(((O))) Interview: Gozer

In the lead up to the release of it’s debut album, Gary Davidson caught up with drummer TJ, guitarist and vocalist Craig and bassist Kez of Gozer to talk over the changes from previous band Archeleon, recording drums five times between lockdowns and sharing a release date with the UK’s other post-metal band.

E&D: The demise of Archelon and rise of Gozer were somewhat seamless, what was the driving force behind that change?

Craig: It was kind of a lot of little things all at once. TJ had wanted to change the name of the band for quite a long time before it actually happened. It was one of those things where we got caught in a loop going “well we can’t rebrand now because look at all this work we’ve done, we’ll lose all our fans”, which turned out to be completely false. It’s one of those things you learn from being in a band after a while, that sort of thing doesn’t really matter as much as you might think it does. Obviously Covid happening was one part of it, not the main part of it but it helped us to make the decision. I suppose the biggest factor was we lost a member of Archelon, we’d kind of not really been getting along with him for a while and it came to a head. He was the only person that really protested a lot against the idea of changing the name, since he was gone we felt a bit more open to do what we wanted to do. It’s kind of the change we wanted for a long time but it just took us a while to get around to.

E&D: Do you think musically you’ve changed much between Archelon and Gozer?

TJ: Yes and no. Yes in the sense I think we’re a lot more happy to just do different sounding stuff and try anything now. But no in the sense that me and Craig have been writing music together for about 12 years now, so it’s kind of that aspect as well. We kind of know each other and how we work so it has changed a bit but not loads, enough to warrant the name change and I think our attitudes have changed a lot as well towards writing music and what we wanted to do.

Craig: The writing process is a lot smoother and we’ve ended up kind of being a bit heavier for it I guess. After Kez joined the band as well that changed us to actually having a solid bass player.

TJ: That’s what most changes come from really is from having Kez in the band because the way he writes bass is completely different to how everybody else in our bands has ever done it. He’s been around long enough that we can start writing things to his bass rather than it always just being the guitar and drums writing everything then the bass coming in after the fact, so I think that’s where the changing sounds come from more than anything.

E&D: A lot of bands are averse to using genre labels and tags to describe their music, are you comfortable being labelled as a post-metal band?

TJ: My view on labels has been that they’re rubbish because nobody wants to label themselves and put themselves in a pigeon hole, and I totally understand that. But then they’re also a really good thing because now people from anywhere in the world can just type in a couple of these labels and they can find bands all over the world. They are like a catch-22 thing for me, I don’t really care if people say we are just post metal, we used to get called doom before when we weren’t a doom band, it made me laugh but I didn’t care either, what’s the point in getting angry if that’s what people think, fair enough, but I disagree. It doesn’t matter as long as they’re not like “oh have you checked out this acid jazz band” because that would be totally setting out wrong expectations.

Craig: I think the tag of post-metal itself is so broad we’re quite happy to just say that but it still gives you quite a specific idea of what we’re going for, a metal band but like shoegizzy and experimental, which is essentially what we are in vague terms. I don’t really like it when people get too specific with genres, it’s almost like people need to be able to hear exactly what you sound like just from reading the genre on a piece of paper, I don’t like going that far into it but there’s a lot of people that feel like it’s necessary but I find it’s really not.

E&D: Quite often it seems that bands don’t actually listen to many of the bands in the same genre very much. Are you post-metal fans?

All: oh yeah for sure yeah.

Craig: We draw a hell of a lot of inspiration from the wide array of post metal bands that there are and do our own take on it almost. We’re definitely heavily inspired and heavily into post metal as a genre. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m more of any other kind of music fan than post metal really.

E&D: What inspires you to write post metal songs and how does your writing process go?

Craig: That’s kinda a hard question to answer because we do it a lot of different ways and it depends on the moment, we kind of let it come naturally to us without trying to force it, we did use to try and force it.

TJ: Yeah I remember in Archelon we used to try and force it quite a lot, we’d end up spending ages sometimes, like after spending three, four, five weeks we’d say it’s not really going anywhere is it and then kind of felt like we’d wasted time and then we’d end up binning it off or just going oh we’ll put it on back burner. We’ve gotten a lot better at recognising when to just move on from something.

Kez: I think if you carry on trying to do something and it’s not consistently inspiring you then there’s not much point going much further is there. If you feel like you’ve already just got as far as you can get and it’s not exciting you enough for that point then we just kind of stop.

TJ: Some songs are written with preconceived ideas where Craig has got this riff, then some of them are just jams where we’ll just jam something out and if there’s something in there then that’ll make it but it’s quite organic really. The other thing is we record everything so we put stuff in a google folder and we can come back and listen to it and decide if there’s something in there and somebody finds it and they’re excited about it we’ll sometimes just take it and develop it a bit more as well.

E&D: Being a post-metal band in the UK underground is a fairly niche choice. Do you have a measure for success and what keeps you going?

Craig: I think the biggest thing for me is just playing cool shows and doing cool stuff. There’s no sort of measure of success, I’m here for the journey, there’s no end goal really. It’s to push yourself and to learn and do things that take yourself out of your comfort. There’s a lot of stuff as a band that we haven’t done yet such as playing bigger festivals or doing more proper tours, like longer or doing it in different ways in different places, hopefully getting out to Europe you know there’s a lot of firsts we are yet to have as a band.

TJ: I’m happy when there’s like 10 people in the room and they’re bobbing their heads along.

Craig: We’ve always said that if we’re playing a gig and it’s like a UK post-metal gig if there’s 10 people in the room it’s all right.

E&D: How long have you been sitting on the new album and did the pandemic slow the process of getting it released?

Craig: It’s definitely been a while.

Kez: Too damn long.

TJ: The thing is all the songs were written apart from one. Five out of six songs we’ve been playing for about a year and a half, maybe even two years.

Kez: I started the latter half of 2019 and yeah most of the album was written then, I was learning those songs to play live.

TJ: We had set up the drums and were halfway through the second song when they announced the lockdown. So we just packed everything up and took a bunch home and agreed as soon as there’s a break in lockdown we’ll start organising recording and setting up. Because I was self-employed even when the first lockdown ended I wasn’t able to go back to work so I just set up and started recording drums again. Then I thought we’ll get Craig and he can record his guitar and it’ll just be me and Craig and we’ll just distance and do everything we’re supposed to be doing. We just kind of kept on doing that and if there were a lock down or a mini lockdown we just didn’t do anything during it and we just kind of managed to get everything done, it kind of just slowed it down but it didn’t stop it or anything.

Because I was recording everything I’d do a full take and think that sounded good and then I’d listen back to it at home and reckon I can get my symbols to sound better. So the next day sounded way better so now I’m going to record everything again and I think I did that about four or five times until I was just like I’m gonna stop doing this because every single time i’m like yeah it sounds better but could be better, but yeah it came out sounding good and then obviously we sent it off to Joe (Clayton, No Studio) who mixed it for us and just knocked it out of the park.

E&D: As well as mixing by Mr Clayton the mastering was handled by another great of the genre.

Craig: Yeah Magnus Lindberg has mastered it, we chose to get him because obviously he knows that sound anyway being from Cult of Luna and it’s nice that we have his name on that because there’s a big influence of us and I love that.

TJ: One of the great things as well about when he mastered it he let us know what he’d done to it. It was nice that he was quite open to let us know what he’d actually done to our songs as well which adds to the learning experience of the whole thing.

E&D: Would you consider mixing or mastering the band yourself in the future?

Craig: there we have there have been things that TJ’s mixed previously in Archelon we had an EP called Descending Into The Void which was recorded and mixed by TJ but then it was mastered by Kate Tavini and you asked Kate loads of questions about your mix.

TJ: I think what we’ve said is maybe EPs and smaller stuff we could potentially do ourselves but then for albums getting somebody else to mix it and somebody else to master it, it’s kind of good having those fresh ears.

Craig: If we were to do a big album I’d be quite happy to go back into a studio and get somebody else to record it as well.

E&D: The album’s coming out on a Trepanation Recordings, how did you get linked up with them?

Craig: Well I knew Dan (Dolby, label owner) from doing Bogwych stuff and I released something previously on Trepanation. We were kind of looking around for different labels and approaching all of the big ones and everything, but I was pretty certain from the start that if we were to release it on Trepanation that we would get a good deal out of it. As an independent label it’s about as none for profit as it can be, for the art not the money. Considering it’s our first release it’s good having somebody like that behind it, that actually likes the album and he’s putting it out because he likes it and for no other ulterior motive. It’s a good place to start really and he’s been really helpful with everything and helped us to just get it started so that it’ll actually be released in a good enough time.

On the side of that we’ve also got For The Lost helping us with their PR stuff to get it into the right places so teaming them two up together for the album actually worked out really really well so it’s been good.

E&D: A wee while you announced the release date for your album the other UK post-metal juggernaut Hundred Year Old Man announced their second album to be released on the very same day.

TJ: Yeah me and both Tom’s from Hundred Year Old Man were messaging each other the other day and they were like “I’m sure you’re releasing your album on the 17th right? So are we, did we steal that from you” I didn’t mind it all we are all good friends.

Craig: It goes back to the genre question and the thing that I like about such a broad term as post metal is we might be similar in a lot of ways especially by influence and we might kind of have a similar atmosphere about ourselves but we are quite different in our execution. We’re a three piece that tends to be a little bit more kind of weird and riffy whereas Hundred Year Old Man is a lot more kind of drawn out and dense. It is a very different approach to a similar sort of thing so if anything sharing a release date just gives all those post metal fans out there a really good release day, they’ve got two different branches of post metal all on the same day, yes it’s all good.

E&D: What are the future plans after the album comes out?

Craig: In terms of having another album we’ve got bits and bobs for that but we’ve got other releases in mind. We’ve got a lot of stuff we have been talking about like release a self-contained EP, do a split or see about making sort of like a little extended music video and doing a soundtrack for it or something like that.

Kez: I think we’re just happy to be in a new space so get settled in there and then get back into a natural rhythm because we haven’t really since the tour last year, we’ve been very on and off with what we do. We’ve not tried to force or rush anything or try and push ourselves.

Craig: The only thing that we’ve got really kind of going on is just seeing if there’s any bands that we can go on tour with and then trying to get on the festival circuit and stuff like that so hopefully some stuff with that will come into fruition soon but uh yeah still on the on the prowl with that kind of stuff.

E&D: Are there any festivals that you have your eye on?

Craig: Probably some smaller all dayers and stuff we want to be playing festivals like Damnation, Arctangent and Red Crust Festival. Obviously I would love to play Roadburn then and especially the smaller festivals in mainland Europe.

E&D: Finally, in the mid 2000’s it seemed that every good band in the UK was from Sheffield but that quietened off a bit. Recently it seems to have cycled back round again, is that just an outsider not paying attention or has it appeared that way for you too?

Kez: There’s a joke that it’s the village of Sheffield so no particular scene is that big really. It’s rather dependent on a relatively small group of people to say what you might have in Manchester, Leeds or especially London and stuff. So yeah it’s very dependent, I think on who’s active.

Craig: Yeah and with that village thing we all know each other and play shows with each other and tour with each other. It’s not like Manchester where people travel from all around to go to gigs, it kind of segregates itself into like a community of people and as that community gets larger you get more talented people involved with it and it becomes cooler and it’s less of an outsider thing it’s very much like just big groups of friends getting together and doing cool shit with each other and maybe that’s why bands all of a sudden explode out of Sheffield.

The debut album from Gozer, An Endless Static, is released on June 17th via Trepnation Recordings.