IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT look at New York through their hyperreal, avant-metal lens.
Channelling the opulence and dark underbelly of their native NYC, Imperial Triumphant are taking metal to new kinds of extremes. And, against all odds, they may just be the underground’s next breakout band
“Sometimes reality can be too complex to be conveyed by the spoken word. Legend remoulds it into a form that can be spread all across the world”
– Alpha 60, Alphaville
If New York is the city that never sleeps, then the chances are that it’s going to lose some of its bearings. It’s become both iconic and a product of our collective, cultural imagination
– its towering mesh of grime and grandeur has been the inspiration for almost a century’s worth of fantastic visions, from Fritz Lang’s
1927 silent Expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis, to Tim Burton’s scarab-like, steampunk Gotham City. It’s the natural home for cinematic, extradimensional destruction, and in novels like Paul Auster’s groundbreaking New York Trilogy or albums such as Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, a city as an internal state of fluid, ever-shifting consciousness, simultaneously omnipresent and flickering on the margins of our peripheral vision.
Its latest emissaries are Imperial Triumphant, a three-piece encased in impassive gold masks that suggest an ancient priest clan yet drawn from NYC’S opulent, Art Deco architecture. Their mission is to channel both the physical and psychological nature of their metaphor-ripe city with unblinking-to-the-point-of-hallucinogenic attention to detail, and the result is one of the most visually arresting and sonically bewildering bands to have emerged from the metal underground in recent years. A constantly self-correcting matrix of death, black, and ambulatory jazz impressionism, Imperial Triumphant’s immersive sensory overload is a journey through New
York City’s past, present and future, as seen through compound eyes.
But as ‘difficult’ as Imperial Triumphant’s music is, it clearly resonates. Their 2018 album, Vile Luxury, proved to be a turning point
– a fully fleshed-out vision that saw them become a cause célèbre within the notoriously picky extreme metal scene and beyond. Fresh from a contract with metal behemoths Century Media Records, and with Mr. Bungle’s Trey Spruance producing, as well as guest Taiko drums from Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake [see The Beat Generation, p.80], Alphaville looks set to put them on the metal landscape with all the imposing stature of their native skyline. “Signing to Century Media was a huge achievement for us,” says frontman and band founder, Zachary Ilya Ezrin, from his New York home. “But at the same time I think they were taking a bigger chance with us than we were with them. We did feel like, ‘OK, we really have to deliver an already incredible record to them, and we need to prove that they made the right decision.’
“Having said that, we definitely didn’t plan any of this. It’s more just us trying to play something true to ourselves, and at the same time, doing something new and fresh and pushing our capabilities. We’re not the first ones to put jazz and heavy metal together, but I will say that we probably do it the best, just because it’s very organic the way we do it.”
As striking as Imperial Triumphant’s visual aesthetic is, like they have suddenly materialised from another plane, Alphaville is the band’s fourth album in a 15-year history. Their path has been one of gradual evolution, discarding of early generic trappings, and ultimately self-discovery.
Imperial Triumphant Mk1 was a generic black metal band Zachary formed in high school, as he puts it, “not really pushing the boundaries or doing anything inspiring”. Taking the band more seriously in his early 20s and starting to play proper gigs, his first moment of reckoning came when a music agent asked him what the band was about.
“I didn’t really have an answer for him,” Zachary recalls, “and I was kind of embarrassed. We just sang about death and generic black metal shit, and I realised the next time someone asks me that I need an answer. I started thinking and thinking and was slowly developing this idea of who am I and where am I from;
“SPEND TIME IN NYC AND YOU WILL BOIL WITH RAGE”
ZACHARY ILYA EZRIN, VOCALS
what do I know about, what can I sing about? The more I thought, the more I realised I was coming from a place that has a unique perspective. Slowly, with the help of my bandmates, we developed this concept of New York City as a lyrical topic that is dark and compelling, and ‘metal’, and it has a whole theme to it. There is Art Deco, which is so synonymous with NYC, and there are also all these social perspectives that play a role in the city. We just kept on going until it was like, ‘OK, there’s jazz in our history, we should be bringing more of that influence in.’
“You can listen to our discography and you can hear it naturally transform into what we are now. In 2015, when I had the line-up that I have now, that was when things really started to solidify. We then put out Vile Luxury, and the rest is history.”
Neither Vile Luxury nor Alphaville offer snapshots of New York; they’re constant, ongoing dialogues. Cycling between the stately and the Stygian with spectacularly deft slight-of-hand, they combine awe and disgust in equal measure.
“I think anyone who spends enough time in New York will develop a love/
hate relationship,” says Zachary, “because there will be moments when you just start boiling with rage, and there are moments when you are just unbelievably content. There is very much a duality within New
York. The easiest way to see it would be to go down to where I live in Tribeca right now. You can go and see City Hall and the Woolworth Building, those gorgeous, gigantic skyscrapers, and then walk 20 feet to the Chambers St subway station where there’ll be a wall falling apart and the smell of homelessness. There is so much gold resting on this darkness and filth.”
As much as Imperial Triumphant have been inspired by Zachary’s own experiences of growing up in New York, the band are also a reflection of how the city has passed into legend, not least through Metropolis, and the movie from which their latest album title is taken: Jean-luc Godard’s 1965 New Wave sci-fi film noir, set in a then newly modernised Paris ruled by a dictatorial computer,
Alpha 60, but with explicit references to New York.
“Alphaville is just another incredible film that had a big influence on us,” says Zachary. “We’re usually not fond of albums named after songs or films, but we just thought Alphaville had such a pure and perfect way of describing this record that it seemed like a no-brainer. It takes place in Paris, but it definitely applies to the New York state of mind. What I really love about it is that it takes place in a futuristic, dystopian Paris, and it’s just shot in regular Paris! Ha ha ha! I thought that was the most Imperial Triumphant thing of all time. And the album that we put out is very much tuned to the dystopian present. It’s no longer the future, you’re in it, you’re here.”
Alphaville feels, somewhat appropriately, like a landmark album in 2020, much like Oranssi Pazuzu’s Mestarin Kynsi earlier this year, speaking to our surreal, frightening circumstances with all the unstable, unmoored urgency they require. Coming from a city that’s always felt like a social and psychic epicentre adds another edge, but offers a broader perspective too – that even through times of chaos, if you dig deep, you can find a sense of continuity within.
“Everything that Imperial Triumphant have sung about has
“WE’RE TUNED TO THE DYSTOPIAN PRESENT”
ZACHARY ILYA EZRIN, VOCALS
somehow come true! Ha ha ha! We’re like, ‘Of course the city is dying.’ I talk to a lot of people about living in New York and a lot of people are leaving the city because they’re saying the energy has gone. But the truth is, the city is just evolving and changing, and it always is. Even if we’re just holding up a mirror to New York, it’s bigger than that. New York is a superpower right now, but if you look in the past, there have been other cities that have ruled the world, London included, and it’s just the way history is; it’s always shifting. So maybe you could say there is something ancient about the way our music is presented, but it’s totally in
the moment too.”
ALPHAVILLE IS OUT NOW VIA CENTURY MEDIA