NOLA natives and nu metal revivalists CANE HILL take us on a tour of their city.
Are Cane Hill metal’s most misunderstood young band? We got them to give us a tour of their hometown of New Orleans to try to get inside their heads
It’s an overcast day in New Orleans when we meet Cane Hill for a tour of their hometown. Surprisingly, given we’re in a city that’s known for Mardi Gras and partying, they are fresh-faced and hangoverfree. When we spent time with them in London back in 2016, following the release of their debut album, Smile, they were constantly stoned. But today, frontman Elijah Witt seems more focused on the music and cautious about the band’s relationship with substances.
“There are things I’ve done that I hate. There was a time I’d drink so much that I’d shit myself onstage,” he confesses. “I made this band look like a joke by being too drunk. It’s not worth taking anything back because we’ve learned from these experiences; they’ve shaped us no matter if it’s good or bad. They’ve become part of our lives and pushed us to be better.”
The band have since had some landmark moments in their city. Last April, they teamed up with Lzzy Hale to play Ember Moon to the ring at NXT Takeover New Orleans, then headlined the main room of the House Of Blues (“We felt a love from our city we’ve never felt before” Elijah admits). Today they’re in an amiable mood as we walk down an eerily empty Bourbon Street, the main entertainment drag of the city. Lined with bars bearing names such as The Funky Pirate Blues Club and Beach On Bourbon, it’s a party hub for tourists and stag festivities. This morning, it smells of stale beer and urine, and Elijah wrinkles his nose with disgust at his remembrances of past nights out. “I’ve got nothing but bad memories of being here,” he confesses cryptically. “I won’t even delve into those. Bourbon Street is a disgusting disaster that I avoid at all times…”
Next, we drive to the Cypress Grove Cemetery. “You kill ’em, we’ll skin ’em!” jokes drummer Devin Clark as he answers his phone. The Cemetery was established by the Firemen’s Charitable And Benevolent Association in 1840 as a place to inter the remains of deceased firemen. Large white pillars flank the entrance, leading to above-ground
graves – typical of New Orleans, where a high water table means buried bodies would rise to the surface in a storm. Many of the crypts are architecturally stunning, varying in stone and colour. Elijah admires a marbled mausoleum. “If I don’t get buried in something like that, I’d kill myself again,” he quips.
Despite playing in many other parts of the US and beyond, he has a special place in his heart for New Orleans. “It’s not the richest city, or the safest city by any means, but there’s something about the people that you just can’t get anywhere else,” he considers.
Elijah arrived here in 2011, to study History at Loyola University. He’d grown up in the “segregated, racist and homophobic” town of Folsom, Louisiana, about an hour from the city, before moving east to Virginia and attending Christian school. It wasn’t until he arrived at university that he realised other people in the state shared his liberal views.
The band that would become Cane Hill met through friends in the local scene, around 2012. Elijah, bassist Ryan Henriquez, guitarists Bemo and James Barnett and drummer Colt Dimaio (replaced by Devin Clark in 2014) would jam at James’s house in Baton Rouge, and discovered he’d been composing songs. “We started hearing what James was writing, and he was like, ‘This is my side shit’,” remembers Elijah. “Ryan was like, ‘Why the fuck aren’t we playing this? Why aren’t we playing this absolutely insane metal?’ It just turned into Cane Hill slowly over time.”
Originally operating under names such as Manvsmachine and Sleepwalker, they spent the next few years playing a billiard hall, a thrift store and smaller venues like Cypress Hall (now The High Ground), building up a local following. Elijah says they were “cocky” in those days, causing drama in the scene, and their rising fame went to their heads. “I remember some of our first shows we did as Sleepwalker, we opened for Attila, The Plot In You and Fit For a King. That was probably one of our coolest local shows and we felt like big dicks,” he confesses.
Despite signing to Rise Records, they soon came back down to earth. In 2014, they renamed themselves Cane Hill and played their first shows outside Louisiana, supporting The Acacia Strain. “It was terrible,” Elijah recalls. “We were a god-awful band. You go from being a big fish in the local pond where you’re like, ‘We’re a fucking amazing band’, to touring with signed bands and then you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m garbage.’”
Bemo left the following year (“he didn’t mesh with us”), and international tours followed, with bands such as Bullet For My Valentine and Motionless In White. This was especially exciting for Devin and James, who’d never left the country before. The band count these shows as some of their best.
“We’re a commodity because we’re not from there; it automatically makes it a lot more fun for people,” says
Elijah. “On top of that, there’s an overwhelming respect for music as an art that we don’t feel in America anymore. Going to the UK, people appreciate the music as art, and
I think it’s because they were raised in a country that has so much more history. The shows because of that are exceptional – even our best American shows don’t compare to shows in the UK where people lose their minds.”
We head to the massive City Park, where the ground is muddy from last night’s rain, and moss dangles from the branches of willow trees. Elijah used to live a few blocks from here, and it’s one of his favourite places in NOLA. “I used to come here to smoke weed and relax and just enjoy nature surrounding me,” he remembers. “A lot of those trees and a lot of that environment you don’t get anywhere else outside of Louisiana; it’s just calming and familiar to be here.”
He begins to talk about Cane Hill’s latest album, Too Far Gone, created while the band were dabbling with harder drugs. As the title track suggests, they went too far in their experimentation with LSD, and had to stop taking it. The lyrics read: ‘You know it’s true what they say, I’m too in love with the trip / And we tripped until our brains fell in a ditch / And we never found a fix ’cause we don’t exist.’
Elijah describes a harrowing moment with Ryan. “He was on six tabs of acid and had this empty, glazed look. I was not where he was; he had this really void gaze and he wasn’t himself – we started
“I’d drInk so much that I’d shIt myself onstage”
EliJah Witt
losing ourselves, losing our humanity and realising how abstract life can become in those moments,” he recalls. “We sobered up, focused on the music, and it’s become much more of a work environment than a play environment, which I think is a good move.”
They’re now poised to release EP Kill The Sun – a semi-acoustic, strippeddown affair that’s a far cry from the substance-induced chaos of Too Far Gone and the nu metal brashness of debut Smile. It speaks not only of the band’s desire to branch out with their sound, but to Elijah’s newfound calm.
“We’ve always combined the heavy with the more ambient, and this time we felt like we could roll with it, and make a body of work that encapsulates that side of us,” he says. “We’ve experienced pain and sadness and other feelings apart from absolute rage.”
The tour ends with fried chicken at Fiorellas’ Café, The Original, on Franklin Avenue. Even though this quaint, unembellished restaurant is owned and run by Ryan’s parents, it’s the first time Elijah’s ever visited. As he relaxes with a shrimp Po’Boy, a traditional Louisiana sandwich, talk turns to the area’s music. While Cane Hill owe an obvious musical debt to bands like Alice In Chains and Slipknot, they look up to the local likes of Goatwhore, Crowbar, Eyehategod and Down.
“We get our groovy atmosphere from New Orleans. In the South there’s just a shit-ton of blues and groove metal in general,” Elijah explains. “The major metal bands that have come out of New Orleans are either sludgy or groove metal. It’s all about that head bop, which has definitely made its way into our music.”
But he and Ryan are worried that, with the exception of the House Of Blues, promoters are focusing on rap and EDM, to the detriment of heavy music. It is their hope to be torch-bearers for a new generation – if the city can forgive them for being bratty upstarts.
“All we’re trying to do is bring a revitalised breath of fresh air into the scene and give something back to the city that helped create us,” Elijah says. “It’s important for people who do have lingering negative feelings about us in our local scene to understand that the remaining people in this band are very genuine, humble and heartfelt. We love our city, we love our scene and we’d like it to return to its glory days.”
Kill The Sun is out on January 18 via rise