Interview: Fallujah
I think fans of technicality, of progressive metal, of exciting guitar riffs and very densely packed songs, if that's the kind of stuff you're into, this album is for you.
Technical death metallers Fallujah have just brought out their latest album Xenotaph and it sees the band, who consist of lead vocalist Kyle Schaefer, lead guitarist Scott Carstairs, bassist Evan Brewer, rhythm guitar Sam Mooradian and drummer Kevin Alexander, dazzle with an album that is atmospheric, brutal and vital in equal measures and an undisputed hypnotic lesson in modern death metal. Gavin Brown had the pleasure of catching up with Kyle Schaefer to talk about Xenotaph, its concept and various Fallujah topics as well as discussing everything from rap to solo projects.
E&D: Your new album Xenotaph has just been released. How excited are you to be back with this album, and what can fans expect from it?
Kyle: I’m very excited. This is our first album in a few years. This one is extra special for me, because this is the first Fallujah album that I’ve been involved with from the ground up. It’s my second album with the band, but I basically joined while the last one was in progress. So I’m extra excited for this one, having had a big hand in it from the very beginning. I think fans can expect a little bit of a departure from older material, but in a direction we haven’t quite pushed this far before.I think it’s the most dynamic and progressive music we’ve made. I think fans of technicality, of progressive metal, of exciting guitar riffs and very densely packed songs, if that’s the kind of stuff you’re into, this album is for you.
E&D: With this being your most progressive album, did you feel it is the most eclectic Fallujah album to date as well?
Kyle: Yeah, I think I would say that in terms of subtle nods to a pretty wide variety of bands that we all love. I think we did a more is more approach, in terms of cramming as many different ideas as we could into each song to make a lot of drastic changes to the song structures as they go. We wanted something that really keeps you on your toes, and yeah, I think in terms of being eclectic, definitely there’s the big range of heavy parts, atmospheric parts, progressive parts, melodic parts, and everything in between
E&D: Who were the biggest influences on the sound?
Kyle: A few come to mind for me, The Faceless was a big one. Necrophagist, Cynic. Between the Buried and Me influenced me personally, quite a bit. I’d say that’s some of the big ones. The Contortionist was another one.
E&D: This is the first Fallujah album that Sam has played on, how is it having him on a studio album with the band and what does he bring to your sound?
Kyle: Yeah, it’s been really good. This is our first album with this new, solid lineup, which has been pretty cool. The writing was basically back and forth between me, Scott, who’s our founding member and long time guitarist, and Sam, who’s the new guitarist, basically the three of us wrote these songs together in different combinations, and we were all very involved. Whenever we were working on guitars, I was involved with that. When I was working on vocals, they were throwing in ideas for that as well. So it’s a very collaborative process. Sam is somebody who writes his own music for his solo projects as well, he’s a proper songwriter, beyond just being a guitarist and in his own music, he has a very cool, very unique style. If you’ve heard his solo albums, it’s very creative, dissonant and unique just very interesting, weird, awesome music. I I think anybody that’s heard his solo music will hear touches of that in the new Fallujah. There’s parts where we reconciled our different styles into something that sounds more Fallujah, so maybe it’s not so obvious who wrote what, but then there’s other parts where, 100%, somebody who’s familiar with Sam’s music, could hear that Fallujah riff and think that’s a Sam riff, or that’s a Sam solo. We tried to find a balance between letting everybody’s different styles shine, but keeping everything still contained in the Fallujah package, so it doesn’t feel too disconnected or random, but there’s definitely moments where you hear our individual songwriting voices get highlighted.
E&D: Was the creation and recording of the album a smooth process as well?
Kyle: We did it really quickly. Actually, our goal with this was to make a shorter album and to treat this as a project that we didn’t want to drag on for years and years. We ended up making the album a bit longer than we initially planned, but our plan was to just speed around the album. We kept saying to put it together as quickly as possible. We spent a couple months just obsessing over it. It happened to be at a time when we all had no other responsibilities, no touring, no jobs, no nothing. We just got together, and because of that, we managed to squeeze the writing and recording process into a much shorter period of time than we have in the past.
E&D: What does the title of the album refer to, and what topics do the songs on the album deal with?
Kyle: It’s a concept album. It tells a story from start to finish, and I’ll try to give my shorter version of it, because I tend to ramble on this question! Basically, the story involves a character who dies at the beginning, the story begins at the moment of their death, when he wakes up in this afterlife dimension, some strange place far beyond anything humans could have imagined or conceived as. He’s in this afterlife world being guided through by this angelic being who he meets and is depicted on the album cover. I worked that artwork into the story, and there’s this whole journey that happens from there. There’s a twist that happens later on that flips the whole thing upside down, but that’s the concept of it. For the title, Xenotaph a combination of cenotaph, which refers to an empty tomb, and we switched it to the Xeno prefix, basically means foreign So to me, Xenotaph is thematically linked, an other worldly tomb. How I think of it, is a representation of the world that the character finds themselves in for this story.
E&D: Is it a cool thing to do to to let your imaginations run wild while you’re writing the songs with this story based concept?
Kyle: Absolutely. It’s my first time doing a concept album like this, and it was definitely a big additional consideration to have to keep in mind while writing lyrics that you know mean something, but also flow in terms of the phrasing and phonetics of it all. On top of that, fitting everything into this bigger narrative was definitely an interesting challenge, but I’m very happy with how it came out.
E&D: Have you had thoughts about potential new music, and revisiting these characters?
Kyle: We’ll see right now, I would say probably not, but never, say never. The story definitely wraps up at the end, and it’s definitely a contained sort of thing. But perhaps, you never know.
E&D: Do you feel this is your heaviest album to date, as well, with all the crazy riffs and grooves?
Kyle: Maybe. It’s got moments that are like that. I think the band has had albums in the past that are more consistently heavy throughout. So this one, I think it was more about having a lot of variety. That includes having the heavy parts be the heaviest they’ve ever been. But at the same time, there’s a lot of time in the music spent being things other than heavy as well. I think it’s all about the contrast and trying to make the heavy parts feel heavier. I feel like if you’re just heavy all the time, you can kind of desensitize the listener, a heavy breakdown can not have the same impact, for example, as opposed to if they’re placed very deliberately at specific times. To give you that contrast and that impact, that was more our goal, those dynamics.
E&D: How much fun was it making the music video for the track, ‘Labyrinth Of Stone’, and can you tell us about it?
E&D: That was fun for sure. The video was directed by our guitarist Sam, who we mentioned earlier. Basically our label gave us the budget for one proper metal music video, which was for our first single, ‘Kaleidoscopic Waves’. Even though we didn’t really have a budget for a second video. Sam does a lot of video work on the side. He’s done videos for his own solo project. He did a music video for my solo project once. He basically offered to make us a video in house, on essentially no budget, and thought it would be funny to for that video specifically to do, essentially a rap video where we’re in front of Ferraris and Lamborghinis and throwing fake cash around. We thought the contrast was pretty funny, and considering that the lyrics of that song are very introspective, too,there’s a theme of letting go of your ego, whereas it’s a rap video and we’re throwing cash, we thought it’d be fun to do something different and unexpected and maybe confuse and surprise people a little bit.
E&D: Would you be open to working with a rapper on a song?
Kyle: I don’t know if there’s a lot of room for that in Fallujah, but we all do legitimately like rap. I’ve seen some people interpret the video as a parody of rap videos, which we didn’t at all, Sam especially was legitimately inspired by rap videos that we just thought were cool. The joke is that we’re metal guys, what are we doing in a rap video? But the joke is not meant to be that rap is stupid or anything like that at all. It’d be difficult to make that crossover work in Fallujah, but maybe in a side project. Travis Scott would be cool, I think the group would all agree on that!
E&D: Are you looking forward to playing the new material live?
Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. You can definitely expect us to be playing a lot of these new songs in the near future.
E&D: Would you play the album in full to get the whole story across, as it is a concept album?
Kyle: I would love to do that. We’ve done that before with previous albums. I think it just has to be the right tour for it. We basically have to be headlining in order for that to make sense, because you get a longer set and all that. I don’t know when we’ll do that exactly, but we have to at some point, for sure, I’m sure. Once we find the right tour for that, we’ll go for it.
E&D: What are you touring plans, now that Xenotaph is out?
Kyle: We have several tours locked in. You’ll see us in the States, you’ll see us in Europe, and you’ll see us in other places as well, where we’ve never been before.
E&D: You’ve toured with so many bands from The Black Dahlia Murder and Dying Fetus to Morbid Angel and Between The Buried And Me. Who have you loved touring with in the past?
Kyle: Everybody! I honestly can’t say I’ve had a bad experience with any band I’ve ever toured with. We’ve made a ton of friends doing it. I’ll shout out a couple. We’ve toured with Rivers Of Nihil multiple times. We love those guys. Would love to tour them again. A great one for us was going to Australia with Cattle Decapitation We all loved that band, that was very cool getting to do that together. There’s a lot they know who they are!
E&D: Has anyone in the band actually visited Fallujah?
Kyle: No, but that would be cool.
E&D: Who are your biggest influences as a vocalist?
Kyle: There’s a lot of for me. Before I was even making metal music, I had an indie rock band, and a lot of my favorite bands are still these alternative rock/emo rock bands in addition to death metal. Two of my favourite singers are Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance and Julian Casablancas from The Strokes, a huge influence for me. As far as metal, Mikael Åkerfeldt from Opeth is a huge one. Paul Masvidal from Cynic too, in terms of lyrics and vocal styles and all that sort of stuff, those are some of the big ones.
E&D: Can you tell us about any other music you are working on at the moment, like your solo stuff?
Kyle: Yeah, absolutely, of course, right now we’re mainly focused on the new Fallujah album but beyond that, I do have other stuff in the works. I did a video game soundtrack, basically as a solo artist, but I’m releasing it under my project, which is called Archeologist, and that should be out a little bit later this year, it’s for a game called Duelyst 2. I’m excited to release that, and, a couple of new Archeologist songs coming later this year as well, some singles that I’ve been sitting on for way too long that I’m finally cleaning up for release. The solo project has fewer deadlines and less pressure than Fallujah but it’s my project to fill in the gaps between Fallujah and release stuff as I have time, but you’ll see some new stuff later this year for me, for sure, and I know Sam has a new solo album on the way as well.
E&D: Is it cool to be able to do that when Fallujah aren’t doing anything so you’re constantly working on music?
Kyle: Yeah, that’s just what I’m used to. I consider Archaeologist as my side project, but I’ve been doing it since way before I joined Fallujah. So to me, it feels very natural, when I have the time and capacity for it, to just keep working on music that tends to take me a long time. I have some stuff that has been in the archives for years, and it kind of goes like that. I’m working on multiple things at once and getting out things when they happen to be finished. But yeah, I definitely like staying busy with that sort of stuff and being able to express myself with whatever sort of music I want, even if it doesn’t fit in with Fallujah necessarily.
E&D: What have been some of the highlights of your time with Fallujah so far?
Kyle: Honestly, it’s been really good the whole time. I mean, for me, a big life change was just before I joined Fallujah, which was in 2022, some time around there. Before that, I had never been on tour before. I had played shows, I was used to being on stage, but it was always local shows with my band or filling with other people’s bands. So the fact that now we’ve done, I don’t even know how many tours since I joined, but it’s been a lot. We played hundreds and hundreds of shows. That’s been a real life changing experience, incorporating that is a big part of my life and it turns out I love being on tour. I feel like I’m pretty well adapted to it. I would say that’s a big highlight, for sure. Just releasing these two albums that we’ve done together and doing all these amazing tours, I mean, it’s been life changing.
E&D: Have you had thoughts about new music with Fallujah?
Kyle: Yeah, because we actually finished writing this album a little over a year ago now. So even though it feels like there’s brand new stuff out, we’re actually eager to start writing again. We’ve been talking about general ideas, for sure. I could see us going a few different ways with Now this album’s out, we’re going to start meeting up and just writing music and seeing where it goes from there.
