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Metalheads Podcast is a metal-themed podcast featuring George, Jay, Will, John, Matt and Markisan. The guys discuss metal news and new releases, perform in-depth interviews with great metal bands, and just generally have a blast arguing about that greatest of musical styles: Metal!
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Now, here is the podcast, Metal Heads Podcast.
Hello, and welcome to the Metal Heads Podcast.
My name is George.
This is Will.
This is John.
This is the situational paradox.
This is Marcus Sun.
And here we are.
We're in Warren, Michigan.
We're in Temple of Void headquarters. And I'm with them. I'm embedded today. And I'm here with the guys, the four guys, all four of them from Temple of Void. Guys, introduce yourselves, starting... Hey, this is Jason. This is Mike. I'm Alex. Justin. Welcome, guys. And those uninitiated, Jason plays drums. Mike is vocals and guitars now. We can talk about that. Alex plays guitar. And Justin, the newest member, plays the bass.
And we're here to talk about their new album, The Crawl, that just got released about a week ago. Yeah, a week ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A week tomorrow. Quite a few of us were extremely excited for this album, as any Temple of Void album that comes out. So, yeah. So what's been the reception of the album so far? Talk, just riff, guys. I was kind of nervous about you guys because we had so much fun, you know, on prior episodes, like hanging.
and we hadn't talked in such a long time and i was like i wonder if the metalheads podcast
guys still like us
i just got the vinyl in the mail today so it was a perfect timing
the question is do you still like us are you just happy to see us
they're not mutually exclusive
he really was nervous that you guys didn't like the band like the like a month or so ago
when we were doing a bunch of interviews and everything started going up, he was like, there's this one podcast.
We got to get on. They're the best. I don't know if they still care about us.
I feel like it was a week later. It was like, we're in.
Yeah, Alex was like, he was so bound and determined to make this happen.
And here I am not answering my email in a timely fashion. Sorry.
But I'm just going to get my ass kissing out of the way and just be like, this is one of my favorite albums this year so far.
Thank you.
So, no fear.
I mean, I agree with that because I play it and then I want to play it again and again.
I was like, I mean, I have the other albums on vinyl too.
I don't know why I dragged my feet on this one, but then I was like, I got to buy it.
So, yeah, it's an earworm.
It's great.
So, I have a question from, you know, a listener's perspective.
What brings you guys kind of like back to that record?
What about it makes you come back to it and want to listen to it again? I think just from a listener's perspective is where our... Because as a band member and playing it for the last year and hearing it, it's kind of like just there now, you know? Sure. So from my perspective anyway, you know, I recall reading something about that there was a sort of a stylistic change a little bit.
bit incorporating some other influence elements and to me what i'm getting is that the sound is a much more open and it breathes more than uh like a typical like death do me kind of album that's just it's very condensed and heavy but you know i don't know that's just like been the the thing every time i put it on i'm
It just rips because it feels open to me.
Cool. I have a very easy answer for you.
Yeah. It's Temple of Void.
Yeah, I was gonna say, it's still unmistakably sounds like Temple of Void.
Awesome.
It feels like the next step in your evolution.
And I mean, we've been without a new album for a little bit.
And so for me, it was just like putting it on.
It's like, well, I mean, I literally feel like I blink and the album's done.
I spent some time kind of going through your back catalog, starting going front to back. And, you know, that was also enjoyable. But to just spend time with the new record has been just, you know, it's what 2026 needed. Wow. Good. Appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. We were apprehensive to a degree about what people might think of it. Just like we put out the crawl first,
Like, if you like TOV, you're gonna like The Crawl. You know, like the song is a single. It was not contentious, you know? And everybody's like, all right, that's still TOV. And then we put out Soulburn. And we thought, oh, man, people are gonna hate on this one. Well, we love it. That's why it was our second single. But we anticipated some level of backlash. And Soulburn? And everyone loves it. Yeah. For anything. I felt like the last album, I, when it came to the release date, I was like,
I wonder how people are going to perceive this. And then I was really surprised, you know, with some of the negativity that we got from the record. And so I kind of you think it's going to be kind of the same thing when it came to this one. And I was really surprised just how like just basically positive everything has been. Yeah. So I will admit, and if you've heard some of the other podcasts, some of the Slayer was is probably my least favorite Temple of Void album. It just seemed like the production was off. And I've said before,
I'll be honest like I felt you guys kind of yeah took your foot off the gas a little bit and slowed it down a little almost a little I don't know it just I still loved it it still made my year-end list like it's time to avoid I still love it but when you have you know Terran supernatural lords of death and um the world that was world that was and then this one I'm like ah but then when when the crawl came out I'm like all right here we go yeah so and I just I part of me I just
I loved that you started the album of Poison Icon with an opening solo riff. And I was like, yes! Was that you? That's Mike all day. That's Mike ripping it. When Alex came up with the idea, I feel like we were, I was like, dude, they're going to fucking crucify me. You're starting with a fast song with a ripping solo. And then it's like, I was like, change number one, like right off the bat. To me, it was like,
For me, from my perspective of loving some of this, summing the Slayer, but loving it the least of the other three that preceded it, it was like, boom, like just kick you in the chest and fly back like you're in 300 going down the well. Like it was just, it was awesome. I loved it. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like during the writing process, we, nothing was written with like something specific in mind. Like, oh, this is going to be the single. This is going to be the, like, we had things where we had ideas.
Like being like, oh, this song is going to be probably a single. With that song, it was one of those, like it kind of had Alex came with that like, you know, kind of galloping riff. And we were jamming. I was like, well, what if we do like an intro solo? That was kind of like, hey, that's something we haven't done before. That's not like a super, you know, common thing. And then we did the out and it was kind of written with the idea, like by the time we basically completed the structure, it was like, okay, we have an intro solo and an outro solo.
And the idea that I had in mind compositionally was like, okay, so the intro solo, I want, now a lot of these leads, I kind of thought specific players in mind. If you want to get down to like the nerdy specifics of it, I'm like, okay, I want something in here. And I was thinking pure like Uli John Roth, like for the beginning, something harmonic minor sounding, a little bit Eastern flair kind of to it. And then the outro was going to be more bluesy and sort of improvisational outro.
And then by the time everything was done and all the songs were sort of put together, it was like, all right, well, time to start arranging them. And we had kind of were just like, this is the very, like, it was very clear. This is the opener. So you chose Poison Icon for the opener. Yeah. It wasn't written with that in mind, but after everything was said and done and we were doing the arrangements. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was cool. I loved it. Yeah. Something I do whenever I think about the sequencing aspect is I look back at all the rounds and I,
I go, how have we opened and closed every album? And I want to try and do something different every single record. And so if you go back and look at like, is it a slow one, a fast one, or does it have like Summoning the Slayer, like the reverse, the kind of Morbid Angel kind of like backwards shit in the beginning, an intro for Lords of Death, a solo for the beginning of, they're all different. And then there's different outro styles for most of them too. And so that's what I try to always consider.
so that it doesn't become formulaic where they're like oh it's the big grandiose intro and the big long outro no we closed with dissolution like an acoustic track on on the last one which that was different you know and i think he nailed it like it is literally like kick you in the chest like whoa okay this is here we go well it's also like he's the fucking coolest shiny toy in the world like it's like you don't have a guy that plays guitar like that and not go like fuck you here it is yeah like you've never heard this before from
any other record and here are all these blazing solos all over the album yeah yeah well that was
basically done that was one of the apprehensive parts too because it's like okay i'm kind of making this
shift and i'm trying not to make like a big deal about it or anything so what's the first thing
yeah there is no tapping so for the uninitiated um so you had two band members
that left and you had one that joined so you used to be a quintet and now you're a quartet um and part of the reason why it's a quartet is mike you've been a guitar player forever yeah but just not in temple avoid so now you're picking up the axe yeah so the box and the axe yeah and it's like it and really it's not that much different i mean i play guitar in some capacity and a lot of the stuff that we've done uh i feel like like if it's like maybe a soul
Like the guitar solo stuff, like Beyond the Ultimate. Yeah. No, no, no. And Temple of Void. Like the solo on Beyond the Ultimate on the first album. And like, pardon me, all the, like the acoustic stuff. Like Disillusion. And that kind of stuff. Sorry, wrong. Oh, yeah. That's another difference with the Crawl is there's no mental track, which historically we always gave Mike, like, this is your song. You do whatever you want with it, like acoustically or instrumentally.
And we didn't have to do that because he's on all seven tracks. So that's why that doesn't show up. I mean, maybe it'll make a reprise like a future record. But for this one, we didn't. I felt, yeah, the time we had, I felt like it was learning how to play together as who we are in the, you know, presently in this room. So, so now that you're also playing guitar, you guys haven't played live yet, as far as I know, for The Crawl, right? No. April 10th. Yeah.
So we're in the rehearsal space, right? This is the TOV headquarters rehearsal space. We're in Jason's basement, which is brilliant, by the way. Yeah, check it out. It's awesome. Nice. All the records back there. Yeah, it's really nice, man. My dad and I built it. He's 88. I just had to throw that in here because he's a...
He's a badass. When did you guys build it? A couple years back. Nice. Yeah, man. All soundproofed. Yeah, it's really cool. It's all black, too. Even the ceiling's black. Nice. If I could just get one thing in real quick, Alex. Deal. If you're worried about us not liking you, we're not Angry Metal Guy. Okay? I saw your comment the other day about that. We're not angry. We like all the albums.
I think he kind of liked this one right yeah but the reference was to the previous okay yeah much more positive review yeah I still only gave it a 3.5 which I thought was that to them is good though that's that's a good release or review for them yeah I was gonna say that is yeah yeah but I don't pay attention to angry metal guy anymore so it doesn't matter yeah I'm not yeah they said something
was like our black album. Oh, God. Nothing. Nothing. I was like, wait till you hear Soulburn, buddy. You want some black album? Here you go. I actually wouldn't even cite I being influenced by that. I don't know if you guys would mind if you got the results of the black album, though. No, not at all. You're down. I could quit my job. Number 13 hour days.
So that sort of leads into my next couple questions. At least it seems like a good place to segue. So were there any non-metal bands that influenced anything on this record? Yeah, all of it. Yeah. All right. So like what? We can go track by track, like Poison Icon. The chorus, definitely.
Johnny Marr. So I wrote the, that clean guitar arpeggio in the chorus. So you should pick, pick fields of the Nephilim, the sound, Johnny Marr, like any of the sound rules. Yeah. Like sad lovers of giants, like any of these like English post-punk bands that have jingly jangly arpeggios. That's the chorus. Okay. That song was called bolt throwist though. Yeah. Initially. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and then the outro is another clean, picky part that, again, is definitely coming from any English APs, chorus-driven, clean guitar band of your choice. Second track. I mean, literally Cynic. Yeah, Cynic, not being non-metal, but it was called Godless Cynic, named after its inspirations.
But certainly in the chorus
I'm representing
In the chorus
it's definitely like a grunge
I don't want to sing the chorus
but the chorus is definitely grunge
influence
but I say influence not like a
direct rip off or anything
it's just like the rhythm of it
and the
when I do that kind of up pick
that's to me very
I don't know Pearl Jam like Alice in Chains like anything from that era then there's a part that I play the the Rip to Machine Head from Bush in there it's it's not in there the chords are in there because my brother I sent him some of the songs like we were practicing in here and I'd send him like a Dropbox like oh here's this jamming and he's like you sound like Bush and I was like what?
I do remember Mike going to your house and you guys showing up. Yeah, me too, man. He was like, we got a Bush part in there or whatever. And I feel like me and Jason were like, what did you guys do? I worked purposely hard to make it not such a Bush part because I don't like that stuff at all. He's like, you sound like Bush. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And it might have been a nice song. But then I downloaded that first Bush record. And I'm like, there's a lot of songs in here that I really like.
I don't think it's a banger from front to back but there's some songs that I think are like Machine Head I think is awesome so that dun dun dun dun dun right from yeah yeah yeah oh you'll sing you'll sing yeah you know the chorus but then Mike one second but then Mike plays the opposite and he goes down so that he hides me going up I literally
went through multiple different harmonies to come across the one that was the most disguised.
You went to de-bush it.
Shave the bush.
Shave the bush.
But it came out cool.
But you know what I mean?
I think at the end of the day, everybody respects where everybody else is kind of coming from.
And I think that's kind of where a lot of that magic is.
Yeah.
You know.
And I'm sorry, George.
I'll keep, I can keep going.
Sure, I just wanted to make a Bush comment because I discovered a while back that the main riff for Glycerin, if you play that fast, it's Misfits the Skulls. Oh, yeah. It's just further down. Their bassist was in like a pretty, oh my god, it is, yeah, respectable punk band. I'm trying to remember who it was, but like some old school punk band. Someone I'm sure can fact check me on this, but I'm pretty sure their bassist was in like a legit,
But then, a dead issue, I was playing along to
Fell on Black Days, and then I just took those
Soundgarden, and then I just took those chords, and then I wrote something
essentially with those chords that I was learning
Soundgarden, but the whole point is that
when you listen to that song, you don't go, oh, he ripped off Soundgarden
But that is the genesis of it. I was like, man, this song is so fucking good. And the whole time, like even in the crawl, which we said was like our, you know, very classic sort of TOV, like do me kind of thing. The time signatures are weird on that. Like when we get to that face break. Yeah. Which was like, we were, I was listening. We were listening to a ton of death at that point. Yeah. So the base break was definitely like a ton of death. Yeah. But also so much Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.
when they play in all these different time signatures or they switch time signatures back and forth. So the influence can come from, oh, Alice in Chains plays in these time signatures. Just that is enough of an inspiration to go, oh, this is going to modify how I try writing stuff. So the influence doesn't have to be like, oh, so overt, but it comes from listening to other types of music and then saying, what can I learn from these other types of music? And definitely, oh, and even tunings. So they play in all different,
Like Soundgarden, like you can't play, you know, and no two songs are the same tuning as you go from front to back in that. I feel like the most consistent tuning is OpenSea. Yeah, like, and they have, I don't know, a half dozen tunings on that record, and none of them are back to back in the whole thing. And so we have two tunings in this one, which is, you know, 50% more than we've ever had before. So, except for... I was going to say disillusioned.
It's in an open tuning. It's a C ad four or whatever. Normally we write everything in drop C. And then here was on this one, we have two songs that are in D standard. So just that, that's coming from grunge. That's coming from what are other guitarists doing and other genres and how can I learn from that and can I keep pushing? Because every record has to have some level of growth as a musician. And that doesn't necessarily mean like chops, you know, like you're just, you're getting blazing because trust me, it'd be a failure if that was how I measured my progress.
But what am I trying? What's new? And so Titan signatures and different tunings. And the next record for sure is going to have way more tunings and weirder shit going on. For sure. Do you play a seven string? No. I can barely play six. Well, I ask this because I was talking to somebody else recently and they were talking about playing in C. And I was like, how the hell do you tune your guitar that low and not have the strings falling off?
If I want to go play an old Sabbath song, I even see sharp is like, you know, the string is just kind of flopping. And I'm like, and he's like, oh, he's a seven string. And I'm like, oh, I thought maybe it was like a, you know, a detuner, you know, pedal or something. You could buy thicker gauge strings too. I've heard that. On the, you know, the sponginess of the strings. Like two gauge? Yeah. Typical would be, yeah, yeah. Higher gauge would be,
Yeah, like I think on my guitar, I've got 11. I've got 11s. I don't know what the lowest one is. We, I don't know, already changed it on me on stage, and I've never changed my string since. So. Shut up. Wait, you haven't changed them since 2022? No. But I also haven't played that guitar live, so there's no reason to. Holy shit. Well, cool, fun fact.
And Justin plays a seven-string fretless bass with a tremolo. Whoa. He's got a chance. I'm going to make a joke that, like, I've been, my strings are older than I have been on his guitar longer than I've been in the band. No, just a seven-string fretless with a tremolo. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's for you a lot of slap, too. She doesn't. I'm being an idiot. Well, that's only my perspective. Like, what about, I mean, you guys, like, yes, like, non-metal. Oh, and Hum definitely was,
an influence for the end. I was thinking of when I was playing those clean chords at the end of the crawl. That's kind of where that was coming from. But what about you guys? I think from a drumming perspective, I just play what I feel in terms of whatever I'm feeling, the rhythm or the guitar riff. It could come from any
anywhere, you know, anything from my past or what I'm feeling at the moment. It doesn't necessarily have to be from a specific genre, you know? I think whatever feels right at the time. So you didn't steal any bush, is what you're saying? No, I didn't. But in the second song, our thought process was to do a Godflesh industrial thing for the, like the... For the verses. For the verses, like, where it's like... And then we go,
and going to the top thing. That was definitely a Godflesh feel. We do a disco beat on Poison Icon. Yeah, we do a disco beat on Poison Icon, which is pretty rad. I think the whole album has a lot more groove to it than you've had in the past. Well, you know, with that groove being said, that is ultimately to do with Justin and I and Justin being a very, like genuinely saying this, like an accomplished musician and knowing rhythm and knowing
just how it feels to play rhythmically and makes me a better drummer so i think that's why and a better person but that's why this this this album is way more groovier than the mo than the past because it's because of justin he's like he's a groovy cat groovy i'm learning about me you okay dad no i mean i feel like we nerded out like we took the you know
that side of things seriously, like trying to match up. And it was like, I didn't just want to play root notes and you weren't just doing basic stuff. Like my typical caveman drumming, you know? Yeah. Because that's what I do. I'm not a double bass guy. I'm not a blast beat guy. And honestly, I've said this multiple times. I think that is something that is very characteristic of us because it is atypical at this point to hear single kick in death metal. Yeah. Unless you're listening to
some regressive, like, you know, just dirty, you know, whatever kind of stuff. It really is, like, kind of absent in a lot of death metal because so many death metal beats are, like, double kick influenced. Yeah, we have a couple songs that double kick, but it's very minimal. Yeah. But I feel like that's what makes it so special. Jason, as a former drummer, I want to ask, is that kind of liberating to not have to fall into that typical death metal, death doom?
constant pounding, blasting away that you can do whatever you want.
You know what's cool?
I noticed that on this album that you just seem like you have a much more air, more space to play in yourself.
Instead of just constantly just, you know, this the whole time, you know, and then and not really having much variety you're playing.
It would drive me nuts.
I couldn't do it personally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what?
And I'm not from that school of thought either.
You know, I was never I've never been a good double bass player to begin with.
No, me neither.
I can do that well, but that's about it. I don't know. I just, I look at it as like, man, it's so heavy. I just want to play heavy and I don't feel the need to cloud it up with a bunch of blast speeds. Cause I feel like, you know, Alex and now Mike, but it just in past records, those guitar, those trims, they're so fast. That should be in my head always.
should be the highlight of the music.
Like, I should be the one supporting
the guitars, you know,
and not doing blast beats
and stupid shit.
I know that we just said this in an interview.
I mean, Mike just talked on it,
but outside looking in,
newest guy, like,
Jason's drumming, to me,
is what is Temple of Void,
makes Temple of Void.
Like, obviously, like,
Alex's riffs, Mike's voice,
and now Mike's, you know, writing,
but, like, Jason's drumming is, like,
it's not just...
You bring something that could be blasted through, but he comes up with this weird groovy beat. It's interesting. That's exciting to me. It's not just fucking smashing whatever. I think it allows the guitars to come across differently too. You get hit with different anvils then. You're not getting crushed by the same weight every time.
makes it even more ominous and crushing. Hey, man, I prefer that. And you know what? Genuinely, I appreciate you guys saying that because that's the 100% mindset that I have, too. Because those guitar riffs are fucking punimal. They punish. And the bass is amazing. Freaking awesome. And the bass playing. I'll say it. I'll say it. Amazing. No, we're definitely... Although he doesn't like my groove.
I'm not going to lie to you at the beginning of is it got less sync where you open up Jason with the drums yeah I'm not going to lie when the bass comes in I swear it's like this has got some old Iron Maiden Steve Harris Gallop to it and I'm loving this it just I love all that and then I didn't get a chance earlier when you guys were talking about Poison Icon I love the whole 80s intro soloing yeah it just straight ahead metal yeah I'm glad I'm glad if anyone's upset yeah because it means you guys aren't doing the
Same Thing Every Album. I don't want that. If I want that, I'll just listen to Lord's Death all the time, right? Yeah, right, man. I want to hear something a little different. Yeah, thank you. I was going to say the solos would be probably my non-metal influence stuff. Because what I was saying before was, when we did the stuff in the studio, in my constant under-preparedness,
going in there and a lot of it was left to like improvisation. And you know, you go in there and you'd rip a lead. It sound good. And then you know, it might go off the rails every once in a while and they got to like, punch you in. But for the most part, it was a mostly improvisational record with leads. And I tried to kind of keep in my mindset like, okay, I'm going to, you know, kind of throw something together here with sort of this guitar player is inspiration. And for this section, I'm going to think something like this. I'm going to think like I said, the first
The Intro Solo, it was like Sales of Charan, or Uli John Roth. That was kind of what I was thinking with it. I mean, it's got a little bit more of a lead into the solo on sales, but basically the sentiment's the same. And then there's a lead break, and I'm going, okay, for this lead break, I've got 90s Marty Friedman in my head, just that opening interval that I play in there. And then the outro solo, which was mostly just the one that was
It's like I'm thinking Steve Lukather from fucking Toto. For the fucking win, man. I love Lukather. Literally, the opening lead in that is built on the lead like he does the fast run and the solo for Rosanna. It's not the same, but it's the same kind of concept of note fluidity in there. It was absolutely inspired by Steve Lukather.
And I'm trying to think some of the other stuff in there, like the Harmonies and Soulburn. Absolutely. Brian May, that goes into the bluesy solo. That's Dave Gilmore. I'm trying to think any other lead stuff on there. Mike, you playing guitar sounds like it really invigorated the band. It sounds like you are invigorated because you're playing now. I am probably the most apprehensive front man. I hate being a fucking front man. I absolutely hate it. It is not my, it is not my,
It is not me. It is not my personality. It is. Thank you because you're the prettiest. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I saw the last photo session. You all look like you're in a band with Santa Claus. When you improv a solo in the studio, do you try to recreate that live or do you just wing it, you know, improv live too? We've improv like live, you know, we do like we did like a goofy solo. We're not really like the previous albums haven't really been very solo.
So it's like we don't really have a whole lot in the set that was solo heavy. I'm going to try and play it as true to form as I can. But I never really play everything like exactly the same. I know like in other bands like Nuke and Asiewicz and all that, it's mostly just like you kind of learn like the basic touch points and the basic like shape of the solo. But like there's room for fiddling and improv-ing and doing things a little differently.
and pretty much everything.
I'll probably approach it the same way.
I've got to ask.
You actually knew about that beer?
Yeah.
Hey, John.
Yes, sir.
So just did you see what Jason was holding up to the camera?
I just sent you a photo.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
John and I are very familiar with this.
I was at the store over the weekend and I was in the mood for a stout reporter and I was like, even more Jesus.
Like, this is the dumbest goddamn name I've ever seen.
I have to buy it.
Yeah.
And I did.
It was good. I was more impressed with how thick and black it is. Who makes that? Evil Twin. That's what I thought. I was going to say, is that Evil Twin? I couldn't, but I didn't want to say it because I couldn't remember if that was right. I wasn't a huge fan of it. No, no, no, no. Because they've got a whole lot of those, right? I had one. Yeah. I'm going to hold that up. You just said you like it thick and black. Oh, I already had one. Black and huge. Black and huge. I don't want it. I do not want it. I brought it. All right.
What is your favorite kinds of beers? That's a question I don't think anybody's asked you. I'm a big, I love Anchor Steam. Oh, yeah. I'm from San Francisco. I love hearing that. I thought it went out of business. It went out of business, man. But that's my all-time favorite beer. Somebody, I think, bought the brewery. Somebody bought it, right? Somebody bought it. Yes. Yes. I grew up on that beer in San Francisco. So did I, man. We grew up on it here. Dude, I love it.
I love it absolutely love it yeah still a fan me too tell ya what styles of beer do you guys like the best I always go with a Pilsner or a Kolsch but I do love a Porter or you know yeah a Kolsch no no no no but we're running we're running this right now you're gonna be running to the bathroom a lot yeah I know you get drunk at least you're hydrated yeah yeah
So I wanted to go in the other direction of not necessarily influences, but are there any other musical directions that you haven't explored yet that you'd like to? You know, you talked a lot about grunge. Is there anything that you'd like to incorporate into the sound that either you just haven't gotten to it, you haven't figured out how to do it yet?
I got to take it. I'm sorry.
Or you're just like, no, that would be so... Everybody would hate us if we did that. It's a woman. Well, we don't care about what people think from that regard. When I said earlier, like, we expected shit, we would never write something that we would... We never hold back. Our whole point was like, we love this. We don't think people are going to like it, but we don't care. Like, we stand behind this. So are you like, hey, we're going to do a sax solo, you know?
Yes.
Maybe.
If we want to have female vocals at some point, do a duet, just like Opeth said they never wouldn't, then they did.
What could I also say?
I don't know.
Can I just say one thing?
No sax.
Yeah.
I agree.
Just an example.
What a female vocals, yes.
I keep behind that.
Just an extreme example of things that you might like to do.
Yeah, and reigning on him, like in the Lost Boy.
That's Tim Capello.
Oh, oh, sorry.
Use evil violins then. Fine. Use a bassoon or some shit. Just no more sax. Experimental guitar or experimental sax guy is on summoning the Slayer. It's buried, but in the end of one of the songs, you hear some like tambourines and credit to the band because as we were writing one of those songs, I forget the name of the song. Treat her like a lady. Sorry, a tambourine song.
In the jam room, I was just like, I was like, doing like a Liam Gallagher kind of thing. I'm like, we need some tambourines right here. It fits. And when we went to the studio, they're like, okay, Alex, we can try it. And they were like, actually, it works, you know? So I appreciate it. I don't even know if I even noticed it on there. Yeah, it's low in the mix. It's like the boom, boom, boom. I don't remember the name of that stuff.
Why can't I think of the name of the song? It should be called Boom Boom Boom. Yeah. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Sequence of Rot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that has some... That's the best title on that album, too. I can't... So, I appreciate that Everyone in Demand is so open to trying different things. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't... We wouldn't be doing it if we were just like, oh, yeah, we're going to do, you know, Four on the Floor, like, Triumph, Death Metal, like, we're not going to rewrite Lords of Death.
No matter how much people like that record, we're not going to rewrite it. If you like it, go listen to it. It's there. Reviewers still bring that up. Even on the new one, they keep bringing it up like it's your standard. I wish they would stop doing that. It was a point in time, but we wouldn't be true or interested in doing it. We wouldn't be here 13 years later if we were just trying to rewrite the same record over and over again.
I did any clean stuff.
Any clean stuff that ever happened on the other records are always like Eric or Don, are the guitars. So now I'm writing clean stuff. The next record, I'm probably going to write even more like that. We'll see. So as long as these guys are always open to experimenting with different things, as long as we got Jason hammering it like he always does and Mike doing his growl, then I feel like we can get away with anything musically and we can explore whatever we want. It'll still sound like TOV.
And if I bring something that's a bridge too far, they'll say. And we'll go, all right, oh, okay. At least like a saxophone. I love that about the band. Because I kind of agree with Will. Like, Summoning the Slayer was not my favorite of your records. But what I appreciated about it was that you tried different things on it. And that leads to this record, which I do really love. Like, it's pretty high up there for me in the TOV catalog.
If you didn't do the record before it, you might not have gotten there. So you keep being open, you keep trying different things, and eventually it's going to hit and you're going to find that rhythm. I think you did on this one. They build 100%. And even the stuff like Justin and I did Love Interest, the side project that we had that was a post-punk band, and that directly influenced my guitar playing for this.
you know,
or developed now that's part of my repertoire and that's not going anywhere.
So everything that we do is like a response to something else.
And you were always growing in one way or another.
And it's,
it's cool that there's no boundaries,
you know?
Yes.
Yeah.
So when you listen back to like,
say the first two albums,
do you hear a clear line leading to the crawl or is it more of a stagger,
stagger,
crawl,
crawl,
stagger,
stagger,
crawl,
crawl kind of,
you know,
No, I mean, I feel it's like that classic illustration of, you know, the evolution of man. And then somebody's hunched over it. Yeah. Hopefully that's not in our evolution. I feel it's like that. Like, you can kind of trace it from, and there are songs, the only thing that I would change about of Cherenal Student Natural is I would just make it a single LP instead of a double. Like, for every other record that we do, we've,
Written an extra song and then force ourselves to cut a song and then we do something with that song whether it goes on a split or we did one of the decibel flexi i was gonna say that's one well yeah and yeah like the first 10 years one the bottom center um that's a lot of uh like singles right yeah it splits and say right you know kind of all put together and we had a song that we cut from this we can't tell you what we're gonna do with it but uh we put ourselves in that same situation we have
too many songs and it's tough. But I like that and I like keeping it because you guys all said I've listened to this record and I put it on repeat and I go back to it. Of Turn The Supernatural is like one song too long. I wish we had cut one just to make it a single LP. So what's the time limit to make it a double? Is it 40? Yeah, 40 is about your average cutoff. If you go over 40, you start
your quality to model record yeah yeah does that mean one it one side is completely blank like in the second
yeah because uh if you do it like if you if we split that record equally across all of them then it'd be like two
songs two songs you know and then like you'd be just flipping records over the whole time so i i don't
remember we think we might have done it different ways we've had it like yeah we had the one did uh it's like uh the c and d
the D side was like an etching that was like the original Shadow Kingdom concept.
I don't even remember. I'd have to bust them out.
We might have it both ways, but
there are songs on of Terran and Supernatural that if we wrote today, I'd be proud to put out.
And like in all of the...
But we never could have written, to your point,
songs from The Crawl or of Summoning the Slayer
when we were right of Terran and Supernatural.
And Lords of Death was a direct response of Terror and Supernatural. It's hard saying all those words. Because we wrote OTATS. OTATS, yeah. We wrote OTATS, and it sounded exactly like how we wanted it to from a compositional perspective. But when we played it live, we would always cut the Doomier songs in favor of the more upbeat, like, you know, more songs. So when we wrote Lords of Death, it was like this big grand proclamation of, like, we're doing death metal.
we're writing the record for the stage and all of these are going to be bangers that we want to play live and that was the mindset going into that and then their reaction to that was you know the role that was we got a new guitarist that changed dynamics and when we wrote that's when don came in yeah that's when don came in and then when we wrote leave the light behind that was the big aha moment for me when i realized i didn't play any chords on this song it's all single picking kind of post-punk-y stuff we've got these synths on it if i can do that and
They, like Jason and Mike, can do their thing on top of it, and it can still sound like Temple of Waste. It does, yeah. I know exactly what's up. Holy shit, like, then I can do anything. You know, like, as a guitarist, like, it freed me up to say, I don't have to write, you know, all this shit. I can write single note stuff and have tons of fun doing that, and it'll still be like TOV, and then that influenced Summoning the Slayer, because that was like the spark that said, well, if we can kick that door open a bit, let's go through it, and then by the time we got
the crowd, we were just like fucking burning the house down, you know? So, um, it reminds me, do you guys ever listen to old school rigor mortis and like,
yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. So, uh, one of my favorite bands of all time, but like, oh yeah. There's no riffs in it. He just plays solos. Oh my God. And the solos are so good though. Like, yeah, it's like, so it's one of the things that when you were saying that, like, you're just picking, you're not playing chord, like there's no chords. It's almost like no riffs. He just like, it's almost like he's just solo.
throughout every single song and every album. It blew my mind. I was in high school. The greatest thing he ever did, as far as I'm concerned, is on Psalm 69 by Ministry. No, no, no. No, seriously. Have you heard that fucking song? That is the fastest thing I've ever heard. I never actually knew that was him. Wow, okay. That's him. TV2, check it out.
Question for you guys. So what's the plan for touring? Can you tour? I know. So you've got a new album out. I know you're having a record release show in April in Detroit. Yeah. What's the date? Where is it? It's April 10th. It's at a place called The Sanctuary, which is probably one of the best venues here in the Detroit area. It's in Hamtramck, technically, which is like a little city within the city of Detroit. Okay.
But yeah, it's going to be with Fel Ruin, who are like a black metal band from around here. The front man of that band is actually one of the guys that directed the Kroll music video. Okay. And the Death Touch music video. Okay. And then Winds of Neptune. And Winds of Neptune is, yeah, I was going to say that's the Aquarius Void Blue song, dudes. It's like heavy, almost like 70s. How would you describe it? Heavy 70s rock. Deep purple, black sand.
Yeah, really great subject. What's the name of it? Winds of Neptune. Okay. Yeah. They sound like you found some relic blew off the dove. Yeah, the lost atomic rooster. Oh, shit. Yeah, you guys definitely check them out. Yeah. Winds of Neptune. I grew up with the drummer, and the drummer is currently the drummer in Flogging Molly. Oh, nice. Nice. We know them. Yeah, yeah. So they're really good friends of ours. Yeah, Kevin. Kevin was in.
Yeah, he was in Meat Men for a while, too, right? Yeah. And the drummer's how I learned how to play drums from him. Yeah, they're awesome. They sound incredibly authentic. Yeah, they are the real deal, man. They're fantastic. I'm super particular about that stuff, especially, like, throwback stuff. Like, most occult rock can just fuck off, in my opinion. But, like, these dudes are legitimately good. Like, it sounds like T2, like that T2.
or something like that. Like I said, like a lost Atomic Rooster record. Yeah, right. Do you have any other dates planned for the tour? Are you coming to Chicago at all? Yeah, we're coming to Chicago May 16th at Reggie's. Yeah, everything pretty much is at Reggie's nowadays. It's a hub for metal. Where is it all at? The interwebs. The interwebs.
It's just the two dates. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'll definitely go if I'm here. Yeah, man. We're playing with Ossuary. Like it's they. Oh, they're good. Yeah. Oh, I love Ossuary. And they were coming to Detroit and they asked if we would play and we couldn't make it. And so they said, how about you get on our show in Chicago? And we said, hell yeah, because we've been honestly trying to book a show with them because they're from Milwaukee. We're from Detroit. We're like Midwest, you know, death doomed. They came out in 2015.
It came out in 2013 and it's been a decade and we still haven't played together. So we're like, all right, fucking finally. Like, what's the date? It's like May 16th, I think. It's Saturday. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how much play tickets are. Well, you can come stay with me, Will. I don't care. It's not going to be as long as it should. I'm going to be in Michigan the week before that. Nope. I'll be in town. I'll be in town, man. Like ships in the night. You guys mentioned the music video for Crawl. I actually just watched that today.
And it was pretty cool. It had this old dungeon and gaming and stuff. Can you talk about what it was like to shoot that video? Cold as cold. Cold? Yeah, there was no heat in that building. It was in the dead-ass middle of winter. December 6th. Like a 13-hour day cold as hell. Yeah, we call him at 3 a.m. We'll let Justin tell you about his height.
I mean listen they're gonna try and downplay this but we all played on this giant fucking platform in front of a it was like like fuck I can't my arms can't even go up that high in front of a staying left 7 10 15 feet you know whatever but I went third these two dudes went first and I was looking at Jason I'm like I'm so afraid to go up there like we gotta go crush some of that wine that's in the best we just panned a bunch of shine
And then I get on this thing and it's super wobbly. Like they had somebody under it holding it up so it wouldn't move. And like right as we're ready to go and the director Brian is like yeah definitely keep one foot planted like that. This will go down. So I'm like I am just fucking terrified the whole time but should not have drank wine. I thought that was going to get rid of the fear but it made me real wobbly. But you made it.
Like you see this major space between me and the mic and all the shots of the video. And it's because I'm like, I'm not stepping that close. I can't fucking see where I'm stepping. You would have died if you can. Oh my gosh. Justin, you got to go the other way. It's like, listen, I was drunk, but my balance was still exceptional. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't me. It was the idiots holding it. Yeah. But where did the concept for that video come up? Did you guys do that? Or was that the director? That was like, I, yeah, I basically sent Brian, the one guy.
I sent him the video from the old game Dragon Strike. And like the old commercials for Hero Quest. I mean, fun fact, Mike and Alex are teaching me and Jason how to play D&D in the video in that shoot. Like we're all wearing robes. Oh, nice. And we were rolling and me and Jason are like, what, do we move the fucking guy five steps forward? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And we're like, this is really fucking stupid.
Yeah, everything. Yeah, it's its own game. It has nothing to do with D&D or any of its licensed trademarks or affiliates. It's a 21-sided die if you look very closely. Defies dimensions. It's got a tumor on one end. It's not cyclopean. I was kind of saving this for one of my last, because this is one of my more ridiculous questions, but since you brought
If TOV were a dungeon crawling RPG party, what character would each of you be? Like character class, should I say. Character class, you know, a fighter, a rogue, a cleric, what are you? I'd be the thumbtack. Oh, not Monopoly. That's Monopoly. How do you think there's a thumbtack? I don't know. I'd be the only kid would end up with that.
Mike would be Gavin Rosdale. Yeah. All right. Yeah, man. Oh, man. Nerd alert. I currently play like an 8th level warven sorcerer, you know. Okay. With draconic bloodline. And he's a thief. Technically.
That's what I currently play, and he talks like Miles Davis. He talks like Miles Davis. That's a very descriptive and unique thing about him. Yeah, like he has that rasp. When I do it, when I role play, like that. My guy, you know, my wizard, he sounds like Dick the Bruiser. Can you do the voice? You gotta do the voice. You have to talk like that when you play? You wouldn't fucking
the chorus to one of our songs, but your character has a voice. Good God. Hold on. All right, fellas. Can you give Justin and I, what would be my character? The Dick the Bruiser guy. Baby. Yeah, barbarian for sure. You're a barbarian. That's Arthur Penhouse. He's a barbarian. Yeah. What's my voice? Me going this way.
Justin's a ranger probably. Yeah, wait, what am I? Yeah, a ranger. I'd give him a ranger class. What's a ranger class? Ranger or ranger? Ranger. Oh, ranger. Raging ranger. Or thief. Yeah. Someone who's like a loner, you know, wears a hood, you know. Yeah. Protects against monsters. Oh, all right. I'll take that. Yeah.
Yeah, he could be a ranger, because it's definitely more of like a lone wolf character. Gotcha. He would, Jason would definitely be a barbarian, you know, with a couple. That's what I said, yeah. You know, just like bashing away at things. Minimal brain cells. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like barbarians are very strong. Oh, fuck, yeah. Yeah, I'm very strong. I don't wipe my butt, but. The guy that just spent 13 hours. I like that we got Jason's D&D voice. I did do CPR today. Did you really?
Straight up God's truth. Yes, it did. Oh my God. Yeah. Did he live? They did. Nice. Needs more Jesus. That's awesome, man. It was a heavy day. Mike would be, you would be a magician. Me? No. See, I never played magicians. You gotta be some sort of sorcerer, warlock, like... I got a wizard magic. That's your job, Doc. I don't actually have... Some sort of magic. Like, you got magic in your fingers when you're playing guitar. Magic hands.
Yeah, I was saying I'm unfortunately doomed to be a bard. The last time I played D&D, I was a paladin, but I've always gravitated like Juju, like we were saying, rogues, thieves, rangers. I've always been partial. I loved elves growing up, like just like wood elves, the concept of just like, you know, the existence of wood elves and living in the forest and hunting and forging and the
of it and, you know, nature's lore being able to kind of communicate with, you know, your surroundings within the forest.
The tricky part is whenever I've played those characters, you always want to play them like they're stoic, you know, and like they're this, like, introverted.
And it's boring, you know, like, it's hard, at least it's hard for me to embody that kind of stoic nature and then be fun at the table.
I don't look at Will because he's like, nerd alert.
I know. Justin's rinking into his hoodie right now. He's ranging up. I don't know if we have to talk about this D&D stuff. It's weird. I was just on a D&D podcast. I haven't played D&D in a long time, but I got asked to go on it because I write fantasy comics. So it was really fun to reminisce about when I did play it. Now I kind of want to get back to it. I haven't played D&D since Tuesday. Wait, what character are you, George?
I was going to say, you know, if I'm going to put you in this spot, I'm a level four Goliath. And he likes to do haiku. Yes. Because he's not real wise. And so I, you know, I, I speak sort of like Jason was earlier with the big dumb voice. And, and, and so it made sense that short haikus would be his thing, you know?
But he started off in Dark Sun. And actually, James Lewis from Decibel was our DM. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. See, it's metal adjacent. But then that didn't, the scheduling for that just stopped working. So we ported our characters into Icewind Dale and changed things a little bit. And so we're doing that now. Cool. So check this out. Since you said haiku, I just have to interject. He's got a haiku. He wrote one.
No, wait, no. This is a selfish plug. So I played another band. This is crazy, man. And we wrote a song called Haiku Guru. Haiku Guru. All right. Haiku Guru. You got to check it out. It's called Saber Tooth Gary. All right. That's the name of the band. Yeah, so go check it out. The singer's a dude. He used to play in war. Oh, nice.
Yeah, go check that out. Will do. I think the first song is Haiku Guru. Okay. Excellent. It's just like late 80s, early 90s punk rock. Nice. Yeah, yeah. I'd say it selfishly plugged in. And I also played a band called The Suicide Machines. Oh, I know them. Yeah, man. We're on tour a lot and stuff. Nice. No, he's not. But he is. Justin.
I assume the crawl is for dungeon crawl the name of the album is that right yes okay yeah
excellent we should elaborate I guess um wait yeah elaborate weirdly enough I did have this question for you
guys did you guys all are you guys stranger things fans because that's a lot of wait because that's a lot of dnd right yeah we yeah we have jokingly had some run-ins with stranger things uh what was it we we wrote those
was at the four doors to death comp songs and we did uh ceramorphosis about like uh about the concept of the mind flayer and then all of a sudden the stranger things thing comes out and the whole season set around the mind flayer i think it's like so you guys you guys said so the mind wait a mind flayer is from dungeon and dragons yes and is demi gordon from judge yes all of that is mechna's even from dungeons yes from the original modules yeah all right all right yeah but we were we put
his stuff out and then Stranger Things comes out after. And then the new season came out and Mike asked me, the first episode is called The Crawl. I was like, yes, it was. Like have to drive into the upside down. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we did it before they did it. Yeah. We did it before it was cool. But we're just in this basement doing it. They also have a basement. I mean, we recorded it in January of 2025.
And then like just kind of between Kurt's schedule and us kind of getting all the ducks in a row, it ended up missing a window and it got a little delayed. And then, uh, yeah. So like by the time that season came out, it was like, you're sitting on this album going, Oh man. But no one up until you had ever kind of mentioned Stranger Things, which is good. We just anticipated that people would have too. Yeah. Cause they're huge. Yeah. So we're copying them. And it's like, no, we actually wrote this shit way before.
So weirdly enough, I was just thinking of other things to ask you guys, to be honest. And two of the things that I really watched a lot with my son was Welcome to Derry, because I know you guys like horror and stuff like that. So Welcome to Derry. I have not seen it. And then Stranger Things. And the two things that bind those two shows together, aside from horror, fantasy, stuff like that, is that it's mostly just a bunch of kids. My son's 12. So he identified with Welcome to Derry because
It's a whole bunch of 12 year olds running around all that stuff. And then Stranger Things, obviously they're older now, but it's a bunch of young kids. But they started young. The besties and their kids still. And I'm like, and what's weird is I'm probably significantly older than all you guys. Maybe not this guy. 55. Oh, man. God. Motherfuckers, man. You guys are still children. You're not the oldest guy in the room. Are you worried he's going to retire? I'm the oldest guy in the room.
No. This guy is. John has me significantly. I'm going to be 58. John's 97. Yeah. I'm not 97. I'm 93. John's got a lifetime of discerning listening. What I loved about the first season is it's based in the late 80s or the early 80s or whatever. What's great about that season, you never see the parents.
Bunch of like young 12 year old kid, 13 year old kids just running around their neighborhood with walkie talkies doing whatever they want. You never see the parents. And that's that was my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. It was like you just think something future generations will never know. What I have to have to experience through retroactive nostalgia being forced to do that through stranger things. That's stranger things. And then it helps you get along. Again, confirm. And now we're in Canada. Yep.
Well, that's interesting about the stranger thing. It seems to have haunted man. Because, yes, it was about a dungeon crawl. And the general premise was it was about a metaphor of all the different choices that you make when you're on a dungeon crawl. And you have a party of people. You meet monsters. You slay monsters. People in your party die. You get new people in your party. You have to make choices. You have to work as a collaborative team. You need diversity.
within your team five barbarians aren't going to last very long you know and you need
cooperation barbarians yeah exactly so it was all those elements of like what it's like to play dnd
as a metaphor because it's more exciting than us as a band yeah you know so just living real life
you know everybody's on their own crawl you know day to day whether it's just trudging through your
or it's doing what you're passionate about or finding time to do what you're passionate about in the midst of working your bullshit job you know like i make choices so like the album cover has all these like divergent paths it has different floors you know so if you start to look at it now and go oh it's about like a metaphor for life and choices you'll see it's very particular and there's a lot of things you can kind of pick up on that bridges you know like i was going to
that actually that's really cool and actually your your previous covers uh summoning the slayer and the world that was they they were visually connected the cover of the world that was was that boat that traveled beyond that river six right and then some of the slayers like what was behind that yeah is there any connection you can see there's four characters on the cover of um the crawl as well like four small little dudes and
It's no coincidence that there's four of us and there's four little dudes on the cover. And Indiana Jones. And they're going on different paths and that's what you guys are doing too. Yep. Yeah. And you may see some skulls, you know? Well, there should be skulls on everything. Yeah. I think I've seen eight guys. I'll show you. That's just your foreigner double vision. Yeah, I was just thinking that. How much has we had to drink?
That's actually pretty funny. I do love the cover. It might be my favorite cover. I was just going to ask about working with Travis Smith. And I noticed another question. What was it like working with him? And are you guys purposely having a different artist on every album cover? Because you've nailed it with each. Adam Berg, right? Yeah. But Travis Smith obviously is known for a number of bands, you know, specifically like his Opeth covers.
are pretty well known.
We were super into death.
Like for whatever reason,
we were in a huge death phase.
Symbolic.
Yeah.
I'm going to see if I can find his sketches and show you his sketches
because they are hilarious.
Wait,
so did he do this specifically for you guys?
Oh,
yeah.
Yeah.
We gave him the,
we gave him the concept and we kept it loose intentionally just so he can kind of
go wild with it,
with his imagination. But yeah, it was posed to him. The idea of choices, different paths, things, ends. So as I was flying here today, I'm like, oh, I'm going to look up some of the old album covers of Adam Burke. And then looking up Travis Smith. And I was like, can I buy the original painting? And you can't. For either one of them, you can't buy the original. For either Adam Burke or Travis Smith. Adam is on first.
I wish I would have bought it and I did not but it was insanely cheap so where is so where's the
original painting or whatever for the crawl uh it's not it's digital I'm pretty sure that Travis Smith is
predominantly a digital guy oh and the same thing for summoning the slayer for yeah Ola Larson yeah oh so
so can you buy like I look at this website you could you buy a print maybe if he made one but yeah
It's not like there's not a physical
because that's kind of one of the things like when Travis
Smith got suggested I was like well we did
digital with Ola like I'm not really
like the biggest digital guy but
like you know it was like okay
well let's see because there's like some Travis
stuff and Smith stuff that I'm not really
like I wasn't a big fan of but then
there's other stuff he does where I'm like this is absolutely
fantastic and honestly
the piece he gave us might be my
favorite piece he's ever done out of
like everything that I've seen like I
I was just sort of like, wow, I was actually incredibly impressed with how well it came out. For this album, he has a lot more detail on your guys' new album than he does on some of his previous stuff. Yeah. I mean, way more, there's more straight lines, because sometimes his stuff kind of has a central picture and it kind of just fades out, you know, which is kind of probably in line with what the band is trying to do, obviously, but I feel like you can see a lot in this. This one kind of reminds me of Still Alive from Opeth a little bit with all the detail.
Which is cool. And the colors set it apart completely from other stuff. Yeah, I love the colors. Yeah. Especially with the red in the doors. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at it. That's what like, just like clinched it for me when we saw the like, did we ask him to do the red in the doors? I think we did. Yeah. And I just remember looking at that and going like, that's perfect. That is such an awesome contrast. And then Alex put like the red drop shadow.
under the logo and it just is like the dude's rug man it really tied it together yeah so so for the listeners so we're in jason's basement behind his drum set is the uh the the six album covers the four the four um or the five main albums and then plus the the first 10 years album cover and so we're looking at i'm like so my question to you jason is like are they actually the albums
and just framed them? Yeah, they're all the albums. So the physical album. So I was like, can I get that? Like, where can I get that? Yeah. Because I was literally looking like, it would be awesome to hang like an original artwork of one of the album covers in my house. It would be, I think, for Lords of Death, I don't know if he, like. He painted that and that was like a full. Yeah. Yeah, Balogarati. I don't remember if he sold it or not. I feel like the world
I own original artwork from Adam Burke. I have two. Oh, awesome. He does put them up. He sells the originals. Then he does prints. A lot of artists. Yeah. See, I missed getting, I would have, I would have put down and probably bought the original just for posterity sake. You know, I'm always surprised when a band like does an original art piece, that's a painting and then they don't own it. Cause a lot of times. I agree. I know that.
For Lords of Death, there was an actual painting. What was his name? Paolo. He was standing in front of it, and I'm like, oh my god, I would love... Because it was big. I would love to own that. Almost like a big sheet of Bristol board or something. Yeah, I was really bummed out that I never... Because when I write comics and I have a guest artist do a cover or something like that, if they do original art, not digital, then I was like,
I need to own it. I want to have that piece of art. I've always paid extra just to have it. But I'm surprised how many bands just paid for the license of it. And then the artist will sell it. I've got this. Oh, that's my daughter. Oh, nice. I have one of her originals as well. An album Alex or something. There's another one back there. My daughter's an artist. Nice.
She's also an athlete. I will brag for a second. She's 15 and she's obviously a girl and she just made the high school baseball team as the only girl and the first girl to ever make the high school baseball team. That's crazy. That's awesome. It's the largest high school baseball team. No, it's just the baseball team. She's never had a woman on it. There's a softball team.
And she's like, no, I'm a baseball player. Softball is the S word. And she made the high school baseball team as the first girl ever. First base. I was going to say, that's a hard position to play. Yeah. So that's my plug. Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy. Yeah. Hell yeah.
She's also an artist and what George held up is she also does art and has art shows and stuff like that. I got a pair of hers in my sunroom. That's right. Yeah. Hey, honestly, that's cool that you know, you are supportive of that sort of stuff. There's a lot of people out there that aren't supportive parents about that sort of thing or only supportive if it fits what they like. No, no. So like baseball is not a it's not.
Like, typically there's not a boys team and a girls team. There's just a team. Yeah. And so she just happens to be the only girl to ever make the team. Yeah. In the largest high school in all of Virginia. Yeah, that's, yeah, right. So it's very competitive. It's huge. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'll stop. No, it's awesome. Proud dad. Proud papa. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. I don't know. Here's one of the sketches. Oh, that's a
Pretty cool. So if Alex is showing a sketch of, is this like one of the... It looks like he took markup on like a picture and did it with a... It should always love Alex. It's like, all right, everybody, check your emails. Like, I sent you sketches. And I'm like, what the fuck do I do? Yeah, like this. What are we looking at? It's a monster eating a gumball. Yeah, totally. Look at those guys in a boat. Yeah. Or in a boat. And this is what you're supposed to react to.
and then go, yes, approve. Go make it. You already did a bow. I think the album cover you have is, here's our money, take it. Is that the original helmet? Yeah, it was definitely from the original sketches. I was like, what is this? Because it literally sent MS Paint. You know, like he went on Nintendo and played Videomation and sent you the sketch from that. Did you guys give him ideas, though, or did you just like, hey? Yeah, we kind of proposed the whole crawl and the choices.
And I think we kind of described, I think the way we described it was entering into some kind of a labyrinth. And inside the labyrinth, there's maybe like different buildings or maybe a reference to like some of the stuff from other covers or see what it is. But like these different paths and that's kind of. Oh, that's why the first thing he came up with monster Pac-Man. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to find. There's like way more hilarious.
ones that he sent where it looked like it looked like a hairy piece of pizza
sending this to the guys like yeah like check your emails
just like what am I supposed to say to this
does he give you like a write-up on each or is it just like what do you think like inkblot almost
yeah no he does give a write-up and I'm trying to find
some of these like with all annotations but you really have to
I do a lot of manual leaks to get it from the squiggles that he sends. So how many drafts did he do before you were like, all right, this is it? Honestly, he just sent us those weird MS Paint sketches, and then it was basically done. He just kind of added some figures and some embellishments. It was almost like doing it with ChatGPT or something, in the sense where you're describing to him what you want.
It was more of that discussion back and forth than it was really a visual because you saw what we were getting as visuals and we just had to go, all right, we trust you. Well, apparently it worked out perfectly because it did a great cover in the end, right? Yeah, and once he started actually putting things together and getting something real, because it's digital, it's so much easier to riff on and he could give us different variants of colors and we could send
to the guys like which color way do you guys like and it could be colder or warmer this or that and we choose and of course these are just like blend layers that you can adjust and with levels you know and curves and stuff and then boom it can change the whole complexion of the record for from being magenta you know to being there's no word beer orange or something so i wouldn't have guessed that it was digital i mean i didn't look at it that closely but i i thought it was a painting so yeah i feel like travis smith's style is a lot of collage work and a lot of different like
filters and textures and that sort of stuff. There's a lot of different layered things happening with it. And that's what I said before. I was thoroughly impressed with it. It's one of my favorite things I think I've ever seen him do. And we sent him, not that we needed to send it to him, but early Slayer covers as a reference of just how they're spatially incoherent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just looking at, like,
they don't exist in real three dimensions. You know, they have, like, an oddness, something that's off about them. And so this record has that, like, weirdness to it where it's not, the geometry's not quite right. You know, you've got the clusterfuck dudes in the center, but then you have the bigger guy. Yeah. Yeah. I remember he edited the four, oh, sorry, finish.
No, no, no, but I have one here. This is a bit more. Oh, that's the one I remember. Yeah, like this. All right, so you can see that scribble, and that looks closer to... Oh, yeah, I see the pathways now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so then there's little annotations on this, like, part of labyrinth here. Curve, cliff, drop off like a waterfall. Trees, you know, like mountains, etc. So there's little, like, annotations on this.
But it still looks like it took you
10 seconds to scribble
in MS Paint. So it's a big
leap between that and where we ended up.
Yeah, so he's just giving you an idea.
How did he do that digitally? That's
insane to me. It doesn't seem like
that's possible digitally.
He's very good at what he does.
Because when we added the four
guys, I don't know if you still hear me from over here,
it's like down here, there's a little bit of
a perspective discrepancy that always
weirded me out because
this guy is like technically higher up when he should be lower with the way that the
perspective is on that and it threw me off and it was like i i think it was just like
yeah fuck it throw like five other guys in there make them all big and little and weird sizes and like
yeah it was yes matt what were you gonna say you were trying to say i mean technically if it's if the
artwork is all digital technically could that be like a non-fungible token or an nft or something
I mean,
I mean,
that would not be a good investment.
Is that still a thing?
I mean,
wasn't,
didn't Wu-Tang get a lot of money for that?
NFTs.
So yeah,
I do want to interrupt for one second because I know Matt is probably the first slash second biggest TOV fan.
Maybe,
maybe of the six of us,
he's up there.
But there's a story behind that.
Right.
Yeah.
But like what,
you haven't asked many questions or said much.
So I want to give you a forum, like speak. I feel like I should. He has a word limit per episode. In his characters, how much he can say per episode. So yeah, I have a word limit. I get paid by the word. It's not a lot. So choose your words carefully. Do a haiku, do it. I can't spell haiku, so I can't do it. But we have high choose here, which I love. But I feel like I should give the backstory to this because we have this thing on the podcast.
when we do our top 25s. Whoever, like if five of us pick an album and one of us doesn't, it's called Jaying the album. And I have to be honest, I, Jade, was at Lords of Death. Wait, what? Yeah, that's the thing. And then I listened to Lords of Death and then I immediately sought counseling, realizing what have you done? And so I've just spent the rest of my life just enjoying it and everything else. As far as questions go,
It keeps coming to my head. Mike, you had quickly touched on it. You worked with Kurt Ballou this round. Curious what that experience was like. With Kurt Ballou? Yeah. Really. Actually very cool, man. Kurt was kind of one of those guys that I think was in the hat. Like we said before, every album, we try and do it a little different. Go with somebody else for production. Go with somebody else for art. Try some new things. And Kurt was one of those guys I think Alex threw in the hat on the
last album when we actually had a budget to work with. And we ended up picking Arthur for that one. And then with this one around, you know, I don't know who we all reached out to, but I know Kirk got back to us and he told us when we were there, he vets every band he recorded. So he clearly checked us out and didn't think we were that bad. So he, you know, I mean, he wanted to record with us and yeah, everything like the price point was good. Recording there was really cool because,
He has an apartment above the studio, so you can basically stay there while you record. And yeah, so it was nice. It's just a modest apartment up there. They had Street Fighter, and they had one of those, almost like a Raspberry Pi that was like, no, it was an actual Super Nintendo, but they had a bunch of games flashed on a cartridge, so you could play 500 video games. Yeah, or play an NBA Jam and Street Fighter.
and all that sort of stuff after hours. But no, him and his assistant, Zach Weeks, were really easy to work with. I tend to get a little nervous in the studio, and I feel like a lot of times performance suffers on my end as a result. And they were actually really cool. And like I said, throwing things to the wind and kind of relying on just going with the flow and things like that is typically very stressful. But in these circumstances, it didn't really feel stressful.
He is definitely an anecdotal kind of guy. He's got a story about pretty much everything. He was going off on all sorts of tangents and pretty amusing stuff, things like that. A brilliant guy. He was telling us straight out of high school he was building artificial hearts for Boston Scientific or whatever. He actually has a patent for a cardiac stent at Boston Scientific.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like, I know. Yeah. Before it became, uh, tell me about the fallout. And then, uh, before we came at God city, Jason, the nurse is nerding out. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Wow. It was pretty, it's pretty cool, man. That's pretty heavy duty to come up with a cardiac stem. Yeah. He was showing, I teach. So like, uh, he was showing me, uh, he wrote a chill or helped write a children's book. Then like all this other like crazy stuff. He was like, Oh yeah. You know, I, I hope this guy,
My friend wrote a children's book I did. I helped co-write it or whatever. And he's like, here it is. You can take a look through it. And, you know, just a very diverse and pretty, you can tell just a genuinely intelligent guy. Well, it's like, I mean, I don't know him. But when I look at Kerpaloo, I think like that guy's got to be busy as hell with a band and multiple bands and all the production work he does. And now he just does stints and he's writing children's books. So, I mean, I'm a true renaissance man. He left that.
when the band started full-time, I believe. Sure. Wow. Jason, do you watch The Pit? The Pit? The show? No. No. I've seen the movie The Pit on HBO. The Pit is an HBO show. It's about University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Okay. So it's kind of like, I don't know, ER. Noah Wiley from ER. Yeah, focus on the doctors, but also the nurses there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't. I don't watch much TV.
Okay. To be honest. Yeah. Yeah. You should watch. It's great. Okay. I don't even like Dr. Shaz, but it's good. I tried watching one episode. What is weird about me is like, if there's blood and guts in front of me, and I've been there, done that, like I could deal with that. When I watch it on TV, I mean, it's a veterinary show where like cut something out, like I can't do it. I can't watch it. I tried watching the pit for half an episode. I'm like, I'm done.
It's pretty graphic because, you know, unlike ER, which is network TV, this is what, like HBO or something? Yeah, it's HBO. And so there's blood, there's boobs, there's a lot of swearing, you know, it's... Boobs. It's ER, you know, notched up a bit. Yeah. You know what, I can't... I've been a nurse for a very long time and what I cannot do is watch Pimple Popper. Yeah. Oh, man. That's so gross. Gross. No, dude, I'll skip that. It's fast.
I can't do it man
I don't even know but someone's like trying to show me
I'm like you don't want to look at that
meanwhile I'm eating a Snickers bar
watching someone take up crap all over the floor
it's so funny
shit though no way
so I do want to ask
I want to go back to touring
so like you don't have there's no touring plans
you got two shows planned one
One in Detroit, one in Chicago, but no tour planning. We need to talk about it because we have, we can tour Europe if we want. We just have to figure out logistics. We have, yeah, we have a point of contact now for Europe and we have, you know, some people around here that are interested in doing stuff with us. It's just getting the stars and the planets to kind of align. Well, you know, Justin's busy. Yeah, he's not doing.
Justin is a full-time touring band as well. So Justin, this is one of the questions I want to ask you. Do you have a normal job like everyone else? Or are you just like your... I do animation stuff, but I've worked for myself for like 10 years. So I go, I'm on tour. Touring is the main music. Yeah, that's the main gig. Which is like a punk guy. That's really like your main thing? Really?
That band's really great. They do very well. Lots of people. It's a good gig. I genuinely didn't know that. I thought that. Yeah. I mean, it's still anime. It's not a priority perspective. I always thought that what you were doing on the animation side was priority one. No, it is. You can do that on the road, though. I do. Yeah. You need a Mighty Boss's Tones style dance include on that thing. Yes. Yes. Now I know where the groove comes from. Hey, man.
It's just full of fucking nerds. It's like they're all the same. To piggyback off of that, I mean, I think this is the second release from Relapse, right? Did they help with touring? Because that is a much bigger label than Shadow Kingdom where you were on previously. I think being on Relapse would make things more receptive for touring. But I mean, Relapse themselves don't really like, hey, we're going to pull some strings and get you on this big package deal.
or things like that. It hasn't really been that kind of a situation. Yeah. And they have a very, I don't want to say like line, like strong line in the sand, but they're like, we are not booking agents. You know, they do a lot for us, but booking shows is not part of their, you know, services. But I mean, you got to do it yourself or have an agent for it then. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're tight with decibel and we've been asked to do the decibel tour, to be honest, but we just, we can't, you know, because it's in,
I can or well and I will well I thought you were the one that couldn't do it no no it was like you
couldn't take off like all that time from work yeah well I mean I have to submit it but the only problem is is that my job there's they have a union thing where it's like only seven people can request the uh breaks like time off in adjacent to a break so like you're a teacher right yeah and that makes it hard for me and then also I've been talking
of these guys, which the delay of the album release is kind of hard too, because I was trying to go back to school and do my second master's in next month. And so it's like, with the delay of the album release, now it's putting literally the album release right before I'm like slighted to go back to school too. But it's a six month accelerated program. So my idea is, is I'm just going to bang it out as quick as I can and get it done. But yeah, that's, that's going to be tough.
So you have a son, right? I do, yeah. And you have a son, right? So, Justin, you have kids? Nope. And Mike, you do? I do not have kids. So here's one of the questions I have for you. You both have sons. How old is your son? 19. Oh, he's 19. Yeah. But yours is much younger. Nine, yeah. Dude's like 79 years old, of course. Yeah, thank you, man. I mean, look, look at this. Well, I mean, I'm only a few years behind you, and I got a 15-year-old
and a 12-year-old. Yeah. River is the coolest. I mean, Anthony is amazing. He could knock any one of us out. The three of us boxed with him. Yeah. But River is the coolest. His son is the coolest kid I've ever met in my life. He's a really gravitated music. He's a central player. So I did see on the liner notes that on the synths, River on is... Yeah. And so I didn't know if that was your son or not. Yeah. Okay.
track of the shows that he's been to. So to give you context, since he was six, Iron Maiden, Ghost, Amon Amarth, Love Interest, Hellmouth, Temple of Void, Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, Linda Lindas, All Cest, Mono, Sabretooth Gary, Suicide Machines, Ghost Again, Oasis, Mama. So those are all the shows that he's been to since he was six. Wow. So he's really into... That's awesome. The other day, he was like, have you heard the new...
the new incantation.
It was one track.
No, it was when the last record came out.
He was like turning me onto the new incantation.
Wow!
And then just actually the other week, he was like,
have you heard Lyrics of Fury by Eric B. and Rakim?
You know?
And like, so he like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he like turns me onto stuff too.
And he's a little shit too, so check this out.
So he comes over, he gets behind my drums, and he is legitimately like double bass, like... fully fluid double bass, and he's looking at me cocky, 'cause I can't play double bass like that. You know, I'm just like, "Man, you little shithead." And he's smiling in his face, and he was just like... And he comes downstairs, he takes his shirt off, and he's just playing. He was shirtless, dude?
Yeah. It's bad parenting. It's bad parenting. But the kid is like really like legitimately genuinely. He's amazing. Like I feel like every time I come over he's like do you have time to jam? And I'm like hell yeah because I get to play Alex's nice Gibson's. We'll go in there and we'll totally you know jam out for 10 minutes. But you can play with him. He's legit.
He's a legit drenzer. He's good, man. I love it. Yeah. So, Jason, does your son like metal? No, he's, uh, he's... Well, all right, so what do you think? Yeah. No, totally. I get it, yeah. He'll knock you out. Yeah, but he will. He will come in and he will... Yeah, yeah, he's a tough kid. Yeah. So, not... Does he like Temple of Void, at least? No, man. He's, like, you know, he's 19 at Michigan State University. Oh, he's at the wrong school. Yeah, he's at MSU, so...
So yeah, right now he's at an EDM concert as we speak. Yeah. Maybe not the first time, but when we met him, he was six. And like, I remember going to Jason's house and he made Temple of Void out of Lego. He was shortlist. He's six. And he showed us like Temple of Void out of Lego. That's badass. That's awesome. But the hilarious part was that he didn't put the bassist in there. Classic move.
And now my son, he's nine. He's always shirtless. You know? And like, why is Anthony always shirtless? I mean, you were shirtless a lot. Yeah, I was going to say, you're the one shirtless guy. Why are you not shirtless now? Yeah, why are you shirtless now? Exactly. Take off your shirt off the top. You've got like four layers on. I keep it cold in my house. It is cold in my house. One thing I noticed is that Alex has, he's got a denim vest with a backpack on.
it's a TV back patch on it. But like, it's a typical what sorry, I shouldn't say typical what I notice is that here in Michigan, your denim vest, your denim jacket is fur lined. Yeah, I've never seen a fur lined battle vest people or battle jacket before just a denim jacket, but I don't know. Alex is very fashionable. Sorry, I just assumed this because we're in Michigan. Yeah.
Well, I gave my son my actual battle vest with all the patches. They're too big for him now, but when he grows into them. Yeah. So he's really into Biohazard right now. Does he like the new album? He loves the new record. It's a good record. Yeah, it's a good record, man. It sounds like they almost never took a beat from the night. I remember there was no Biohazard. I was in high school, Urban Discipline. Yeah, can't beat that record. Yeah, yeah.
This new one's the second best, in my opinion. I think it's better than State of the World Address. Yeah. That was the other one. It's crazy that it's 2026, and I'm like, yeah, the new Biohazard's better than State of the World Address. But I went back, and I listened to it, and I was like, yeah, the new one's better. Who's got a Biohazard tattoo in this party? Not me. It's covered up, but who had a Biohazard tattoo? I thought we were going to get a shirtless.
No, I had it covered, but it was an original Biohazard tramp stamp. Tramp stamp? What is it now? Like a bigger tattoo. A bigger tramp. I did see Biohazard on the State of the World Address tour opening for Slayer at the Orbit Room in Kalamazoo. Yes. I saw them on that tour as well. Yeah, George is from,
What's the name of the town? I grew up in Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, man. Every now and again, he sounds like you guys. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. When I moved here, I sounded like I was from Michigan. Apparently, I've lost it. Like you're saying the word they and that at the top, not a soda. Yes, yes. I have transitioned from pop to soda. Yeah. My girlfriend is from La Corte.
Los Angeles and she moved here and she's just like you have an accent and I'm like I do and she's like yeah you have an accent she's like you all have the accents Michigan accent is weird it's disgusting yeah yeah I don't really notice it's like the worst parts of Canada and the worst parts of like you know I mean at least it's not Alex's D&D accent yeah yeah my wife makes fun of my friends accents same metal
Yeah, Scotland.
No.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, are you, is one of your family members, are you from Scotland? I grew up in Scotland. So when you said Scotland, you're like Scotland? Yeah, I grew up there. Until what age? 15. Okay. Whoa. Well, you, you've shred, I mean, Scottish accent is powerful. You worked here when you were 15? Oh, I thought you moved here when you were younger. Holy crap. It's funny. Like, we're having this conversation. You guys are all discovering new things about each other. Yeah. During this conversation, like, well, I didn't know that. Yeah, they don't know dick about each other.
You're welcome. You're welcome, boys. I feel like that's come up before. I feel like I knew that. Yeah, so my great-grandmother grew up in Grosk. I want to go to Scotland. Tracy said it's going to be our next trip. Oh, I was growing up. Yeah. Probably mumbled a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Edinburgh, dude. Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Edinburgh.
Beautiful city.
Probably one of the best record scores I've ever had.
Yeah, I went in some like hole-in-the-wall record thing, and literally
the original Death Metal comp, we found that there, which is like Dark Avenger, Hellhammer, Running Wild,
Hellhammer, who else is on that?
Whatever, but I found Vertigo Press, alternate cover, Paranoid.
which has it just says black sabbath like that way it's yeah it's black
sabbath paranoid like kind of arched above and below and in the circle it's the witch from the first
album and i'd never seen it before and still i've never come across another one since but yeah it's a it's a
legit like tab out like press vertigo record too wow there you go edinburgh edinburgh and possess seven
Church's embossed logo.
All right, so question for you guys.
What are you guys listening to?
What's on your radar right now?
That's a loaded question.
We listen to a lot.
You want to know, like, favorites?
You know, other than your album, of course.
Yeah, what's besides the amazing crawl?
I like Final Gasp, their new one.
That's good.
I've not heard that one.
I had the one before it.
It's got a real Killing Joke vibe to it
Really?
It's good
The band, the Relapse band I really like
Is that, I like that Poison Ruin band
They're pretty good, yeah
Yeah, that's alright too
I love Killing Joke
It's probably my top three of all time
But what else you guys got?
The new Vryde
I've seen people talking about that
It's like, is it like a live thing?
Or like a collection of
No, it's a new album
Earlier stuff?
It's called The Sky's Turn Black
It's the one notable thing about it is there's a song with like lead female vocals. I don't know where that came from, but that was different. But on the whole, it's pretty cool. If you like that sort of, you know, black metal. Black and roll, kind of. Black and roll. I've seen some people drop it. I haven't checked it out because admittedly, I barely check out New
things anymore. Watching TV, listening to music. I just want to get time to do it. New music. When we get a shit ton of promos, we're always getting new. Yeah, see, that's cool. I'm not even listening to a lot of metal right now. Yeah. What do you listen to, John? I just picked up this album. He was on a metal. He's one of the most famous metal drummers ever, even though he's only on one metal album. But I just picked up an old Simon Phillips album called Another Life Time. Oh, dude, Simon Phillips is my fucking shit.
I love Simon Phillips. Dude, he's on all the best fucking albums. He's on the first Michael Shanker. He's on Sin After Sin, which is the best 70s Priest record. Otherwise, they're a fucking poser. We got a thing going with Steve Lukather and Simon Phillips today. Yeah, man. You are my dude. Yeah. I'm not a huge, I would never claim to be a huge Jazz Fusion fan because most of my stuff doesn't go past like 1989. But I love Simon Phillips. I just picked up an album I haven't been able to get for a while called it
So, very cool stuff. Man, you are my dude. Seriously, kudos to you. I love Simon Phillips so fucking much. And Simon Phillips and Steve Lukather play together all the time with Derek Sherinian solo albums. So I'm all about that. I've been listening to a lot of cow punk. Thank you. What is that? Cow punk. Cow punk. Yeah. That's like a mix of punk and country stuff. Like Dead Milkman, Mojo Nixon.
Yeah, Mojo Nixon, yeah. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Dead Milkman, all right, I understand where you're coming from. I'm thinking more like folk punk or something. Dead Milkman played here a couple years back. Oh, really? I'd love to see them. Yeah, at the Hamtramck Festival. Yeah. Well, I'm listening to, I really like, there's three tracks out from The Silver, and I really like that band. That's a horrendous band, too.
Yeah.
And so,
like your guys' album is leading for album a month,
but Silver is coming out like next week.
Album of the year.
So I don't know.
I really like Silver,
but,
and then I'm also listening to,
have you guys ever heard of a Briction?
No.
No.
So it's a post-black indie,
like electropunk screamo band with melodies,
hooks,
just really arresting beauty to it.
Punk.
It's all by this one woman named Meredith Salvatore. And it's some of the most eclectic, just interesting music I have heard. What's it called again? It's called a Brickshin. So the last album was very metal, but she just uses all these different influences. She has tons of albums and splits. So I've fallen down a hole with that. And I think she's a genius. So I think you guys might like it actually just based on the last couple albums that you've done,
where you have all these different influences that are going into your your death. How do you spell abriction? B-B-R-I-C-T-I-O-N. Okay. That's right. Yep. And then the other one I've fallen down a hole with too is Wounds of Recollection. And I don't know why this one's kind of fallen under my radar because it's this long running project by a guy named Anos. And he did this album called I Slept on the Moon, which is like my number two album in 2024.
So Wounds of Recollection is atmospheric progressive black metal, but it has post-metal, folk. There's some emo in there. And he wanted to create a sound that had like this deep sense of nostalgia to it for moments in his life that he really identified with. It's very all-sat sounding. It is, but it's like it's beyond that, I guess. And he's got tons of songs and albums and EPs and stuff. And so I've just been,
and those two artists for the last i don't know a couple months really cool cool sounds sweet yeah oh by the way marcus on do you see that lago just dropped i did i was gonna send that to you yep i'm excited i got it yeah it's been like what six years since lago uh i'm like how many years has it been eight years a lot yeah um yeah the song was good it was more dissonant than i
I remember them being. Yeah, it's a little bit different. They're from like Phoenix area, I think. Yeah, I'm trying to think. They're on unique leader records, or they were at one point, right? It's kind of like kind of strange, spacey, brutal death metal type stuff, right? It kind of reminds me a little bit. Some of the older stuff kind of reminds me more of like Morbid Angel kind of stuff. Yeah, but I somehow, I don't know how, I think via Twitter, I got in touch with the
and the main guy behind it. And he was a retired Marine and he's a retired Marine as well. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, I love that band. They're great. Anyway, sorry. Sorry. Interrupting stuff just to make sure Mark's on. I'm good, man. I'll give you those. I mean, I've listened to a lot more stuff, but you know, right there, those two bands, Abortion and Wounds of Recollection. I mean, if you start listening to them and you're into that,
They have so much material. So that's like finding that kind of stuff, you know, like how did this, how did this escape my notice all these years? And then all of a sudden I get into it and there's just tons and tons of material. Well, it's always good when you got an extensive back, you know, catalog that you can dive into. Yeah. It does. Yeah, it does. Cool. Yeah. I'm putting out my notes, man. Cool. Yeah. Let me know what you think. Yeah. Awesome. Stoked.
How you doing on questions, Will? I've got like two more myself, so just wondering where we are. I can't believe it's been two hours already. Of course, we did have those technical difficulties. Are you guys all from Michigan? Yeah. He's from Scotland. Oh, he's from Scotland. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You're all from the greater Detroit area? Mm-hmm.
So we're in Michigan right now. We're about 20 minutes north of the city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I passed by all the Chrysler plants on Mountain Road on the way here. Yeah. And I was actually thinking like, this is my first time really spending more time in Michigan. And I was like, I wonder if I'm going to see all the automotive plants. I'm like, oh yeah, you drive north on Mountain Road from north from Detroit. Yeah. They're all on the right side.
Or on the east side of the road. Yep. All the GM. I love Michigan. Blueberry Farms. Right, so truck. Yeah. I went glamping on a blueberry farm, which I never thought I would ever do, but I loved it. So do you guys like Detroit sports? Are you guys into like the Red Wings and Lions, Tigers and Bears? Oh my. Lions are the eternal underdogs. I always support the Lions. Yeah, I'm digging the Pistons. Okay. I used to be a Red Wings.
I just I don't know who any of these kids are things are doing well though are they where I got into metal and playing guitar I was definitely a hockey guy I was a major Red Wings guy I mean I grew up in that like the whole like you know Stanley Cup champs 97 like seeing all that stuff the Russian five you know line like all that that was yeah that was like a great great thing to be like a 11 12 year old boy you know what I mean
Like that was awesome watching that stuff, especially because they hadn't won a cup prior to that since the 50s. And it was like they got so close. It was like 95. The Devils ended up going on and taking it. And then 96, we got what I think it was beat out by the Avs. And then the Avs went on to go and cinch it. And there was that whole like Claude Lemieux, Chris Draper thing. And Darren McCarty coming straight off. Right off the puck drop, just gloves down to beat the shit out of him. Like it just.
waiting on that. I just like what a time to be alive to be a kid into sports you know. Baseball and a tiger. No fuck no. Yeah I call it tigers. Okay. Yeah. Alex is like I don't mean the D&D. Yeah totally. Which you know for sure. Yeah lines got Alex like footy. Yeah I like well I mean these days I've been following on F1 for the last 15 years. Yeah that's right. That's my main sport.
The Monster. Yeah, it's May 4th. Yep. In a way, you're talking about? Yep. Can't wait. It's going to be early in the morning. I have DAZN. I have that subscription, so I'm going to be watching it early in the morning. It's super entertaining. Nakatani. That's going to be a super fight, man.
shit to him in the last fight just so he could. Oh, yeah. He lost that fight. He completely lost that fight. Oh, it was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. But up until that fight, I really like Nakatani too. Me too. Yeah, he was great. That guy was a tough fighter though, so who knows what's going to happen. But they're fighting in the Superdome, and of course they were going to give it to Nakatani for this big fight. Like, who fights in the Superdome? It doesn't happen that often. Yeah. In a way, he's my favorite fighter actually, so. Yeah, us too. And so the three of us all boxed together for a while, like me, Jason.
and Justin. When we were talking about Anthony, Jason's
son knocking people out,
he started boxing too
with us.
He was like 15.
The guy's fast, athletic
training and all this
cross shit.
We're 40, 50 year old guys.
I feel like
every band you're in, you
fight with them.
Didn't you guys
And we did this band Hellmouth. We all did a krav. It's like you're getting all your shit out. Yeah. Afterwards. I mean, it was fighting. It's so cool. Like, yeah, I mean, not not fighting, but like violence. It's an intimate experience. Yeah. Yeah. And like, so when we were in Justin and I were in Hellmouth are still in Hellmouth. And our bassist was a certified krav maga instructor. And so twice a week we would get together.
One day to do Hellmouth practice and then one day the whole band would get together and he would train us. We would fight and kick each other's ass. And that's how TOV started because the origin story is that our singer from Hellmouth brought this guy Eric who none of us knew. Here's my friend Eric. He came to Krav Maga and he and I started chatting. And I was like, oh, hey, you should come work out with me in my basement. Just being nice. I didn't know him. He seemed like a cool guy.
Next day, he shows up from my basement and we're like working out. And our friendship grew over like working out together for a year. And if it wasn't for Krav Maga, I never would have met Eric. And TOV, we would not be having this conversation. Oh, wow. That's awesome. So you owe everything to violence. We owe everything to violence. You guys are way more badass than I thought. I never get to talk about boxing because these guys are always talking about baseball and football.
I never get to talk about boxing at all. And usually when they're talking about that, like my eyes are glazing over and now the shoe's on the other foot. Yeah, I'm glazing hard. It's awesome that you love the monster too. He's my favorite guy. Same with you. Yeah, dude. Yeah, he's incredible. Super entertaining. I mean, he's already a first ballot Hall of Famer. It's crazy. Yeah, looking forward to it. And Netflix is doing a documentary on Canelo.
I didn't hear that that's cool yep that's gonna come that'll be cool yep I'd watch that
definitely definitely gonna watch that for sure yeah man I'm really into boxing because I have all
the networks and then I I'd listen to podcasts for it and I'm just ever since I was a little kid my dad used to have these like fight parties and and he would invite people over and they they contribute to the pay-per-view you know and then he wouldn't let me be involved in it so I had to listen to the fights the vent dude I feel like that's like a right
passage though. I feel like growing up, that was the thing. The uncles would come over and everybody would watch the fight. Not me. It doesn't happen watching him. For my son, because he started doing karate, and I was watching him, and I was feeling jealous. I hadn't kicked or punched anybody in a long time. I'm watching my son doing all this stuff. That's when I got into boxing. Then, of course, I started roping my friends into it.
And it's crazy. You know, when you do it yourself, you approach watching boxing in a completely different way. That's a very intimate experience. Taking a punch to the face changes your perspective. Well, you have to just be an amazing athlete because to be able to punch all that time, you know, these three minute rounds for whatever it is, that's a lot of activity. You have to be exceptional. But it was the
It was looking at it as chess instead of looking at it as violence because when you get in the ring and you're fighting someone, at least for me and I think for the three of us, we're not these like aggressive, macho, like, "I'm gonna kick your ass" kind of guys. It's something that's enjoyable where we're testing one another, you know, and it's just a game of chess. It's as much a head game in boxing as it is. That's why I don't like MMA.
see someone's knee going into someone's forehead and caving their forehead.
It's not the sweet science, right?
No, it's not.
It's not.
It's so brutal.
I've never heard anyone describe it like that.
Like boxing is more of a chess game.
And MMA is just more like just brutal.
It's adapting to different styles because you're more restricted in what you can do.
MMA, you can just do whatever you want.
That's why it's sloppier.
That's like me, but in the classroom.
But like when you're in the room, you're looking at, you're waiting for, you know, a counterpunch opportunity. You know, you're reacting to what's happening. You're not in some fight or flight like, oh, I'm going to like kick the shit out of this guy mode. It's more like they make a move and you have to react. If you're a counterpuncher, it depends on what style you're doing. That's the thing I like about it too, is like everybody's got a different style that they employ. And how does that match up with somebody else? Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. So yeah, I really,
I really do see it as a sweet sign so I don't see it as anything brutal at all we certainly felt some brutal effects I remember the first time that I that I sparred my coach didn't didn't make me wear a mouth guard just like the first time that I was sparring and I mean the girl that I was sparring with hooked me and the next day I went to the dentist because I was like my jaw is fucked up
And because I have TMJ and she got a hook in that just like got me right in the spot. I don't know. Isn't that the tabloid side? I don't know what it stands for. It's the Scottish side. Something with your jaw where it can be like kind of like misaligned a little bit. It can clip a little bit. I've got that pretty bad. She rattled my bagpipes.
That was terrible, I know. I had to try it. Yeah, she rattled my back twice pretty good. So after that, I was like, I got a mouth guard and yeah, I learned. That's awesome, man. Yeah, it was so fun. But then I tore my ACL and so I don't box anymore. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, it's too bad because I was looking forward to going to the gym with you when you're in Chicago. Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry. Yeah. And the irony is I said, I'm not going to do crosswalks.
I did boxing and then I tore my ACL.
You know you do, Alex? Aikido. Because it's all throws. It's all momentum.
I'll still find a way to...
Wait, is Aikido the Seagal?
Yep, yep. It's all about taking somebody's momentum and then using it against them. So it's like throws.
It's like this.
It's less like fighting, like kicking and attacking. It's more about defensive.
Got you.
All righty then.
That's how we went down a rabbit hole with that. Sorry, boys.
Bullshido.
Bullshido.
So I've got one last question on my list.
Bullshido blade.
If we're ready.
Yeah.
All right.
This is my really stupid question.
She saved the dumbest for the last.
That was the plan.
That was the plan.
So if Temple of Void had to collaborate with one completely inappropriate artist, Dolly Parton, Bruno Mars, Willie Nelson, who... Inappropriate? Inappropriate to the style, not inappropriate like touching. Dolly Parton. Our Lulu moment. Who do you think would make the weirdest but coolest record? And this came to me because of the whole Metallica, Lady Gaga thing. The Galilee, bro. Oasis would be pretty...
I was thinking, yeah, that would be you. And that would be highly inappropriate. Yeah, yeah. It might actually yield something. Yeah, I think it'd be great. I feel like no one was in the races would get way more popular. Yeah. You guys might get the box with them a little bit. Oh, it's true, John. You never know. Somebody might lose it on their side when it's starting to fight on stage. I'm going to say G.G. Allen. G.G. Allen?
I don't think that that would be like so I mean do they have to be alive no no no that boy is that man thank you thank you oh it's just uh I think that's a great like Bill Gallagher is my favorite songwriter of all time and I do think he'd be very inappropriate for our band I think Robert Smith would also be pretty awesome yeah would that be too would that be too appropriate though I mean with the direction that we're going yeah like he would yeah guys
Something we didn't touch on, but I'm just going to mention quick here. The atmosphere on your album, especially the new one with the synth and everything, is phenomenal. That's probably my favorite part of the record, of the band, I think, is the atmosphere that you put into the records. So when you mentioned Robert Smith, like The Cure, I love The Cure. It's all about atmosphere to me. So that would be a cool collaboration just because I think you guys are masters at that.
The synths on the record, like Mike brought Soulburn and it sort of felt like a, just like a heavy metal song for the most part. And then his buddy did synths on it. And when we heard that, it was like, fucking crank them. Like it turned into like a typo negative song, you know? Yeah. That chorus. Yeah. My favorite part of the whole record. Interesting enough, it went from being the song we were going to cut to being one of the lead singles. Yeah. And the song we cut was the one going into it. You know, we said before we, we didn't really
have like defined roles but there was one that we were like okay this will probably be one of the singles this will probably be and then that one ended up being the one cut so it's very weird how things worked out and the thing about atmosphere is to me i i'm glad that you i love it when people pick up on it and and say that they appreciate the atmosphere because it's an intangible quality you know that you can't just hit a button on the on a keyboard or be like that's the atmosphere or this or that like
It's a culmination of everything that you put into it. And that's why, like, you could give our guitars and our drums to anybody and be like, this is our tuning. And like, I'm very open. Like, there's no secrets in TOB. Because you can't just manufacture atmosphere. That comes from a certain, I hate to use the word, I shouldn't say, you know, but like, it's the sum. That's not Scottish. Everything coming together, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes I copy it. The synths bring the atmosphere. The added synths brings, to me, as a listener, the synths bring the atmosphere. It's just an added element. It's what makes the difference, because you could have those same riffs and put them in a different band, but if you don't have that atmosphere that's added to it, it's not going to sound the same. The synths are always in the background, which I like. I have this, so I have to give a shout-out to my friend, Chris Brady,
who may be listening to this who's a huge fan of yours who's stationed in the Middle East right now. Good buddy, Ma. We were in Iraq together in 2003. But big fan of yours and he's a Warhammer. I told you. Yeah, I told you about this, Alex. He's a huge Warhammer fan. He actually left the Middle East, traveled to Germany just to go play Warhammer. I guess in person. Yeah. Like, nerd alert. Yeah.
This guy's gonna kill it. Yeah, the guy with the golden demon calling him a nerd. Yeah. Is that the golden demon? Fuck yeah. So like, I don't know, like, whatever, how many goddamn years ago, he turned me on to like more of these like Swedish, like, these Swedish bands that use a lot of syndic in flames as a guy that use a lot of synths. And I always joke with him about like, oh, these synth bands, like these Swedish, Norwegian, whatever, Scandinavian bands use synths.
And then when I hear you guys do it, it's like in the background. It's not like in the foreground. It's in the background, but it just gives this atmosphere that I like and I really appreciate it. And I think it just works really well. They're building aesthetic. They're not running around like they own the place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, they complement the music for sure. Yeah. And I would suggest putting your heavies on and listening. What's that? I would suggest getting under the cans and listening because I listen to the music.
the other day out with my heavies it's way more up front than you think it's just it's how it's
presented and what you're using which is nice that's why i wanted to get under the heavies and listen to
them yeah i mean i wasn't on the previous ones but i know on a couple of the songs soul burn and dead
issue we were like put them up yeah you know bring them up yeah and we use um a friend of mine who does sound
designed for movies and commercials.
And so there are some of the songs on this record and on the last two that Meredith Davidson did.
And so she's not bringing a musical aspect.
She's bringing sound design.
So you get these swells, you know, and these noises for lack of a...
Yeah, I think that's kind of my point.
Like the stuff that's underneath just like great intention and like accent.
Right.
Yeah, all the drips and stuff between the tracks on the last album, that was all her pretty much. Yeah. I guess that's kind of my point. It's an accent that I appreciate with you guys in DOV. I love that Hammond organ and dead issue. I think it's like when it happens, when I first heard it, I'm like, holy shit. That's weird. Yeah, I feel like you weren't super into it. Yeah, it wasn't that.
So I was like, man, this isn't like, this isn't going to work. This is not us. And then after a few listens, I'm like, fuck this rules. Yeah. And yeah, when you heard it at first, it was like louder in the mix because he wants us to hear it. And yeah, but like when you get it and that's, it is, but dude, it's so, but it, but it brings that eerie horror vibe to the song. Like, it's just like, am I at a funeral? Yeah. Yeah.
It's fantastic
Oh boy, they're mentioning Hammond's
What's next?
You guys gonna drop a Mellotron on us?
Yeah!
To be perfectly honest
how you feel about the synth on Soulburn
is how I feel about Steve's
stuff with A Dead Issue
I feel like Steve's synth
really brought
the album together
Yeah
Yeah
Cool
What else?
Any last
questions?
What are you guys doing tomorrow?
I got work and I got another bad practice. Remember that time you guys made Lords of Death? Yeah, that was cool. It was so much better. Why can't you guys make Lords of Death again? It comes up so much. Every review I see, they keep naming it. Obviously, it bothers you guys that they always use that as a standard.
I wish they would stop doing that. We were like, yeah. I mean, I didn't contribute shit to that. Yeah, but in our group chat today, we talked about that today. Yeah. And it's not that it bothers us because, I mean, who are we to be bothered that people like one of the records a lot? Yeah, I was going to say that. It bothers me a lot. I think the implication is that, oh, you did this like magnum opus and you haven't been able to equal that. And that's what I don't like.
because if you hold that up to the apex of what you've done, you're not allowing room for the band to grow and do other things. And I think what you've done on this record is really magnificent. Oh, thank you. I don't want you to make the exact same record every single time. Why would you want to do that for yourselves or for the audience? But you're a real music fan.
listen to it because everybody in every band gets caught up on the first record or it was your
guys's second record it's like nobody can ever get over it like if you want to hear it go listen to that
yeah it's like you know or stay tuned but i also really do like we because we have five albums
we've had a lot of interaction with fans over the last 13 years and it while it is a typical fan
favorite it's not it's not unanimous like there are a lot of people who will say this one's my
or that one's like the other day we're talking to someone who said otats is her favorite you know we just did that podcast in michigan and they said otats was one of their guys favorite and that's still my favorite i like that better than lords of death personally there you go it's all been downhill after your first record so what's cool like on like your perspective and when you got into the band it influences i mean yeah i'll never forget that one guy who does um at the time bronca studio he was doing a lot of album covers um for a
Yeah, he's a designer. I met that guy in Spain, actually. I remember in an interview, he said that Lode was his favorite Metallica. Oh, what? Which is mind-blowing, right? But the guy's so young that his introduction to Metallica was Lode, and that was the record that resonated with him. Of course, he goes back and he likes the other stuff, but that's what he was introduced to, and it has a special... I mean, it's hard for us to grasp. I recognize that. It's different for every single person. It could be a gateway into something.
I remember getting into metal and Metallica
had the black album and there was like
a six seven year span
between the black album and load
and I remember at before load
came out by the time load came out I
was a Metallica fan and I was
so excited and I just remember
like liking it for what
it was at the time but
also being able to be like
I like
Injustice for All much better
than that
Yeah. Guys, listen. Of all the people we've interviewed over these many years, most people, if we were to actually do a poll, they would cite Metallica as being like one of their first metal albums in their gateway. It could be a different record in their catalog, but it's actually given me a new respect for everything they have done because it could be a load or reload or something that got them into metal and then they found other things. Even if you're in a band,
That could be because at this point we're really old. So I have a lot of respect, more respect even than I did before for Metallica just because they've been able to get people so involved and invested in metal. Well, and think about Iron Maiden too. My son's first exposure to him came on the Senjitsu tour. That's when he first saw him. So Senjitsu was the first record in his lifespan.
So he loves senjitsu on a different level than I do. Yeah. But of course he went backwards and he likes all the old stuff too. But he's not a big Paul D'Anno fan. You know, he likes all the Dickinson stuff. And he is or is not. No, he prefers the Dickinson hero for Paul D'Anno. But even in 1992, right, when Fear the Dark came out, a lot of people had written off, you know, Iron Maiden in 92 and like Fear the Dark was like the new, like, you know. I like Fear the Dark. No, no.
So do I. It's been over time. Fear of the darkest age. It's a fantastic record. But there's generations, you know, and by this time that came out, there was a generation of people afraid to shoot strangers, man, who had just been like, ah, this is, they would look at it like we would look at senjutsu and be like, you know, we have all this, but you get into it different periods and, you know, different things resonate. And I know I had the X factor as my introduction.
I remember I worked backwards in the amazing catalog. Isn't it great to be old you guys? I saw I saw me. I mean we're not as nowhere near as old as you. But we had the best introduction to metal and music. Hands down. Yeah. My in the mid 80s. My first Metallica album was prior to Master of Puppets being released was Ride the Lightning. So I got Puppets when it came out because I knew it was coming.
I bought Whiplash on vinyl when I was a kid, not even knowing. Yeah. Oh, fuck. But to the X Factor reference, I saw Maiden play X Factor at Harpo's. Yeah, I was just going to say, back when Maiden was playing Harpo's, Maiden and Dio would come through to Harpo's. Yeah, I saw Manowar there too. That was loud. Yes. What was it? Manowar played St. Andrews with Immortal. Do you remember?
that in like what was that 2003 or something or 2000 yeah i saw death angel do act three at her at saint andrews in 90. wow i saw crocus and keel hell yeah brocus reference dude wrong keel great voice totally went on to be a country singer and the song my horse is a harley good night i was waiting for him to sing that movie bad channels he plays the cook
in a diner and then they bust out and they do a song and I think it's just Kiel solo or something like that. But. Okay. Wow. There's my Ron Kiel anecdote. Not as cool as the Simon Phillips, but you know. Awesome. Well, I think we probably should end this. What do you think? Oh man, don't tell me I killed it. Well.
If we're ready, I thought I would close with a little haiku I composed for you. Oh, yeah. Just a few minutes ago. Excellent. I like the crawl lots. It makes my small parts tingle. That's six. I like the crawl lots. Oh, lots. Lots. It makes my small parts tingle. Me love you long time. Okay.
We had to make sure the syllable happens. Great job, George. You're sitting with a teacher, so he's going to, you know. Give you a grade. Yeah, he's going to grade. I teach special ed, though, which is kind of like hanging out with metalheads. You just get great. Thank you, guys. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. It's a good scene. Good talking again. Thank you always for supporting us. Yeah, appreciate it. Always will. We really appreciate it. We do love you guys.
We had a blast. Hope we lived up to your expectations. No, you guys. And nice to meet you, Justin. Yeah, you too. Guys, this was awesome. Pleasure. Love the record. And you guys, when you're in Chicago, if you want to hang out, I'd love to buy you a beer. Dude, absolutely. Yeah. Are you going to be at the show, do you think? I mean, now that I know about it, I have to look at my schedule. But if I am available, then I will go for sure. If you are, let us know.
Oh, and we'll just put you on the list. Oh, fuck no. I'm going to pay for it because you guys deserve the money. And we like to drink a lot. I will buy you drinks, and I will pay you to get in, but it would be great to hang with you. If you want to see Chicago, if you have time, I'll do that too. Hey, I'm going to see the Sleaford Mods. I don't even know what you're talking about.
I'll be in Chicago May 17th. And what is that? No, goddammit. Oh, hit me up. Hit me up for one whole day extra. No, I was gonna say, are you just gonna stick around? Yeah, that's pretty convenient. May 25th. Damn, that sucks. So you're gonna drive through this weekend. Let's see a band. I might be doing C2HU then. So what's the band again? Sleaford. Sleaford Mods. Sleaford? How do you spell that? When we were on tour in Europe.
F-L-E-A-F-O-R-D-M-O-D-S. They're fantastic, guys. I'll check it out. The 25th Memorial Day. It's Memorial Day. Well, Jason, listen, figure out your dates if you're around. The 19th. It's a Tuesday. Yeah, it's a Tuesday. Yeah, but check out that band. You guys, I don't know if you're going to
They're from the UK.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
I love it. It's my new thing.
I've been into it for a long time.
They look creepy.
They're fucking great.
Yeah.
I'm very...
Yes, that's it right there.
You guys might not like it, but I love it.
I like weird shit, so if it's weird...
Oh, it's weird shit.
Fantastic.
The weirder, the better for George.
Yeah, indeed.
All right. Well, thanks, everybody.
I do shit.
I like.
Boys, have a great night.
Don't break Will.
Okay.
We want him back.
All right.
Thanks.
Now we're back to Ann Arbor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
Cool, boys.
See you.
All right, guys.
See you guys.
Take it easy, everybody.
Take care.
Bye, friends.
ДИТОМОН.