Sauce

Samuel L. Jackson once said, “When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you … and ‘umption’.” A lot of music writers, myself included, made that embarrassing partnership with “umption” when we first heard the Roadrunner debut from Daath, thinking that a brand of metal this dynamic could only have come from somewhere like Sweden, and certainly not Atlanta. But it’s a misconception guitarist Emil Werstler can sympathise with. While stranded in a mall in Hollywood in the midst of their massive US tour, Emil spoke to me about the “Atlanta Groove”, and how The Hinderers has turned heads in more than one direction.

The album came out in March – which was fucking fantastic, by the way – what kind of reactions have their been to The Hinderers?
Well, to be one hundred percent honest, a lot of times you predict … you try to predict things. Especially from … being in a band; a musician’s standpoint. Your art gets released to the world, and a lot of the time you’ve got a lot of preconceived notions of how people are going to react to it. But it’s kind of obvious that Daath is kind of a new thing. People don’t really know. It’s kind of fifty-fifty – some people really don’t know how to take us, and a lot of people really enjoy it; they really are into it; they feel like it’s something new. A lot of the feedback we’ve been getting from other bands that we just met, or we just played with for the first time, that’s one of the main things that I hear from people – that we’re really different. Whether we’re their cup of tea or not, they definitely respect us, because we’re definitely a little different. A lot of bands have the Gothenburg sound these days; the In Flames/Maiden sound … I grew up on those bands for years, and they’re my favourites, but we’re definitely a little different harmonically-speaking, as far as the music goes. A lot of reactions have either been “I like it, I like it, it’s growing on me”, or, you know, “I really like it,” or “I don’t like it at all.” It’s pretty extreme, you know what I mean? I’m definitely happy about that, though.

A term that’s being thrown around your music is “the Atlanta groove”. Tell me – what is the Atlanta groove?
As far as Atlanta, the city that we’re from … I don’t know. Not a lot of metal bands have really come out of Atlanta. Mastodon’s from Atlanta … there’s a few bands from Atlanta … it’s got a nickname; they call it the “dirty south”, whatever. And a lot of that has to do with the rap music; there’s a lot of groove in the music. It’s really beat-oriented, you know what I mean? It’s very beat- and groove-oriented. I think it’s safe to say that we do have the blast beats, and we have a lot of double-bass parts in our music, but, in general, we try to emphasise the groove … we try to focus on, you know, having a song that has a really straight-ahead groove that makes people want to bob their heads, or bang their heads or whatever, you know? Because a lot of bands these days … they’re really extreme, and the bar’s raised so high, that a lot of these bands aren’t really focused on a simple groove, and exploring and emphasising a simple groove to music. They’re more along the lines of “faster, faster, harder, harder, louder, louder,” that kind of thing.

It’s funny – on my first listen, I actually thought you guys were Swedish or European or something.
We get that all the time! Yeah, we get that even … especially in the States. Just the other day … I can’t actually recall where they thought we were from, but most people think that we’re from another country – even here … I guess it’s just … the way the music sounds … it definitely does sound a little different, and I think people relate different sounds with different places, you know what I mean?

The Hinderers is out now.

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