CONJURER
Through darkness, desolation and depression, Conjurer have had to slay some demons to stay alive. Channeling their pain, they’ve emerged with the best debut album of 2018
one of the most exciting new bands around reveal their dark side.
“We’re not actors. We’re up there letting you into our minds.”
Welcome to the sound of depravity. Welcome to the bleakest show on Earth. Welcome to Conjurer. Rising like a mutated Sasquatch from the swamp, the Midlands riffmongers are about to unleash their debut album, Mire: a seven-track odyssey into the darkest recesses of the human psyche, oozing with a cancerous, pitch-black tar.
Formed in 2014 from the partnership of guitarists and vocalists Brady Deeprose and
Dan Nightingale, the destructive duo found themselves another pair of cohorts – Jan Krause (drums) and recently Conor Marshall (bass) – to complete their four-pronged attack on the soul. We first spoke to Conjurer two years ago upon the release of their promising I EP, but Mire is a more accomplished and darker piece of art.
“There’s a lot of stuff to do with self-reflection, looking at yourself and realising that you’re not perfect, and there are things about you that you actually fucking hate,” says Brady today, speaking to us over the phone from his house in Northamptonshire, having just finished a shift at a local hi-fi store.
Admitting that Conjurer gravitate towards the negative side of life, Brady says that the songs on Mire come from “a place of honesty”. The notion of depression, in particular, rears its head throughout the album, most notably on Thankless and standout track Hollow. While Thankless refers to both Dan and Brady’s separate relationships with the condition, Hollow is an unflinching glimpse into the realities of self-harm.
The song previously existed in another form, but Dan requested the band didn’t play it live for a while because the lyrics were “too hurtful for him”. Thankfully, Dan is now in a place where he can perform the song, but the lyrics are still emotional for him, adding more weight to the track when Conjurer play it live.
“‘As blood rushes the blade, and all colours fade, I commit this pyrrhic crime to destroy its source and mine. Bloody your hands! If I have to tear at every tendon to rid me of this leech, I’ll bloody my hands! Thus my perdition ends. I have found a way. I lay hollow’,” recites Brady.
“Suicidal thoughts, thinking about self-harm, those things can feel like a way out of a horrible mindset. Knowing how fucking down Dan was when he was writing these lyrics, it’s just really horrible to think about someone that you care a lot about feeling that way. I’ve had experiences with those kind of thoughts myself, people I’m close to have as well, so you think about all of that and it’s just that horrible, sinking feeling you get. I think about it during the song. All that horrible anxiety and shit that stops you from sleeping… that’s what I want to get out onstage. Performing in this band is how I sleep at night.”
Conjurer’s colossal riffs and harrowing heaviness are borne from pain and anguish. Brady’s keen to stress they’re authentic; not some po-faced shitehawks pretending to have feelings for monetary gain.
“I feel that a lot of lyrics and concepts in mainstream music can feel like a generic, ‘I’m sad about a situation that may or may not be
“We have to Get this anxiety out onstage”
PERFORMING LIVE IS THE ONLY WAY BRADY CAN SLEEP AT NIGHT
real and it may or may not be me who’s sad about it, but here’s a song about it,’” he explains.
Some of the songs reach outside personal experiences. Take Mire’s opening track, Choke: a reaction to the idea of celebrity and how it has become a poisoned chalice due to the dubious morals and ethics of the tabloid press, it focuses on Amy Winehouse. “She was just a woman who wanted to play music,” he begins, “and Choke is about how sickening it is that we have a culture of gutter press and paparazzi that just looks at everything through this horrible lens, literally, and how it can affect people.”
At the opposite end of the album, the doomladen Hadal is about the deepest part of the ocean and how humankind still doesn’t know what’s down there. Elsewhere on the record, Conjurer tackle the topics of the universe’s existence (Of Flesh Weaker Than Ash) and a human’s passage to hell after death (The Mire), drawing from the 14th- century poem The Lyke-Wake Dirge. Put short: fluffy songs about ex-girlfriends, this ain’t.
Baptised in the UK sludge/doom/stoner scene (despite, as Brady says, having more in common with lamb of God than Conan), Conjurer have racked up an immense amount of gigs – the details of which Brady has stored on a nifty spreadsheet. They have played shows and all-dayers with death metal bands, hardcore bands, tech-metal bands and everything in between, honing their bludgeoning riffs and crushing walls of noise until they could snap Godzilla in two.
“I want to write the kind of music that I’d be excited about as a fan, and we definitely do that,” says Brady confidently. “What I love about this band is that you can’t just say it sounds like ‘budget this or that’; you can’t immediately pigeonhole the music. I think it was Phil
Anselmo who said, ‘Ripping off two bands is plagiarism, ripping off 50 bands is originality,’ and that’s basically what we do,” he laughs.
“We really make it a point to not write things that sound too much like things already written; we want every idea that comes to the table to be unique in its own way.”
Despite admitting to spending 90% of his time listening to hip-hop, you can’t knock Brady’s knowledge and love for all things heavy. Throughout our 90-minute conversation, he cites the likes of Mastodon, Converge and Yob as influences, but also mentions Portland indiefolks The Decemberists to mix things up a bit.
But it’s Californian sludgelords Armed For Apocalypse that Brady says were Conjurer’s only direct influence, specifically their records Defeat and The Road Will End.
“They’re the heaviest things ever put to tape,” he says. “That was the starting point for us, to be the UK’s answer to that. But we swiftly got a lot more progressive.”
And progression is already on the horizon. Despite the four-piece only just releasing their debut album, Brady reveals they’re already writing record number two.
“Everything we have so far is vastly different. We’re not going to be one of those bands that does the same thing over and over again. There are some riffs on our new stuff that aren’t even riffs; it’s fucking horrible and so exciting!”
“I have no idea what’s coming next,” he says cryptically. “hopefully the next record’s just gonna break people.”
You have been warned.
MIRE IS OUT ON MARCH 9 VIA HOLY ROAR. IF YOU’RE STRUGGLING TO COPE, SAMARITANS ARE AVAILABLE ON 116 123.