great little community.”
They’ve logged over 250 shows, sharing the stage with the likes of Exodus, The Black Dahlia Murder, and Suffocation. They’ve played U.S. festivals, Decibel Metal & Beer Fest, Milwaukee Metalfest, and overseas festivals Copenhell in Denmark, Into the Grave in the Netherlands, and the Download and Damnation festivals in the U.K.
“We played Download Fest in England to about 8,000+ people. That was pretty incredible, to say the least.” Jones
We asked about the tour so far and Alexander added “We were just in Asia and Australia for about a month and had a killer time. The shows were great and we ate a ton of crazy food. Doesn’t get much better than that.” One where we can go from show to show on yachts and we get paid a zillion dollars a day to play death metal music.
Undeath’s debut album Lesions of a Different Kind (2020) garnered rave press reviews and built them a fervent fan base. Ditching the Sophmore jinx, their second album It’s Time...to Rise from the Grave proved to be a Billboard Chart-topping successor. The release also earned Best New Music from Pitchfork, and, most impressively, rocketed to the top of Decibel Magazine’s Top 40 Albums of 2022.
On More Insane, Undeath—featuring Kyle Beam (guitars), Alexander Jones (vocals), Tommy Wall (bass), Jared Welch (guitars), and Matt Browning (drums)—feasts on the rotten flesh of brutality, complexity, and depravity. Singles “Brandish the Blade,” “Disputatious Malignancy,” and the title track are imbued with death metal’s immortal soul but possess Undeath’s inimitable energy, pit-friendly hooks, and work-hardened ethos.
More Insane intensifies all the aspects of Undeath’s horrifying visage.
“We put more pressure on ourselves than anyone else—it’s all internal,” says Alexander Jones. “We always try to one-up ourselves. There’s exterior pressure for sure, but we ignore it. Ultimately, we’re just big fans of our band. We know what we want to hear from ourselves, so we’re always making music we’d be stoked to listen to as Undeath fans.”
“The songwriting has been streamlined a lot since Lesions,” Kyle Beam adds
“Even though I wrote [for this album] on the road, most of the songs were written at home in my chair—I just ripped them out. I’m trying to get closer to tracing the line of metal from the mid-’70s to now. More to the point, if you’ve never heard us before and see us live, you can take something away from it. We want people to remember the songs. That’s important to us.”
Beam even has a Dunable Guitars signature model, the ‘Skeletonizer.’ Undeath not only knuckled down on effort but most importantly, they’ve written great songs, like “Rise from the Grave,” “Lesions of a Different Kind,” and “Necrobionics.
“The songwriting is the same as always—riffs, drums, vocals, brutality,” exclaims Beam. “Writing began before It’s Time… was released. ‘Dead From Beyond’ was the first track completed, while a few tracks took slightly longer to form up. ‘Cramped Caskets (Necrology)’ was the most recently completed track. ‘Bones Clattering in the Cave’ is a Tommy Wall track, and Jared Welch also brought his A-game too. ‘Disattachment of a Prophylactic in the Brain.’ Like me, those guys are always writing. They have a great work ethic. We’re proud of this record—it’s absolutely Undeath!”
“‘Bones’ is such a strong closer,” Jones says. “The track has an intense finality to it that I really enjoy. I’m happy where it ended up on the album. ‘Brandish,’ our first non-tech, fantasy-only tracks, and ‘Disputatious’ are two tracks I felt had to be on the record when I heard them. The rough demo of ‘Brandish’ was so sick. The title track, ‘More Insane,’ is straight death metal goodness—an undeniable death metal banger. When we played it for [producer] Mark Lewis in the studio, he said, ‘You’ll be playing this song for the rest of your lives.'”
If the gross-out teenage hallucinations of It’s Time… rattled death metal’s caved-in cranium, More Insane explodes with even sicker vistas. Lyrically, Undeath picks up, in part, where ‘Necrobionics’ and ‘Enhancing the Dead’ left off. Indeed, the undead armies (from space) cause more carnage in ‘Sutured for War’ and ‘Dead from Beyond.’
Elsewhere, the New Yorkers summon nightmares from video games (Bloodborne, etc.) on ‘Cramped Caskets (Necrology),’ turn to high fantasy on ‘Brandish the Blade,’ and man-eating laboratory demons on ‘Disattachment of a Prophylactic in the Brain.’ Unifying themes of murder, weirdos, psychotic people (who kill others), and more lunacy prevail on More Insane. Browning’s eye-catching cover art of a splayed head atop an optic white background engulfs all in graphic, blood-soaked glory.
The recording of More Insane was “hearsed” over to American studio wizard Mark Lewis (Cannibal Corpse, The Black Dahlia Murder) at Mark Lewis Audio in Nashville, TN. Undeath and Lewis met after a gig in Alabama, where they became fast friends. With the basics out of the way, the group set up a month-long residency at Lewis’s studio to nail down More Insane.
Undeath and Lewis co-produced, while Lewis handled engineering, mixing, and mastering. “Brandish the Blade,” “Disputatious Malignancy,” “Dead from Beyond,” and the title track are pure, unyielding death brought to horrifying reality by a kick-ass production.
“Mark gets the old-school stuff,” says Beam. “He’s not like some guy who only knows music from 2000 and later. I just thought it would be cool to work with him. When we met previously, we clicked with him immediately. He was extremely cool, and we all have a similar juvenile sense of humor. Also, I wanted tighter and better arrangements than last time, but not necessarily crazier or heavier. We have another great group of songs, so we focused on the production. The biggest thing about More Insane is the production. Compared to It’s Time…, this record isn’t as claustrophobic. It highlights the songs.”
“This time around, there was just a specific sound we were chasing that we knew Mark could execute perfectly,” Jones says. “We wanted it to be bigger, brighter, and clearer—the kind of record that doesn’t lose any of its clarity when you turn it way the f**k up. Mark is 100% the guy for that sound.
From a strictly professional perspective, Mark really pushed us all to deliver the best possible performances. He helped me step out of my way vocally and open up to a broader range of screaming I’d never really tried to access. He was a joy to make the record with.”
Don’t take my word for it, check them out! Either on YouTube or your favorite streaming service. Either way, the only real way to experience a band is seeing them live and this Thursday at Broken Goblet is your time to do it. It just might be your I saw them when moment!
When we asked them what their dream tour looked like, Jones said “One where we can go from show to show on yachts and we get paid a zillion dollars a day to play death metal music.” While that might not happen exactly, I think they’re a band that could spend more time doing festivals and larger tours.
We asked Alexander what American venues could copy from their European counterparts, “Beds within the venue that you can sleep in so you don’t have to pay for a hotel. Genius stuff going on over there.” It’s almost word-for-word what we hear from a lot of bands.
Finally, we asked if the band had anything you’d like to say to the fans coming out to the Broken Goblet show and we got an enthusiastic…
Thanks a ton for the support! See you there!