Mortuary Spawn is a killer death metal band from England who recently released their crushing debut EP "Spawned From The Mortuary" which is an addictive blast of brutality from start to finish. The following interview was conducted with the band’s guitarist, Jack.
Greetings! How’s everything going in England? Please tell us how Mortuary Spawn was conceived and what the band is all about.
Hi Jim - cheers for the interview! All’s well here, or as close to well as it can be these days. On the welcome cusp of having shows return even as cases of the virus seem to be skyrocketing, so wouldn’t be surprised if that decision gets reversed, but on the whole we are happy and healthy.
Mortuary Spawn started as an idea myself and Ben (drums) had many years ago, shortly after a band we were in called Bong Goblin ended. The initial plan was for Ben to send across some mad sounding drums and I would come up with some riffs and send them back, working that way as we were based in different cities at the time, but that never ended up happening, mostly because of my ineptitude using recording software! In the meantime I had started writing some songs with some friends more local to London under the name Deadly Intentions, but as that project kind of dissolved, I started travelling up to Leeds on spare weekends and jamming with Ben with more purpose, and at that point you could probably say Mortuary Spawn was properly spawned. Shortly after that Ben (bass) joined, followed by George on vocals, and all the while we were searching for a capable shredder who eventually emerged in Joe after he watched our debut show supporting Demilich on Valentine’s Day 2020. Then the pandemic hit and although it really scuppered our plans (and everyone else’s!) in hindsight it gave Joe a chance to catch up and add some extra flavour to the EP, which was eventually recorded by Ben at our practice space earlier in the year.
As to what we’re about - nothing more than trying to write some gross Top of the Pops death metal and having a good time while we’re at it!
As we all know, the underground is saturated with bands and competition is strong. Do you feel it’s important to leave one’s mark with a quality output, as opposed to releasing some sub-par material that will soon be forgotten in time?
The obvious answer is yes, but it depends on what you’re trying to achieve! If that’s immortality through music, then for sure, crack on with writing a masterpiece. I think I’ve been in over 15 bands, and I’d say most of them would be classed as sub-par or forgettable unless you were directly involved in them, but playing music isn’t a popularity contest for many people, or at least it needn’t be when you’re playing this style. It helps not to lose sight of the fact that you need to entertain people with quality songs if you want to play live a lot, but as long as we continue to write music that is interesting and fun to us, that is the key thing.
Your debut EP “Spawned From The Mortuary” ripped my head off. Raw, vicious, and well-executed Death Metal. Can you tell us a little bit about the sound you were after, including some details about the whole writing process? Will there be more of the same with future releases?
Cheers! There was no foundational plan or guiding principles when it came to writing these songs, and because some of the riffs have been bouncing around in my head for the best part of a decade before being upgraded massively by the full band’s input, there’s been the chance for a lot of revisions and improvements along the way. I’ve got some videos of some of the riffs that made it on to the EP from 2013, and the hardcore influence was a lot stronger then, sounding more like All Out War or Stampin’ Ground. I’m glad it’s ended up fully death metal sounding, and that’s largely down to the combined talents/capabilities/backgrounds of everyone in the band. Ben (Southern, bass) is a maniac for grind with the nastiest tone in the business, while Joe (Kerry, guitar) is successfully learning Stabwound by Necrophagist at the moment, so I think playing to our strengths while working towards a common goal is probably the reason we sound like we do. Going forward the songwriting has started to be a lot more collaborative, but I still do most of my portion of things at home first, as I can obsess over note choice for hours on end without wasting anyone else’s time (bar my own) that way, before bringing it to Ben (Jones, drums) to demo/learn and then to the practice room. Expect pretty much more of the same from us in the future, which is essentially our take on classic death metal - not enormously original but not entirely hackneyed either.
I have to admit, the black and white artwork for the EP is just awesome and gives off a sort of cult vibe that fits your music. What is the idea behind it and who is the artist?
The original concept was George’s and it was drawn up by the excellent Tombtower, someone we know from their time playing in Stiff Meds before relocating to Berlin. The brief was pretty short - we wanted a corridor filled with a trail of chaos leading to a set of double doors behind which you would not want to go. Tom ended up going one step further and actualising this horrific monstrosity that you see on the cover, so there’s less left to the imagination but it’s certainly better for it and we’re extremely happy with his work!
Do ridiculous boomer sentiments like “metal is dead” hold any significance to you?
Haha - absolutely not! Great metal musicians keep dying, which is obviously terrible, and we’ll most likely never return to a time of stadium filling metal bands, but any which way you look at that statement, it’s a pretty stupid and blinkered one.
Has metal become too soft and watered-down? Are people too sensitive nowadays? How do you feel about censorship?
As far as I’m aware, no! If anything, metal mirrors the population at large - it has spread, split into smaller and smaller fractions, evolved for the better and for the worse, argued with itself, become many new things and preserved old ideas too. So if you go looking for something that seems soft and watered down to you, you could probably find it easier than ever before, but that ease applies to more orthodox shit (rendering the concept of obscure somewhat less earned) and other much more unpalatable ends of the spectrum too. I reckon a lot of the people you see pumping out inflammatory sentiments regarding censorship, or a perceived culture war, or trying to reduce the world to binary terms like left and right when it suits them to do so - people like Nergal from Behemoth, for instance - are smart people who are too comfortable in their own views to continue to evolve or listen to other experiences that contradict their own. Penny Rimbaud of Crass is someone else who because of their own well established world view, just sounds like an idiot these days. It stinks of laziness and intellectual stagnation, it sucks. More than trying to censor others' views, I think we all need to practice a bit more compassion and spend a lot less time trying to garner truths about the world from warped, decontextualised online interactions. Honestly, is there anything more depressing than a group of older men with stupid avatars banding together in a space they dominate to convince some new teenage black metal fan that they are somehow wrong or a poser to bring up the issue of outright racism in the music that they are encountering for the first time? It’s a hateful playground where it’s easy to get sucked into the wrong crew for quite some time before you’re able to come to your own (hopefully palatable and respectful) conclusions. Metal and the wider music world will always be a place where ideas can be discussed and learned and an avenue for expression, but they definitely aren’t the places where they should be finalised or taken as law.
What are some of your favourite albums of all time and which bands influenced your sound?
Most of my faves dwell outside of the kind of relevant levels of heavy, but all of Sepultura’s classics, Doom - Rush Hour of the Gods, Entombed - Clandestine, Extreme Noise Terror - Phonophobia, Carcass + Obituary + Death in general, Framtid, Bolt Thrower, Merciless - The Awakening, Aura Noir, Black Breath - Slaves Beyond Death, After The Bombs - Relentless Onslaught, Celtic Frost (big time) and Dystopia are all firm favourites of mine who fit both categories and have seeped in to the Mortuary Spawn sound somehow!
Can you give us some details about working with labels like Brutal Cave Productions, Chamber of Emesis, and Sewer Rot Records? How has the response been so far towards your music?
Great on all three counts - Chamber of Emesis is George’s venture with the other two in Vomitorium and we thought 50 copies with them would be enough for a first run, but we’ve got through a fair few extra copies now. It was only a matter of days after putting the EP up on bandcamp until Brutal Cave (Portugal) and Sewer Rot (Southern California) got in contact with offers that worked for all parties, as in no unreasonable obligations, no expectation of riches, but plenty of enthusiasm for the music, and although there’s crazy delays with production worldwide at the moment, you should be able to buy Mortuary Spawn stuff from both of them by the time this is published!
The response has been pretty great and more than we expected, and since then it’s been a pleasure finding out a bit more about the current landscape of death metal through the support we’ve got from strangers in the underground. I didn’t realise death metal was having such a big moment! I might have come across them anyway, but now I’m listening to 2021 releases by bands like Sněť, Morbific and Cerebral Rot and thinking, shit, these guys are very very good and we’re going to have to be very very good too.
That will be the end of our interview, thanks for your time! The last rotten words are yours.
If you’re in the UK, come to any of the shows listed below, and give us a shout on mortuaryspawn@gmail.com so we can come play in your living room/alldayer/generator show/megafest/miserable town, we really would like that. Thanks again, Jim!
LEEDS 24/07/21 w/ Discharge, Pest Control, Ona Snop, Frisk + loads more @ Boom
LONDON 02/09/21 w/ Celestial Sanctuary, Slimelord + Vacuous @ the Black Heart
LONDON 11/09/21 Chimpyfest w/ Varukers, Active Minds, Sulk + loads more @ New Cross Inn
LEEDS 14/10/21 w/ Foetal Juice, Basement Torture Killings + Ona Snop @ Boom
MANCHESTER 16/10/21 w/ Wode, Live Burial + Sump @ the Star and Garter