Worldwide Negative Album
Krysthla Interview
UK based up and coming extreme metal band, Krysthla, released their third studio album Worldwide Negative on the 16th August. The 5-piece have, in the past, toured with Decapitated and recently opened up the main stage at Bloodstock 2019.
Throughout their albums, they have worked up to creating a sound that stands out, with hints of atmosphere fused with progressive death metal and some of the most aggressive vocals, with a cherry of cleans on top.
We caught up with the band to talk about what makes the new album the way it is, streaming compared to buying real copies and the reason why guitarist Neil should be the president of Earth. This is part 2 of a 2 part in depth interview with Krysthla.
Adi: I think it all happened when Lady Diana died, everybody started expressing grief for some reason. It never used to happen before but public crime, and public outburst of emotion seems to have been from that point on, and social media definitely dragged it forward as well
Neil: It makes it easier to become part of it, if you know what I mean. We know that suicide rates have been going crazy at the minute, and you can get to a point where you get a little bit of hysteria where people start feeding off it a bit and it becomes its own entity which you get stuck in, then you realise that everyone is miserable, everybody has had some kind of therapy and everyone’s a little bit not with it. You think “has it always been this way, how?”
Noel: We can’t cope with the pace of life
Adi: We’ve been in bands together over the years for a long time and I don’t think we would have discussed anything about this until a couple of years ago, but we’ve definitely had those discussions about suicide and the feelings of depression that you go through, and that probably wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago. Social media has its demons but, in that respect, it has definitely helped people to open up.
Neil: Technology has developed so much faster than the human body, our body only evolves a little bit with each generation but technology since ’95, like the internet just didn’t exist, but look at technology now, and the body just can’t keep up with it. But yeah, Worldwide Negative, based on everybody on earth. Earth itself just seems in a very bleak dead space at the minute and it seems to be everywhere. I think we’re living our natural lives that aren’t geared for humans and we get caught up living in it, trying to survive not realising this is probably the wrong way forwards. Psychopaths are in charge of us basically. Kill the politicians. Then I can be president, get rid of Spotify and turn 10 Downing Street into a record shop. 10 Download Street.
Adi: the top 10 Download Street.
Carl: I think the writing process is pretty much always the same, but we’ve just had a bit longer to let things evolve. The layers are a bit more this time, there are some clean vocals as well and some of the riffs that are on there were designed with that in mind. You’ve got to progress and move on and always have got to keep pushing boundaries. It’s just another expansion of what we do.
Adi: I think originally, we weren’t even gonna have the clean vocals on, but we heard some demos and stuff and it sounded right, and we all thought “yeah we like that”. We have loads of melody in the songs without the clean vocals, so it seemed like a natural progression. I think the whole album has been a natural progression. It’s just a movement and expansion on what we’ve done before, but it is a snapshot of where we were at that moment. It’s not really like a conscious effort, it’s just what happened in that time span.
Liam: it’s almost like a photo of that timeframe
Adi: For me it’s Psalm of Heartlessness, it is absolutely brutal and that’s why I love it
Liam: Mine is Grief is New Love, it is just ridiculous and when the album comes out I reckon that one is gonna be other people’s favourite as well
Carl: It’s so hard to choose because it changed all the time. To steer away from the obvious ones, I’d say probably White Castles. I just think it’s a wicked track. It breathes, it’s not just a ‘down your throat’ track, it sort of meanders.
Neil: I’d probably go with Grief as well, it’s a banger of a track that one.
Carl: I think there’s something in it for everyone. Even some of the reviews that have come out, they are also picking some of the songs
Adi: Every song on there has its own identity as well, we’re tried to make sure that we never go back to repeat ourselves if we can
Noel: 8 tracks of the same song is just crap, you know. If you wanna go and buy a Lamb of God album, you know what you are going to get every time. Some Slipknot, there are variations in it but you are always gonna get that dance beat thrown behind everything else. We don’t want to repeat, we want to do something that stands on its own merit but also doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb next to each other. They are all along the same vein but totally different personalities and work in their own right as we believe.
Liam: If you listen to the first two albums and then this one back to back you’ve got two solid hours of music there because they’re all 40 minutes long, and there isn’t any repetition on there, is there. There is loads of difference, there’s death metal on there, there’s a bit of Djent, there’s thrash, even some black metally bits
Adi: Yeah especially White Castles has definitely got some black metal bits. I would suggest we are purveyors of extreme music and we have used all of our influences over the years to weave into what we do.
Kat: I found that there are some progressive bits in the album too
Adi: There are also some progressive bits, I wouldn’t say we’re a prog band though. We have progressive tendencies, we wanna expand on the bog-standard genre and push it out, so make the melodic bits more melodic, brutal bits more brutal and just keep pushing the boundaries out.
Carl: the whole reason why we struggle to describe what we do is because we don’t pigeon hole it. The whole point of being in a band is to put an album out there that doesn’t yet exist and no one has done, so we are trying to create something new. You can’t really compare yourself to any one thing because you blend it all
Adi: I think the thing that makes bands stand out is when they’ve got an individual element to it as well, so it isn’t just a collection of everybody else, its stuff moulded together. We have got our own identity within that, all our influences are on show, but we have taken it to our own level, our own different place
Kat: So, what are your views on when a band completely changes their sound? There are many instances where people complain about that and don’t like the band’s new material simply because they haven’t stuck to their original sound.
Liam: I fully respect it, whether it is the right move or the wrong move. You’ve got to see it from the band’s perspective. Bring Me The Horizon for a start, they went from this deathcore, death metally kind of underground band, where there was no melody to it at all, but now they’re doing virtually pop rock. Look at where they are from it as well, so it was a good move for them. You’ve got to think about why would they want to do the exact same album every time? You could make the same things but from a band’s perspective it can get boring.
Adi: Bands like Metallica, you can often hear people saying: “I didn’t like them after Load and Reload, they’ve changed”. If you look back over all of their career from Kill ‘Em All, all the way through, they’ve progressed and changed throughout it. You get on board with that, I don’t like everything Metallica have done but I totally respect where they have gone with it. They are taking it their way, and being an individual, innovative band will definitely take you places and get you more fans in the end.
Carl: It also adds longevity to the band itself because if you play the same stuff and practice two or three times a week plus touring, those tracks get boring super quick. Everyone else is like “oh man I love these songs”, but they are literally dead to you because you are bored fuckless of them. You need to do something else and express another outlet in the band, it keeps it fresh for the members as well. A lot of bands, I think, call it a day a lot quicker if they don’t try and express different avenues and try different things.
Adi: You’ve got to keep open to creation. At its best, music is an art, and art is an individual expression.
Neil: We’ll be the heaviest opening band they’ve ever had basically
Noel: there’s a gun trained on that sound engineer so if he does crap…
Adi: There’s a mania going on, there’s something in the air and it’s not right, it doesn’t feel right, if you could touch it, it wouldn’t feel right, if you could smell it, it wouldn’t smell right. Something is going down and it is really disturbing. It’s hard to put your finger on it and I think Neil has tried really hard to. It definitely revolves around the fact that human beings don’t live the way they should do to be happy. It’s almost like we are becoming automatons but we still have feelings but you can’t become machine if you still have feelings. This is the ultimate kick back from being stuck in lines and being told what to do. I mean, metal itself is a big fat middle finger to the mainstream life in general
Liam: You take your influences from world events, or at least we certainly seem to in this band. The first album had its story, the second album was all from when we were out touring Europe with Decapitated and that was definitely a moment.
Neil: We remember the refugees that had come over from Syria and they were all in Macedonia. You don’t hear about it now, but it is still going on and we saw the little kids running up to us, so Peace in Our Time, our last album, was written around war and the reasons why those people were there, and the effects it had on us. Even though we are a technical, almost machine-like band, underneath it there is a human heart and there are feelings of positivity within it but you have to look for it.
Throughout their albums, they have worked up to creating a sound that stands out, with hints of atmosphere fused with progressive death metal and some of the most aggressive vocals, with a cherry of cleans on top.
We caught up with the band to talk about what makes the new album the way it is, streaming compared to buying real copies and the reason why guitarist Neil should be the president of Earth. This is part 2 of a 2 part in depth interview with Krysthla.
Considering the name of the new album, does it have a theme running through it, or a message?
Neil: Again, I’m mystified about how we have found ourselves in such a negative headspace all over the world. Everyone is miserable, everyone’s got a thing. Maybe we’ve always been miserable but never had a platform to talk about it as much like we do with social media, because now you can wake up in the morning and tell 5000 people that you’re not in a good place. whereas before, you got up, went to work and did your thing and you probably kept it to yourself. Now it’s everywhere and it kinda seems like, although it’s a good thing and it’s better to talk, there’s a certain element of feeding off it, its growing, it’s becoming a thingAdi: I think it all happened when Lady Diana died, everybody started expressing grief for some reason. It never used to happen before but public crime, and public outburst of emotion seems to have been from that point on, and social media definitely dragged it forward as well
“Technology has developed so much faster than the human body, our body only evolves a little bit with each generation but technology since ’95, like the internet just didn’t exist ”
Neil: It makes it easier to become part of it, if you know what I mean. We know that suicide rates have been going crazy at the minute, and you can get to a point where you get a little bit of hysteria where people start feeding off it a bit and it becomes its own entity which you get stuck in, then you realise that everyone is miserable, everybody has had some kind of therapy and everyone’s a little bit not with it. You think “has it always been this way, how?”
Noel: We can’t cope with the pace of life
Adi: We’ve been in bands together over the years for a long time and I don’t think we would have discussed anything about this until a couple of years ago, but we’ve definitely had those discussions about suicide and the feelings of depression that you go through, and that probably wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago. Social media has its demons but, in that respect, it has definitely helped people to open up.
Adi: the top 10 Download Street.
Compared to your previous records, how has your song writing process developed and progressed with the new album? Noel: There are more layers and things going on this time
Neil: Material is always being written, so we are always jamming bits and bobs, there are always demos floating around. This time though, because we’ve had a little bit longer between albums, the opportunity to try and fiddle a few more extra things crept in. You start putting things in and the longer you take you kind of rehash things. We’ve even scrapped a song that was meant for the album and wrote a new one, if we had kept it in it wouldn’t have quite been the record it is now with it on there.Adi: I think originally, we weren’t even gonna have the clean vocals on, but we heard some demos and stuff and it sounded right, and we all thought “yeah we like that”. We have loads of melody in the songs without the clean vocals, so it seemed like a natural progression. I think the whole album has been a natural progression. It’s just a movement and expansion on what we’ve done before, but it is a snapshot of where we were at that moment. It’s not really like a conscious effort, it’s just what happened in that time span.
Liam: it’s almost like a photo of that timeframe
Do you have a favourite track that stands out to you? If so, what makes it stand out?
Noel: It’s a bit of a different answer for everyoneAdi: For me it’s Psalm of Heartlessness, it is absolutely brutal and that’s why I love it
Liam: Mine is Grief is New Love, it is just ridiculous and when the album comes out I reckon that one is gonna be other people’s favourite as well
Neil: I’d probably go with Grief as well, it’s a banger of a track that one.
Carl: I think there’s something in it for everyone. Even some of the reviews that have come out, they are also picking some of the songs
Adi: Every song on there has its own identity as well, we’re tried to make sure that we never go back to repeat ourselves if we can
Noel: 8 tracks of the same song is just crap, you know. If you wanna go and buy a Lamb of God album, you know what you are going to get every time. Some Slipknot, there are variations in it but you are always gonna get that dance beat thrown behind everything else. We don’t want to repeat, we want to do something that stands on its own merit but also doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb next to each other. They are all along the same vein but totally different personalities and work in their own right as we believe.
Liam: If you listen to the first two albums and then this one back to back you’ve got two solid hours of music there because they’re all 40 minutes long, and there isn’t any repetition on there, is there. There is loads of difference, there’s death metal on there, there’s a bit of Djent, there’s thrash, even some black metally bits
Adi: Yeah especially White Castles has definitely got some black metal bits. I would suggest we are purveyors of extreme music and we have used all of our influences over the years to weave into what we do.
Kat: I found that there are some progressive bits in the album too
Adi: There are also some progressive bits, I wouldn’t say we’re a prog band though. We have progressive tendencies, we wanna expand on the bog-standard genre and push it out, so make the melodic bits more melodic, brutal bits more brutal and just keep pushing the boundaries out.
Carl: the whole reason why we struggle to describe what we do is because we don’t pigeon hole it. The whole point of being in a band is to put an album out there that doesn’t yet exist and no one has done, so we are trying to create something new. You can’t really compare yourself to any one thing because you blend it all
Adi: I think the thing that makes bands stand out is when they’ve got an individual element to it as well, so it isn’t just a collection of everybody else, its stuff moulded together. We have got our own identity within that, all our influences are on show, but we have taken it to our own level, our own different place
Kat: So, what are your views on when a band completely changes their sound? There are many instances where people complain about that and don’t like the band’s new material simply because they haven’t stuck to their original sound.
Liam: I fully respect it, whether it is the right move or the wrong move. You’ve got to see it from the band’s perspective. Bring Me The Horizon for a start, they went from this deathcore, death metally kind of underground band, where there was no melody to it at all, but now they’re doing virtually pop rock. Look at where they are from it as well, so it was a good move for them. You’ve got to think about why would they want to do the exact same album every time? You could make the same things but from a band’s perspective it can get boring.
Carl: It also adds longevity to the band itself because if you play the same stuff and practice two or three times a week plus touring, those tracks get boring super quick. Everyone else is like “oh man I love these songs”, but they are literally dead to you because you are bored fuckless of them. You need to do something else and express another outlet in the band, it keeps it fresh for the members as well. A lot of bands, I think, call it a day a lot quicker if they don’t try and express different avenues and try different things.
Adi: You’ve got to keep open to creation. At its best, music is an art, and art is an individual expression.
How does it feel to be back at Bloodstock this year?
Adi: Me and Carl go every year, so it’s like walking into the arena and being home. But now it’s like walking into the arena and being in our practice room, except with the biggest PA in the goddamn world. We are really looking forward to being able to open the Ronnie James Dio stage on Saturday, it is a massive honour for us and we are well excited. We are gonna absolutely kick it off.Neil: We’ll be the heaviest opening band they’ve ever had basically
Noel: there’s a gun trained on that sound engineer so if he does crap…
What have been your inspirations for writing this album?
Neil: Yeah, I dunno… Liam: hahaha “yeah let’s write a bunch of stuff and see how it turns out”Adi: There’s a mania going on, there’s something in the air and it’s not right, it doesn’t feel right, if you could touch it, it wouldn’t feel right, if you could smell it, it wouldn’t smell right. Something is going down and it is really disturbing. It’s hard to put your finger on it and I think Neil has tried really hard to. It definitely revolves around the fact that human beings don’t live the way they should do to be happy. It’s almost like we are becoming automatons but we still have feelings but you can’t become machine if you still have feelings. This is the ultimate kick back from being stuck in lines and being told what to do. I mean, metal itself is a big fat middle finger to the mainstream life in general
Liam: You take your influences from world events, or at least we certainly seem to in this band. The first album had its story, the second album was all from when we were out touring Europe with Decapitated and that was definitely a moment.
Neil: We remember the refugees that had come over from Syria and they were all in Macedonia. You don’t hear about it now, but it is still going on and we saw the little kids running up to us, so Peace in Our Time, our last album, was written around war and the reasons why those people were there, and the effects it had on us. Even though we are a technical, almost machine-like band, underneath it there is a human heart and there are feelings of positivity within it but you have to look for it.
Author Bio: Kat Skarpetowska
Staff Writer
Educated at Oxford Brookes University in the field of graphic design, live & promotional photography has been my main passion since 2016, which ventured into writing gig reviews, album reviews and interviews. I also love travelling, especially if I can catch a good show out there too!
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