Tasmanian death metal outfit Psycroptic take another step towards world domination with the release of their already well received seventh studio album As The Kingdom Drowns. The band has already told their fans that this is an album where they pushed themselves to go out of their comfort zone and when HEAVY Mag recently sat down and spoke to the band’s bass guitarist Todd Stern he not only told us how excited the band are about the release of the brand new album but also that when the band celebrates its 20th Anniversary next year that a fair chunk of the world will get to see them play live as well.
“We wanted to take the whole thing to the whole next level,” says Stern when we talk about what the band were setting out to achieve with the brand new album. “It had been three years since we put out a full-length and we just wanted to re-brand the whole thing. We wanted new artwork, new imagery, new songs, new touring cycles and a new bass player… of course that would be me. Everybody was just really bloodthirsty and really wanted to take advantage of the fact that time is really on our side in this game of death metal and we wanted to take the chance to climb the ladder of success, so we are taking every step carefully in a bid to build our brand.”
“So Joe mentioned to the rest of us that he wanted to have his wife Amy sing on some parts of our record,” explains Stern when we begin to talk about the change in Psycroptic’s sound on this album. “And everybody jut welcomed it right away we were all saying ‘that sounds like a wonderful idea, why didn’t we think of that earlier’ and then we got Amy to record some of the choruses, she was doing these massive female operatic vocals and not only were we all impressed by it but we were all thinking that this was what was going to take this record and set it apart from the others. Not only in the terms of the sound but also in terms of how people are going to respond to the band. I think one of the most focuses for the guys when they were writing the songs was ‘how do we make these songs more memorable? How do we make them more available to a wider fan base but also make them sound like Psycroptic?’ I think getting Amy to sing on these choruses made it sound a lot bigger, it is more massive, it has this epic sound that everybody seems to love.”
You can listen to our full interview with Psycroptic on the Spreaker player on this page and As The Kingdom Drowns is out on 9th November through Prosthetic Records.
