Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Mark Morton, the guitarist for Lamb Of God, discussed the band’s impending tenth studio album, “Into Oblivion,” which will be released on March 13 on Epic, in a recent interview with Craig Reynolds, the drummer for Stray From The Path, on The Downbeat Podcast, as per Blabbermouth. When asked if he and his bandmates intentionally chose to revive parts of Lamb Of God’s previous sound on the new album, Mark responded as follows.
So I’ll tell you, and we all come into these things with our own perspective and mindset. Lamb Of God is very collaborative, and there’s no meeting before we get going about what our premise is gonna be or anything like that. But I do think collectively we were having conversations about, ‘Well, what is it that we’ve gotten away from?’ Not because anything was necessarily wrong, because some of the more recent work we were feel really excited about — ‘Ditch’ is a monster, from the last album; we play that almost every night. And ‘Resurrection Man’ — those are all new songs that are big in the live show and we’re into. ‘Memento Mori’ was massive. But it’s, like. what have we gotten away from that was really at the genesis of this thing that was really the cornerstones that we built it on?
So two things happened for me. And I don’t remember exactly where we were in the writing process, but we did a tour that was the ‘Ashes Of The Wake’ 20-year tour. So that had us, and me, going into those songs and learning them inside out. Some of those songs — I think a couple of the songs we’d never played live. I don’t know the stats on that, but certainly most of them we hadn’t played in a long time. So I was digging into those songs. So when you learn something like that and rehearse it so much, you start to understand the patterns that you’re not really… ‘Oh, I don’t really do that move anymore.’ You know what I mean? ‘But I’m doing it now ’cause I’m learning this thing that’s 20 years old.’ And kind of jumping off of that, I also — rather than go back and listen to ‘[As The] Palaces [Burn]’ or go listen to ‘[New American] Gospel’, which I’ve listened to this records from time to time, just [for] nostalgic [reasons]… So, for me, I decided to kind of start going back to the music that I was listening to when we wrote those records. So I started going back and listening to The Haunted and to At The Gates and to early Meshuggah and all that kind of Swedish stuff that I was so excited about at that point in time. That The Haunted ‘Made Me Do It’ record, I was burning that thing down. It’s so good. And ‘Slaughter Of The Soul’ [by] At The Gates, that’s just an absolute classic record. So [I was] just kind of going back there and re-tapping back into my excitement around those bodies of work and then allowing that to inspire what I was doing when I was picking up the guitar again.
Mark went into further detail about how Swedish experimental extreme metal band Meshuggah has inspired him.
‘Destroy Erase Improve’, that’s one of my favorite metal records, for sure. Some of the stuff, they get so abstract that I don’t… I’m probably impatient as a listener for some of the stuff that they’ve evolved into. And that’s not a criticism. It just means for me, the sort of essence of the basic groove that ‘Destroy Erase Improve’ has, that weird groove with an extra angle but it still grooves, that was a big influence.
Morton also discussed the accomplishments of Art Cruz, the drummer for Lamb Of God, who officially replaced Chris Adler seven years ago. Before joining Lamb Of God as their new drummer in July 2019, Cruz, who had previously performed with Prong and Winds Of Plague, covered for Adler on a number of the band’s concerts. Mark responded as follows when asked if Cruz “felt more comfortable to spread his wings” this time around as opposed to on 2020’s self-titled effort and 2022’s “Omens.”
I think he felt more comfortable. This is Art’s third record So, the self-titled record, I think there was probably a little bit of more intense focus on the drum parts, just because we had such a large body of work with Chris, and that sound, it’s the Lamb Of God sound. So to change drummers and have the drums be drastically different didn’t feel — it didn’t feel right for us, it didn’t feel fair to anybody, including the listeners.
The beauty of Art being our drummer is he is such a big fan of the body of work of Lamb Of God, and that’s become a resource for us when we’re songwriting, because we can get a perspective from Art that we don’t have ourselves. He can say things like, ‘Well, Lamb Of God in 2009 would’ve done this.’ And we trust that perspective, because we know how important the band’s music was to him coming up and how formative it was for him. So he’s in a unique position to be able to honor that sound and also run with it, which he has done. So I think on the self-titled record, the drums were treated a little more conservative in terms of making big sweeping changes stylistically. And then over the course of the ‘Omens’ record and now ‘Into Oblivion’, you see that sort of evolving, as it should.
