Hailing from Denver Colorado comes Khemmis, a doom outfit that fans of the genre have watched be on a steady rise over the past couple of years. Their debut album Absolution was released when the band was pretty much not known outside of Denver but still somehow made various magazines’ best albums of the year lists.
From there the band went from strength to strength, their second album Hunted saw them rise to the ranks of one of the top doom bands in the U.S. and earned them touring spots alongside Enslaved, Wolves In The Throne Room and Myrkur. Now comes Khemmis’ third album Desolation which is their first with Nuclear Blast Records. HEAVY Mag recently sat down with Daniel Beiers, the band’s bass guitarist to find out all there is to know about this brand new album.
We start off by talking about the hard work that went into making the album and Beiers agrees that is the right term to use. “Hard work is actually the right term,” he says with a laugh. “I shouldn’t say difficult but this is probably the most complicated album that we have done in terms of what we are playing and the riff structure and the song-writing in general. It may not come off that way to people but in terms of how complicated it is to play we definitely put ourselves to the test for this album and hope that translates to some people.”
Beiers says that once again the band found that their sound evolved as they were putting the album together as well. “It’s not fun if you are not evolving as people and musicians,” he explains.
“I think lyrically this time the album is darker and more angrier than anything we have done in the past and I know the Phil (the lead singer and song-writer) said to me once that he thought the album expressed the stages of grief, at least for him, so lyrically I think there is a very emotional place where Ben and Phil were coming from and musically when it comes to influences I don’t think we were trying to do anything specific but what came out was the evolutionary process with our band.”
Desolaton is out on the 22nd June through Nuclear Blast Records.
