It’s never easy when a vocalist leaves a band. When Chris “CJ” McMahon left Thy Art Is Murder towards the end of 2016, the future was uncertain. The only thing that was clear was that the band would carry on and continue to serve up savagely brutal deathcore like only they can.
A number of touring vocalists stepped in to fill the live void, and it looked like eventually the band would settle on a new permanent full-time vocalist and get to work re-establishing their identity with a new voice. Then in January of this year, McMahon rejoined the band at the Unify Festival, confirming his return to the group. It seems like the best of all possible outcomes, with McMahon returning to the band with a new commitment, and saving fans from the agony of a ‘how does the new vocalist stack up’ dread upon the release of a new album.
Dear Desolation, the band’s fourth studio album, is their most brutal yet, and features the band’s greatest recorded guitar tone to date. We caught up with guitarist Andy Marsh to talk about this new phase in the band’s journey.
“It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster,” Marsh says of the past two years. “There have been a lot of precautionary measures, a lot of changes to the strategy of touring and whatnot, so we can navigate this period and figure everything out. There’s been a lot of tippy-toeing around. There’s a lot of politics involved in being in a band, from the members of the band ourselves, to the crew who rely on you for their job, to the management, to the agents, the other bands, the fans, promoters – it’s never-ending how this industry intertwines. It’s kind of like the investment marketplace: a line-up change can cast doubt into investors’ minds and a totally arbitrary thing can affect the price. Likewise with us, with CJ out of the band it changed so many things for us. We just proceeded with caution and underplayed things quite a lot, and got through the storm.”
Marsh says the bands’ growing maturity was a big factor in helping to get through the issues that led to CJ’s departure, and in managing his return. “Absolutely. I think that’s my primary skill: navigating difficult situations and coming up with solutions. We’re all committed to each other as friends, to this little institution, to this little conglomerate that is the band, as friends, as creators, and then to the fans. To continue to deliver music that we find enjoyable and that they find enjoyable as well,” he says, “Touring is our livelihood, and it is only afforded because fans enjoy the music. And not even buying the music, with the way the industry is now. Many are generous enough to purchase our music and support us that way, but if they enjoy the music it creates the opportunity to tour. And it only exists because of that relationship between the creator and the consumer.”
The Dear Desolation sessions were marked by a professional, dedicated approach, with the band at once acknowledging yet putting aside the turmoil of the past few years. “We’re a band of people who just get on with it,” Marsh says. “Obviously there was some kind of caution and trepidation about how it was going to be, but we were making an album anyway and we would have had another vocalist had it not panned out with CJ. Obviously our preference was for him to return. We’ve said this before: we imagine him as the other guy in our band. We’ve been together for a long time and his is the voice we hear over the music, just the way you imagine how the guitar or the kick drum sounds. His voice is the one we imagine when we write. So we went in and started writing the record and had been working towards it with CJ, to make sure we were willing to accept him back and he was ready to come back and deal with the pressure and responsibility that comes with being in this band. But you never know until you get there. I mean, people bail on their weddings right before they’re about to put the ring on the finger! So if that hadn’t worked out then Nicholas Arthur, who had been singing for us in Europe, would have done it. But we got together before playing Unify and that was great, like it was meant to be. CJ truly was like a healed man.”
The primary guitar for the sessions was an Ibanez RGD2127 with an EverTune bridge. “We recorded most of the rhythm guitars in three or four days,” Marsh says. “Normally recording rhythm guitars takes forever simply because of the tuning: when you’re stacking guitars any kind of micro adjustment in the tuning is bad, so that takes a long time. Often you’re tuning guitars for four hours a day! But the EverTune made a massive difference. We did use our lucky pickup. There’s this violin or amber, honey-yellow Ibanez Prestige seven-string that they only made a few of ten or more years ago, and we used it on Hate and Holy War, but because we were using the 2127 for the extra scale length and EverTune, we had to de-solder that pickup and put it in the RGD.
“And I removed all the other electronics so it was just pickup to amp. And for the leads I have a very lucky guitar, an Ibanez JEM BRMR, a mirrored one that the TSA cracked for me. I used that for most of the leads. And I also used my touring guitar, an Ibanez RGD2127 in Lamborghini Yellow that I call the Bumblebee. It has a Seymour Duncan Pegasus in the bridge and a Sentient in the neck. I think the Pegasus is a great pickup. The midrange texture is totally different to a traditional metal pickup, and the super, super high-end is kind of lopped off, which I like because you’re going to take that off for a recording anyway. And we used a lot of cool pedals. Too many to remember!”
Release: Dear Desolation is out August 18 via Human Warfare/Rocket.
Written by Peter Hodgson
