“The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.”
New York City’s Imperial Triumphant has never been the easy choice. Layered, brutal, far removed from convention and steeped in intrigue and mythos, the avant-garde blackened death metal three-piece lives on the fringes of the metal space, where fans tired of copy-and-paste blast beats and mascara-clad heartthrobs eagerly embrace their weird and wonderful alternative.
For guitarist/vocalist Zachary Ezrin, who founded Imperial Triumphant 20 years ago, the nuanced monoliths of the metropolis he’s called home his entire life continue to inspire. From the sleaze of the ‘70s and ‘80s and the rise of Wall Street to the booming cultural hub of the present day, NYC is part siren song, part madman’s cackle as the backdrop to the band’s highly anticipated opus, Goldstar.
“We took inspiration from what’s going on in 42nd Street in the 1970s, that sort of darkness or 1929 with the building of the Chrysler building, or the 1960s cigarette commercials and the boom of the Mad Men on Madison Avenue. All this shit is kind of inspiring and then certain characters, certain buildings. There’s so much to explore,” Ezrin shares during a sit-down with Metal Injection. “The well has yet to dry up, still. I have not found myself unable to find inspiration yet.”
Armed with influences ranging from art and architecture to the films of Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick, Goldstar is elegant and epic, never relenting on fire or ferocity while still somehow serving as the band’s most accessible album to date.
Clocking in at a trim 36 minutes, with only one track – the album’s unapologetic closer “Industry of Misery” cracking the seven-minute mark – Goldstar was shaped through years of touring alongside the likes of Behemoth and Carcass and renowned festival slots on Hellfest and Brutal Assault. If necessity is the mother of invention, this stripped-down and pure version of a band that has never skimped on creativity cuts the fat to its beating heart.
“I think putting time restrictions on how long a song can be will push you creatively and make you cut all the fat and anything even this good but not good enough. And so you’re left with a more straightforward song and if you do all the songs like that, then the whole record feels a little more punchy and lean,” Ezrin explains.
“It’s also like a good creative challenge as a band. It’s not our first album and we’re trying to challenge ourselves and do something different. It’s so easy to write a nine-minute epic. It’s not easy to condense it down into four and a half minutes. That’s the fun challenge.”
Juxtaposing eclectic heavy hitters like “Gomorrah Nouveaux” and “Pleasuredome” with a manic 47-second grindcore-inspired gut punch in “NEWYORKCITY” (featuring Yoshiko Ohara of Bloody Panda) Goldstar stands as the final offering from Colin Marston‘s (Gorguts, Krallice) Menegroth Studio in Queens.
“We were the last band to record in Colin Marston‘s studio at Menegroth. We were supposed to record longer, however, we ended up getting an offer to tour Abbath. So you have to say yes to that, of course. We end up basically recording the whole thing in five days,” Ezrin recalls of the eye-watering sessions.
“We’re pretty good at this sort of thing, and we worked with Colin, who’s very good, and he understands what we want and he gets us. So there’s that sort of he’s doing it before I can even think it, and that saves some time. And we also spend a lot of time rehearsing months and months before, so that when we go in the studio and record the basic tracking live we’re getting it done in like two takes, three takes.”
Peppered with Easter Eggs (yes, you might just be hearing A Clockwork Orange/Barry Lyndon type “ven diagram” midway through “Hotel Sphinx”) Ezrin shares that “Nothing’s off the table … We’re not trying to hide it or anything like that, it’s more just like wearing our influences on our sleeves and taking it and bringing it into our universe.
“It’s a snapshot of the band,” he adds of the record as a whole. “There are thematical things that we are messing around with on every record and there’s an overarching theme to what we’re doing and with this one there definitely was. Cigarette advertisements I thought were a cool jumping-off point. Obviously all the songs are about different things, they’re not tied together or anything like that, but at the same time, we do put a lot of thought and energy into the track listing and the order in which you experience the music and making sure that it’s a dynamic and worthwhile journey.”
That Goldstar journey took Ezrin, bassist Steve Blanco and drummer Kenny Grohowski to the top of the Chrysler Building, with the trio becoming the first metal band to perform atop the iconic structure.
“It was Francis Ford Coppola up there, then Imperial Triumphant,” Ezrin joked, explaining that the legendary director shot scenes from his much-maligned Megalopolis at the Chrysler Building directly before them.
“I have a contact there who was a friend and helped us make the whole thing happen. I think it’s a pretty classic case of following your dreams,” he adds. “Anyone watching this who’s wondering how do I achieve my goals? How do I get what I want? The most crucial piece of advice I can ever give is the power of the follow-up email. It’s the most powerful tool in the arsenal.”
Continuing a recent hot streak of high-profile collaborations on their albums – legendary drummers Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Mr. Bungle) and Tomas Haake (Meshuggah) lend their talents to Goldstar – Imperial Triumphant have held nothing back on their sixth studio effort.
And while the songs are tighter and more digestible, don’t expect any easy answers, Ezrin cautions. The best trips are sometimes the hardest.
“It’s just more interesting not to spoonfeed the listener everything,” he says of the band’s lyrical content, drawing a far-out parallel to the fan-favourite and unbelievably frustrating video game series Dark Souls. “I loved all the Dark Souls games, but what really inspired me was there’s a story within the game, but they never tell you what it is. You just kind of have to figure it out. And I think that’s really clever. I like that. It’s interactive. I have to go out and seek the answers myself and I think that’s something I also like in my music that it’s sort of hidden messages and hidden meanings or just discovering what it’s about and it can be any level.
“Our fans, they’re smart. People who listen to our music are gonna draw their own conclusions. People come to me and tell me what they think our songs are about and I enjoy that a lot more. That’s way more interesting,” he shares. “I think that kind of makes it more of an interactive listen. Even if we can go back to Stanley Kubrick, he’s a great example of a lot of his films have a story and a plot that you can follow but then there’s an underlayer and then one below that and one below. And It’s up to you if you want to explore all that. And I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to achieve with Goldstar. Give the listener a more forgiving, more palatable avant-death experience and then if you want to dive deeper, you get your PADI license and you dive down.”
Imperial Triumphant‘s new record Goldstar is out on March 21. Get it here.
Source: metalinjection.net
