Interview: Melvins
We’re definitely a punk rock band, regardless of what people might think. Our roots are based in that kind of mentality.
Melvins have always been a band who make the music they want to make with absolutely no compromise and always do so with the same passion and raw energy. They have also always been a band with a truly impressive recorded output. 2025 sees no change in that, with the band having just released their latest album, Thunderball, in their Melvins 1983 incarnation. Gavin Brown caught up with Melvins guitarist / vocalist Buzz Osborne to talk about Thunderball and the original Melvins on their current US tour with Napalm Death and also discussed how the tour is going, having two drummers again on stage and their touring plans for the rest of the year.
E&D: Your latest album, Thunderball, takes the Melvins back to their 1983 form again, How does it feel revisiting those early days of the band again in 2025?
Buzz: Well, we’ve already done two other albums. Tres Cabrones and Working With God, so it was great. We had a great time doing those records, and this was a little different than those. I think there’s no humour on this one. As far as, there’s no funny songs. I always love doing that kind of stuff, but I didn’t feel like doing it on this one, but it’s always good to play with Mike Dillard. He’s a union machinist and a family man, so he doesn’t get to do this very often. So we have to plan it very rigorously to make sure that he has the time to be able to come. He has to arrange his vacation schedules and things of that nature, so I get as much done as I can, and then he comes down and adds his thing to it. He has to fly down from Washington State, which is about two states up from California, so I had all the stuff done. I’d send him demos, and he’d worked on all those things. Then comes down and puts it on. But the idea of him ever being in the band full time, that’s not possible, you know? I mean, he has kids and is a union machinist, so he’s not about to stop doing any of that so that he can pursue an unlikely musical career.
E&D: How is it playing with him again, when you do the Melvins 1983 and have you always been in contact with him since he left the band?
Buzz: Yeah. He’s one of my best friends, and I talk to him multiple times a week, and have since high school, since the early 80s. It’s great playing with him. He’s not a full time drummer, the guys I play with, Coady and Dale, they can pretty much handle any kind of off time weirdness but I have to write songs for Melvins 1983 that he can play, because it’s certainly not all easy, but it doesn’t mean it’s not and good. It’s just different.
E&D: Is it a cool thing to have both incarnation of the Melvins to make music with?
Buzz: Yeah, to do it all, it’s a lot of fun.
E&D: Thunderball also features Void Manes and Ni Maîtres. How is it working with them, and what did they bring to the sound of the album?
Buzz: I’ve known those guys for a long time, and they’re kind of noise musicians, and they’ve done, over the years, various opening situations for us on tours, Void Manes lives in Atlanta, Georgia, which is on the east coast of the United States. So for years whenever we’ve been in that area, he’s came down and we had shows in the general vicinity of there, once again, he’s a family man as well, with a full time job and all those kind of things. But he’ll take some time and come out and do four or five shows with us that are within a reasonable traveling distance from Atlanta. We’ve done that for years with him and Ni Maîtres, we’ve done stuff with him. He opened up my entire acoustic tour last year, me and Trevor Dunn, and he opened up all the shows that we did in Europe. He’s actually from Bristol, and I got the idea that I’d like to add stuff that I’d seen from watching those guys do what they’re doing, and hearing them. I wanted to add stuff to this record. So what I had him do was record a whole bunch of things and send it to me, and then I picked out stuff and inserted it where I could make it work on the record.
E&D: Will you work with them again in the future?
Buzz: Oh, I’d love to, that’d be great. We’ll see what the future holds. We did a a covers album of Throbbing Gristle songs a coupe of years ago that Void Manes was a big part of, so that was a lot of fun. I love that kind of thing. I’m very much into Throbbing Gristle and that whole idea and sentiment and how that works, what they think and what’s important to them. I can just as easily listen to Throbbing Gristle as I can the Archies, or anything like that! I would love to have a radio show where I can play all sorts of things. We were travelling, and one of the guys with us., I had a playlist I was playing, and he’s like, you’re the only people that would put a super catchy pop song right next to a Miles Davis song, right next to a Throbbing Gristle song! I would love to do that. My musical tastes jump all over the place, from Tom Waits to Amy Winehouse to David Bowie to Whitehouse, just on and on and on, tons and tons of stuff. It’s all over the map, plus lots of heavy metal stuff. I don’t really think that there’s enough good music out there for me to be that picky. When I find stuff that’s good, it affects me. Music affects me more than any other art form by far. Movies to some degree, but nothing has affected me the way music has, so if I find something that really strikes a chord in me, I don’t care where it comes from.
E&D: Has it been like that, since the Melvins started, and before that, just a constant flow of new, new and exciting music for you?
Buzz: I work at this very hard and have a fun time doing all of it. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make my living playing music and being a full time musician. And since that is the case for me, and don’t take it lightly I try to do as much of it as I can.
E&D: What are your main memories today of the Melvins in 1983?
Buzz: Well, at that time, we were very into the music, not any less than I am now, it’s just I had to work a straight job to also exist while I was playing music, because I certainly wasn’t making the money playing music! 1983 was figuring out how to be a band, how to play live, how to have a lot of punk rock sentiment in there with how things should work and what interested me in a way that wasn’t oppressive. I think a lot of that stuff is stuck. We’re definitely a punk rock band, regardless of what people might think. Our roots are based in that kind of mentality. I like the intimate nature of club shows. We will do festivals and things like that, but by and large, I prefer the smaller venues. Any of the rock star eccentricities, like, let’s bring out a wardrobe person and a lighting person or any of that crap, we don’t have any of that. I just don’t have any interest in that, that sort of thing at all.
E&D: Are there plans for more new Melvins music as well?
Buzz: Yeah, I’m working on a brand new album right now, that we’re gonna record by the end of the year. We’re going back to having two drummers. Right now, we’re on tour in America with Napalm Death and Weedeater, we’re doing like a 52 day tour of the US, and tonight is show number four in San Jose.
E&D: Are you going to be working on the album while you’re on the road?
Buzz: I have demos and stuff like that, that I’ll work on, but not too much writing on the road. I have a month between this tour and when we come to Europe in July, so I’ll work a lot on that then. Then I have two weeks between our European tour, and we do another US tour, where we play all of the markets in the US we didn’t play on this tour. I’ll have two weeks then, and by then, I should have everything. I have a lot of it already done, so I should have everything in order, ready to go. Then we’ll rehearse it. We’ve already started rehearsing some of it, so we’ll rehearse it and then record it sometime in November, hopefully.
E&D: How is the tour going?
Buzz: Tonight is the fourth show. We’ve done three shows. We played San Diego, we played Santa Ana, which is in Orange County, California, and then we played last night in San Francisco, and it’s been tremendous. I am a big fan of Weedeater and of Napalm Death. I think Napalm Death, unfairly, they get kind of lumped into this metal category, and I don’t think they’re metal. I think they’re more like performance art to me, but I’m a big fan. I think it’s a really good combo, really. Happy to be here. They’re sweethearts, super nice people, and I like their work ethic, and we get along great. I think we’re really delivering something, there’s no tour out there like it.
E&D: You mentioned working with Coady Willis again. How is it having two drummers again and have you wanted to do that for a while?
Buzz: Yeah, the last time we did it with Coady was in 2015 so it’s been almost ten years. I think he’s gonna be back in the band for good, probably, I would say, unless he quits or something. I really like it. I think we barely scratched the surface on what we what we’re capable of doing with it.
E&D: Obviously, he’s super busy with his job and family, but getting Mike involved as well at any live dates, does that ever come up?
Buzz: There is almost no chance of that happening. I mean, he’s got no time for that. The Melvins 1983 is a fun thing for us to do. We take it very seriously, but doing it with him, there are very few opportunities to emerge for that.
E&D: Going back to Napalm Death, how was the experience of making the Savage Imperial Death March release with them?
Buzz: That was fucking amazing. They came to us, John and Shane came to our studio in LA, and Shane had some songs, and I had some songs, and me, Dale, Shane and John recorded all that stuff. We all shared a lot, like I played bass on some of it, Shane played bass. Shane played guitar. I played guitar, just all over. So it’s a true collaboration, in that we spent about a little over a week perfecting the songs, and then recording them all and all that stuff. Then we sent it to England, and Barney added his part to it there. So it is really a true collaboration. I’m very, very happy about it. It’s really nice to have two full length albums out this year.
E&D: Did you ever discuss doing any of it with Napalm Death on this tour?
Buzz: We’ve had no chance to rehearse any of it. But who knows what the future holds?
E&D: With this tour, you mentioned Weedeater and you’ve also got The Hard Ons with Jerry A, Trip To Tachyons and Shane Embury’s Dark Sky Burial as openers. Is it a good feeling to have such an eclectic lineup of bands to play with as well as Napalm Death?
Buzz: Oh, I’m very excited about it. I mean, we’re different than Napalm Death, and that’s good. Then the opening bands are different than that. So I think it’s a really great package for people, there’s a lot of young kids at the shows, which is cool and we’re very excited about the possibilities of what’s happening. A lot of times package tours aren’t very adventurous with the other bands all sounding interchangeable to me, and I like to have something that’s a little weirder. We did a tour with Napalm Death in the US in 2016 that went really well, and we wanted to do it again and now we are, nine years later.
E&D: You’re coming back over to the UK and Europe in July and August as you mentioned and you’re touring with Redd Kross, are you looking forward to that?
Buzz: Hell yeah, we’re gonna do four weeks in Europe with Redd Kross, who are one of my favourite bands, and Steven from Redd Kross plays in the Melvins and has since 2016. His first tour with us was actually with Napalm Death, which was really exciting, and then we’re going to do the US tour with them as well.
E&D: Will the tour have both Dale and Coady playing drums?
Buzz: Oh yeah.
E&D: How did your recent Spring Break live dates go?
Buzz: Oh, that was a thing where we got Coady back in the band, and then we knew we’re gonna do this tour. So what we did was, we set up six shows in California, in small markets like Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, and out near Palm Springs. That was kind of a warm up for this tour. We did that at the beginning of the month, and then we had time if we needed to change anything so we could have it ready for this tour. I didn’t want our first show with Coady to be the first date of this tour.
E&D: How was it having him back playing with the band?
Buzz: I love it. It’s amazing. I mean, he’s phenomenal, and a great guy, really good. It’s a really fun, exciting thing to do.
E&D: Is he still doing Big Business as well?
Buzz: I don’t know exactly what he’s got going on with that, but yeah, he still does that. It’s not over. He still plays with High On Fire as well.
E&D: Do you still look forward to doing long tours? You’ve got this, and then you coming straight over to Europe and then back to the US.
Buzz: Yeah, doesn’t bother me. It’s part of the deal. I’ve said this before, but they asked Bob Dylan, why at your age, do you continue doing what you’re doing? You don’t have to tour and those kinds of things. And he goes, that was the deal I made when I sold my soul to the devil. That was the deal he made.
E&D: With so much music in the Melvins catalogue, is it a cool feeling to have such a choice into what you play live each night?
Buzz: Yeah, we’re at the point now, where we’ve been a band for over forty years, and there’s a lot of young people who haven’t seen us before, so I feel a little bit of an obligation to to give them kind of a glimmer into what we were doing at the beginning, so our sets are kind of a third older songs, a third medium, and a third newer so I think that’s a pretty good mix. I hate it when bands just disregard, you know, we don’t play stuff off of that anymore. It’s like, Well, why not? It’s just music. What the fuck is wrong with you! I don’t like it when that happens, it’d be like, if I went to see The Who and they didn’t play, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, I’d feel kind of fucked over, you know?!
E&D: What have been some of the standout shows you’ve played over the years?
Buzz: I’m not sure exactly where I would start with that. We’ve had so many good shows. I mean, so far on this tour we’ve had great shows, and they’ve been great fun. Anything that makes for a really fun, exciting tour. If you can get everybody excited about what you’re doing, so I take a lot of interest in routing the tour, how we’re going to do it. Then I give that to our booking agent, and I’ll tell him, this is the routing you want to go because I don’t want it to be too difficult to drive and all those kinds of things. I don’t think enough people take that kind of stuff into consideration. So I think that now that we’re on the tour, all the bands are like, this tour is great. I take that into consideration, and that makes it to where, if you plan it out enough, then you can really do longer tours, and it doesn’t make it as rigorous on everybody.
E&D: Is that planning something that you’ve always done, or is that that more a recent thing?
Buzz: For the last twenty years. Once we got to a point where we can get to dictate that, which some bands don’t because they have to take what they can get. Once I got to a point where, I knew, if I could set this up far enough in advance, I could get the kind of tour that I wanted. And I think that then, when you do fifty two shows, and you’re not in the van, overnight and every single day, it makes it a lot easier on everybody.
E&D: What bands have you loved touring with over the years? You are obviously loving touring with Napalm Death.
Buzz: They’re really great, and they’re, they’re super nice people and not hard at all to deal with. They’ve been great. They’re probably right the top of the list, I would say. I don’t know who else. I mean, lots of bands. If I start listing people, then I’ll leave somebody out, and then I’ll feel bad about it!
