BRODY UTTLEY Breaks Down All Five RIVERS OF NIHIL Albums

Over 15 years and half a dozen albums into their careers, Pennsylvania’s Rivers of Nihil – Metal Injection‘s Artist Of The Month – are far from done with their progy tech death sorcery on their long-awaited self-titled record. 

An amalgam of the changes that have brought the band to present day, Rivers of Nihil – available May 30 through Metal Blade – is hard, heavy and overwhelmingly epic in its scale and scope, a testament to the maturation of founding members Brody Uttley and Adam Biggs, drummer Jared Klein and rhythm guitarist Andy Thomas.

Uttley sat down with Metal Injection for a deep dive into the band’s discography, breaking down major thoughts, themes and insights into each of the five Rivers of Nihil records.

The Conscious Seed Of Light

Yeah, I think that record, the first record, The Conscious Seed of Light, I think that was kind of just us trying to figure out what kind of band we wanted to be. A lot of the songs that ended up being on that record had parts on it that were written before Rivers of Nihil even existed. Like it was stuff that was written in 2007 in our old bands and stuff. And kind of just like piled everything that we had ever written as a band together to come up with those 10 songs that are on that record. We had only really done eps up until that point, so it was like what, 10 songs, that’s insane. It seemed like an insane chore to us at the time, so a lot of the stuff that’s on that record, some of it was written pretty close to the time that it was recorded and that other stuff was written five or six years beforehand.

So there are songs on that record that are much stronger than others, in my opinion. Like, I think “Rain Eater” is a strong one. That’s one of the better songs on the record, in my opinion. Same thing with “Soil and Seed”. I mean, “Soil and Seed” is like the only song from that record that we will still occasionally play live. So I think that the first record was really just an exercise in us figuring out what we wanted to sound like. Did we want to be like a hyper-tech band? Did we want to be like a more atmospheric kind of post-mealty sort of death metal band? Did we wanna be like more like Morbid Angel kind of vein sort of band? We didn’t know. There are so many different influences on that record that it’s a little A.D.D at times, I think.

I haven’t listened to it in a long time, but to me, now, I just kind of see it as the real experimentation phase for the band. Everything was new, you know? We just signed with a label. We had never made a record, and we’re making a record with Erik Rutan. We used to watch the Cannibal Corpse DVDs and be like, man, that would be cool to like record an album with Erik one day, and here we are doing it. It was all so new, so we really didn’t know what we were doing during that time. We were just trying to figure it out. So I think that that first record was really just us trying to figure out what we were going to do, really. 

Monarchy

Yeah, I think that Monarchy is like the first record of ours that I kind of consider the real start of the current version of Rivers of Nihil. Our original guitarist, Joh, founding member, you know, me, Jon, Jake, Ron and Adam all started the band. Jon ended up leaving the band shortly before we finished writing Monarchy, or I guess actually towards the beginning of writing Monarchy, he ended up leaving the band and starting Outer Heaven.

Monarchy was a real proving stage for me as a songwriter because we lost Jon. He wrote a lot, and I wrote a lot. He wrote maybe like four songs on the first record or something like that, and I wrote the rest. He wrote a decent amount and losing him, I was very nervous, like shit, can we still do this? And I was really getting into recording, like home recording at the time and learning a lot about audio and stuff. That kind of coincided at a perfect time with us having to write a new record, minus a guitar player really.

So Monarchy is the record where I think I really kind of started to find this sound that Rivers still carries with it into the modern age of the band. That was the first record that I recorded guitar and bass for. I just recorded the bass. Biggs played the bass obviously, but did it at my home studio and then mixed it with Carson and Grant at Atrium Audio, but that was like the first record that we did that was kind of like the modern version of what we do now, because we still do it that way. I record guitar and bass here.

Then we go to Atrium Audio and do mixing, drums, and vocals with Carson and Grant. And we’ve been doing that ever since Monarchy. But yeah, Monarchy was the first record where that big atmospheric sound that I think is kind of synonymous with Rivers of Nihil, the big atmospheric progressive thing, really kind of like took shape on that record.

That’s the record that I consider to be our truest form, like a tech death album, you know? It was very intentional. That was an album where I was personally listening to a lot of tech death and a lot of just like really heavy death metal. And everything that I was listening to was inspiring me. And yeah, that record is a proggy tech death record really, it’s got some of like the most insanely technical stuff that we’ve ever done. But that kind of atmospheric, melodic progressive thing that we developed even further on Owls really kind of first took shape on Monarchy.

So yeah, I consider Monarchy like the first real complete from beginning to end album that was like a complete thought, you know? Cause we wrote all of that material in a year’s time, whereas like on the first record, that record was written over like five or six years. So Monarchy was like basically one complete thought, and the first time that we had ever done something like that. So I kind of consider that the true start of things for us as a band, at least as far as things being connected to the modern era of the band. 

Where Owls Know My Name

Yeah, well, I can only speak for myself, but as far as the music goes, I think I had a real kind of paradigm shift in between Monarchy and Owls. I started listening to a lot more prog, like I got really, really into Steven Wilson‘s album Hand. Cannot. Erase and that album like blew my fucking mind. Like I remember that album came out shortly after we finished recording Monarchy, I think and like when I heard that album, I listened to it over and over, and I was just like, man. There’s so much stuff on this record that I wish I had known about when we were writing Monarchy, because we hadn’t even released Monarchy at that point yet, and that record for some reason just blew my mind so hard.

I don’t know, it just kind of broke my brain open, and it like switched me from mostly being like a death metal guy. I mean, I listened to prog my whole life, but not in a huge, huge way. I like Pink Floyd and King Crimson and Rush and Yes, and stuff. But I never really dove deep. And for whatever reason, that one Steven Wilson record was like, whoa, so we could do whatever we wanted on a record. We could have a 260 beats per minute atmospheric death metal song next to a like synth wave song with a Miles Davis-esque trumpet solo next to acoustic ballads. The whole prog way of thinking, really doing whatever you want. I know it seems silly to like not have thought like, oh, like I can just do whatever I want.

With the title track on Owls in particular, I remember when I was writing that song, I had like the whole intro of that song up until when it gets heavy, the first chorus, I had that whole intro and I think I wrote, I was playing around with like a delay pedal or something. And I was trying to write like a post-rock song, something that you would hear Explosions in the Sky or This Will Destroy You or Caspian or some band like that. I was just trying to do something like that, and I thought there’s no way that Rivers would ever use this. This is way too pretty and then once once I came up with that chorus, I was like oh shit.

That was a real big moment of realization for us as a band and for me as a songwriter because that’s one of the first songs that we ever wrote that like didn’t have any blast beats in it, I know that sounds hilarious. The working title for that song was “No Blast Beats” because it was the first song that we ever wrote with no blast beats in it and we thought like man they’re gonna hate this, we’re just gonna get shit on so hard, they are gonna think that we suck and and it ended up being like the biggest song we’ve ever released.

That whole album is such a strange thing to me because once we put it out it just kind of happened and all of a sudden people cared about the band and all of a sudden we were selling shows out and stuff. It’s just like we totally did not expect any of that because we just thought we’re making a record that we didn’t really give a shit what anyone thought, which I guess is kind of like a good thing to do. We totally just didn’t pay attention to any expectations from ourselves or from anyone. And we’re just like, let’s just do whatever the hell we want. And we did. And it worked for some reason. And ever since then, yeah, that was kind of the record that like tipped most people off to who we were. 

The Work

It’s an album that could have only been written when it was written. I mean, most of it was written during COVID, like during lockdowns and stuff. Had kind of like endless time to work on this record, which I’m assuming part of the reason why it ended up being such an enormous and long album was just because we just had so much time to just like tweak stuff and keep writing and all this stuff. But really, I think when we saw how Owls went, I was saying how when we wrote Owls we kind of just ignored people’s expectations completely and just did it for ourselves, totally. We looked at that and we were like, well, let’s do that again and take it even further in a different direction, you know?

We kind of looked at moments on Owls, the stranger moments on Owls, like say like “Terrestria III: Wither”, for example, or like the closer “Capricorn/Agoratopia” on Owls. Some of the deeper cuts on the record, and we wanted to explore those sounds a little more. The Work, to me at least, it’s not an industrial album, industrial metal album, but it just has this kind of overall industrial sheen to it, and I think a lot of that was because of, like I said, looking at the stranger moments on Owls like “Terrestria III”, which is a synth-wavy dark industrial kind of tune, and wanting to like explore that sound more. We wanted to just make this a massive prog album that was just like larger than life. I mean, some of the songs on that album have like 90 tracks of like guitar and synth. At times like that album, it feels like it just ventures too far at times.

It’s really an album … I don’t know if I would recommend taking acid and listening to it in a dark room, but if you wanted to, you could. It’s like a headphone record. It’s an album to listen to in headphones in a dark room and just trip out. It’s a beautiful album at times and like a really fucked up freaky album at other times. It’s just like a real true experimental album for us i think, and like i said you know in hindsight like i think there’s some songs on that record that they’re too long there’s some sections that there’s just too much going on you can’t even tell what’s going on at certain points and like there’s moments that are like what? This is like a Guns N’ Roses song or a big nine-minute acoustic ballad. There’s so much like what?! On that record, which, to be fair, I think scared a lot of people off when it first came out.

I think a lot of people were kind of expecting like an Owls 2.0. We were very aware of that. We knew that’s what people wanted, and we didn’t want to give it to them. We just wanted to go in as far of a strange direction away from that as we possibly could. And I think there are some songs on The Work that sound like they could have been part of a continuation of Owls. Like, I think “The Void From Which No Sound Escapes” definitely sounds like a continuation of the Owls sound, but I mean, there are other songs in that record. The opener, “The Tower (Theme from ‘The Work’)”, it’s like almost like a Nine Inch Nails meets Muse kind of song. And “Dreaming Black Clockwork” is just this fucked up like Strapping Young Lad kind of tune and then “Wait” is like a lo-fi Faith No More kind of song.

It’s such a strange blend of influences, The Work, but I mean, for that reason, though, that is an album that I will always look back on as just such an incredible creative time because it was during COVID. It was going out and just experimenting with stuff that I never experimented with before like field recordings and making drum loops out of sounds that I recorded in industrial warehouses and the kitchen door slamming, stuff that you would hear on like a Björk or a Radiohead album, but in a death metal context, you know what I mean? Just really fucking around with sound is a dumb way to say it, but that’s really what was going on.

So yeah, it’s an album that I think shocked a lot of our fans, scared some of them off, but since we’ve put that album out, a lot of people who initially were kind of taken aback by how different it was from Owls have kind of come around to it. And I see Owls and The Work kind of discussed together a lot. Kind of like, when you’re talking about Pink Floyd, most of the time people are talking about like, Dark Side of the Moon versus The Wall, and it’s like a similar kind of duality.

I think for a long time, I thought that they were albums that were really not connected at all. But now, the further down the road I get, the more I realize that Owls was kind of the call, and The Work was the response. 

Rivers Of Nihil

It’s cool to have some time and space to have kind of viewed those first four records and kind of examined how they interact with one another. I think that that had a lot to do with, like I was discussing previously, how this new records turned out, just kind of looking at those first four records and seeing how they interacted with each other and what the high points were and what really worked and what we really didn’t and then kind of taking that information and playing to the strengths of us as a band and what we’ve done so far. 

This record is kind of like an amalgamation of everything that we’ve done thus far, plus something extra, I guess. On this record, at least instrumentally, which is kind of like my department, now that we have four albums behind us, I found myself kind of reflecting on the last 10 years or 12 years or whatever it’s been. Looking at stuff on all of our records that I feel has really worked, what hasn’t worked, what songs really click live both with us as like a live band playing together and as well as the audience and kind of like really looked at our past discography as a big influence on this new record, more than anything, I would say.

I’m always listening to music. So that stuff always works its way into whatever it is that I’m working on. But I really feel like examining what we’ve done and what I think we’re the best at, what our strengths are and really kind of playing to them and bringing them into this new era of the band and kind of trying to take what we’re already good at and push it even further. That was really kind of like my goal on this record, because I think that on the last record, The Work, it was really an album that is more of like a film score than anything. It’s just this huge, huge record, an hour and 10 minutes long.

It’s like kind of like our The Wall or something like that. That was very intentional. You know we’re huge Pink Floyd fans. Just the big like theatrical kind of album thing has always been something that we’ve always wanted to do, so doing that on The Work, it was important that we made that record because I think we had to prove to ourselves that we could do something like that.

But on this record, it’s very like cliche to say, but we really wanted to kind of get back to basics in a lot of ways and focus on the core elements of the band like guitar, bass, drums, vocals, get all that stuff really cooking and then kind of add in the extra stuff after the fact; the saxophones and the synthesizers and any kind of additional orchestration that we wanted to put in there after we had these songs that were already really heavy hitting just with the kind of core elements of the live band.

Yeah, it was really an album of reflection, I guess, and like I said, having Andy along for the writing of this stuff and being able to bounce ideas off him and have him contribute ideas that would maybe inspire me and vice versa was really awesome. And then having Adam take over on lead vocals. Since Adam‘s always written all of the lyrics, it was cool to see him kind of be able to perform the stuff that he was writing in a way that he had never really been able to perform them before, because before he was like writing stuff, but kind of through the lens of knowing that somebody else was going to be performing it. So it just has a different feel, but now he’s writing what he’s going to be singing, and he definitely brought some moves to the table vocally that we didn’t have before.

So yeah, it was a test of an album to write because it was such a big shift, but I think ultimately we had a blast making it, and I think it’s some of our strongest material to date. And it’s somewhat of a retrospective on what we’ve done, but not in a sad way. We’re just going to do this again. It’s a refreshed kind of perspective on stuff that we know we’re really good at as a band.