Sydney’s Thy Art Is Murder a a band that isn’t afraid of a bit of controversy, their recently released politically charged video for their single ‘Holy War’ (and the album’s title track) garnered a lot of attention for its visually graphic imagery.
Not long after the record release they were banned by Disney from performing at their venues during an upcoming North American tour alongside Parkway Drive. The just recently following the recent Australian Political spill the band designed a new merch item to celebrate the departure of Tony Abbott which you can check out here.
Amidst all this, the death-core five piece have announced and Australian tour, so we decided to catch up with the band and focus what the these guys do best and that’s produce some of the best heavy music coming out of this country right now. We chatted with the band’s Andy Marsh who gave us a track by track run down of Thy Art’s stellar LP Holy War. Check it you below.
Absolute Genocide
Last song to be written for the album. I wrote it all by myself in one hour – except for the breakdown at the very end. I didn’t know what to do and Will [producer Will Putney] was like, “You need to put something on the end here.” So I came in, sat down on the chair in the control room, he handed me the guitar, and I was like “Just press play and I’ll come up with something.”
Then I played the rhythm and that’s the end of the song. I was like “that will do” and he was like, “Yeah, sweet.” That was the end of the album being done. That’s how nonchalant it was. “That will do,” and he goes “Yeah, sweet,” which is hilarious – because he’d been nagging me “Can you just come in here and write something?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, there it is.”
The song has a fairly generic, dystopian look on things.
Light Bearer
Has the oldest piece of music I believe was written for Holy War. I think it’s the chord mantra at the beginning and I think Sean came up with that, I’m gonna say like three years ago. And we weren’t necessarily like, “Yes, we have to do something with this,” but our A&R guy at our record label Nuclear Blast, Monty, became obsessed with it. I don’t know if it was because it was catchy or if it’s just because it’s the only piece of music we’d given him in like two years, so he’d just been listening to it.
It came together in the studio. Sean built a third or a half of it over the last two years. It was one of those ones where you started it and then you just left it and it’s hard to go back and get motivated to finish things until you have to. So that one came together in the studio. And the lyrics are about accepting that man is one with his own spirituality and people have to accept that in order to move forward and can’t blame all the good and wrong in the world on deities. And accepting that in Laveyan Satanism, Satan is inside of man himself and that he’s his own god so when you accept that man is one with the fire at the centre of the Earth – that being Satan or hell – that you can see rebirth through it. So that’s the little lyric at the end of the song.
It’s also a reverse playback kind of of the narration of the birth of Christ – if you read that phrase backwards. We do a lot of stuff like that where we play on bible stuff.
Holy War
The title track. Sean Delander rolled his ankle while playing soccer in Italy against some kids a year and a half ago and he could not play soccer anymore with us and he got sad, so he stormed off hobbling with his poorly sprained ankle and sat in this tiny backstage in Italy and wrote the lead line that starts off the beginning of the song – which is hilarious.
The song is like a cyclical play on a book – The Satanic Verses written by Salman Rushdie about 20-something years ago and the idea behind the song was to create a piece of art that might make fundamentalist or extremist Muslims attempt to assassinate the band, because that would be ironic because the song is about Muslims trying to assassinate someone else for creating some art. I find hilarity in irony,
even if it is kind of dark.
And then some of the lines in the song like “The Army of Guardians,” is an actual Iranian army, whose only job is to uphold Sharia law outside the bounds of common lay, which is kind of sickening that that still happens.
Coffin Dragger (feat Winston McCall)
Whenever I say that I imagine the little alien robot out of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy walking across the universe dragging coffins behind him. That one is more melodic. Sean had two riffs – it basically has two riffs in it – for a while and they’re both kind of circle pit riffs and it was this weird thing where we’re like “You have to have different kinds of riffs,” and I can’t remember if it was him that eventually said “Fuck it” or Will, where they were like, “Fuck it, let’s just have a circle pit, and then have a quick break, and then have another circle pit riff.” And so far that’s what’s happened across Europe.
We wrote the lyrics and the part was very melodic and I remember we were listening back to C.J.’s lyrics he’d done on the song that day and was like, “Yeah it sounds great C.J. and I don’t want to bum you out but I just think that Winston from Parkway would be way better over this.” And then he sat there for a second and I thought he was kind of mad and then he was like, “That’s a perfect idea and he got his phone out of his pocket and messaged Winno straight away on Instagram and then an hour later he was like, “Yeah, send me the tracks and I’ll do it.” That was sick. I call that one Circle Pit Anthem Of The Year and we have the biggest circle pits in Europe for that song.
Fur And Claw
Pretty groovy song. It’s a little bit different for us. It’s a little bit black metal and it’s about animals committing suicide. Last year and for a few years I started doing a thing where I would each vegetarian for one month. Because I think the power of the person – if everyone on the planet didn’t eat meat for just one day it would really shake things up in the meat industry.
I’m not saying be vegan because I’m not vegan, but I think more people should give a shit about animal welfare and purchase free range, organic produce. It would make a world of difference to the welfare of animals and also the greenhouse gases that are omitted from the meat trade doing a lot of damage to our ecosystem.
Obviously what we are doing already is killing a lot of animals and that’s really brutal but that doesn’t seem to be shocking anyone because how many times a day is someone putting a dead animal into their mouth and it’s not controversial or shocking. So we thought we’d flip it on its head and something definitely more depressing is animals choosing to kill themselves.
I mean if you had a sub-tyrannical leader in in Victoria or wherever you’re living and he was just going around assassinating all the people that lived under him, you’d be like “Oh that guy really, really sucks. That’s terrible. What a horrible person.” But if everybody in Victoria just started killing themselves because the Premier was such a bad person, that would be truly disturbing, you know? So that’s why we tried to flip it around like that. I don’t think people often think about things that way.
Deliver Us To Evil
This is a play on the Lord’s Prayer, which has the line “deliver us from evil.” I thought that was ironic because religion generally delivers people to evil and wicked things. So that song is pretty straight forward. We just made a shirt for it that has a priest with an ambulance dropping off patients to a church on fire, which I came up with the other day and think is kind of funny.
Emptiness
Is about accepting responsibility for the problems in your own life. I think too many people blame everything that goes wrong in their life on external factors. Chances are 99.9999% of the time it’s you and you alone.
That song specifically references the breakdown of my previous relationship, where my professional career – if you want to call it that – playing in a band was advancing and I was away from home 10 months out of the year and her career was advancing and we were complaining about our relationship falling apart, but really it was our own choice to pursue our careers and eventually we accepted that.
Violent Reckoning
A bit of a political one about the spread of misinformation. Poor Sean Delander is a very good riff writer but not the smartest bloke out there by his own admission, is addicted to click bait and this is a serious issue.
He’s just an idiot that will believe anything. He told me that there was a civilisation that had been uncovered in the centre of Australia with underground pyramids that existed like 100 million years ago. I was like, “It’s not possible.” He was like, you haven’t even read the information, how could you know.” I was like “It doesn’t line up with the evolution timeline or carbon dating. What about the different periods?” And as soon as you explain something to him he’s like “Oh shit. Yeah, okay.” It’s kind of a serious issue and that’s a satirical way of looking at it by having it pointed out to him “Scroll to the bottom of the website Sean. Does it say that it’s a satirical news site?” And he’s like, “Yeah, alright, it’s a joke.”
But on a serious note people now use social media and technology to spread misinformation for their own agenda and their own gain – most notably in politics. Not only on an international level but on somewhat of a small scale, we see it invading almost everything in life. Misinformation – it doesn’t have to be a lie, it could just be a twist on something or withholding certain parts of information but in reality it does make our lives a hell of a lot more difficult. So it’s about providing transparency as a leader in the public world.
Child Of Sorrow
A pretty metal song. Number nine. Inspired by C.J.’s fiancés name, which is Leiden, which is a city in the Netherlands. It means “suffering” or “suffer” and they named the city that because years ago, and this has to do with religion again, some religion started invading the Netherlands and so they came over and they killed all of the parents and the religious leaders and just left the children, because then they could arm the children with their new, “saving” religion and expand at the same time.
It’s a lot harder to expand when you’ve got the parents involved telling the children not to believe something. So it’s about the vulnerability of children.
Naked And Cold
Another sad song Death is never dignified. It’s always gross and ugly. Christopher Hitchens, one of my idols, passed away the other year from oesophageal cancer and he was like, “death is always gross.” When we all die we all die alone and that’s the line in the song. We don’t have anything. There’s no after life. People for some reason just blatantly en masse in billions across the world believe in some fantasy land that no-one’s ever returned from or seen. I don’t know where it is but I think it’s pretty hilarious.
It’s also about choosing to leave when you want to. There’s a line in the song that says “We’re only living because we can’t seem to leave,” which means like “We’re only existing because we can’t choose to go somewhere else. And when you do choose to go somewhere else it takes a lot of courage, but generally it’s the right choice.
Vengeance
The bonus track which is hilarious. I hate this song. I’ve lobbied for it to not make it onto any physical format of the record but unfortunately it’s the only one that we had extra lyric for and unfortunately the sole song that C.J. contributed lyrics for. It’s about paedophilia.
I mean, obviously we’re not pro-paedophiles. C.J. has always loved kids, again, not in a paedophilic way, he loves kids. He wants to really have his own kids. He wants to have an army of kids surrounding him. But as we’ve seen in the catholic church here in Australia where how many thousands of children have been molested by priests that have since been shipped off to the Vatican to receive some form of protection from very, very wealthy company.
He hates paedophiles and if you asked him what we should do with paedophiles I’m sure he’d give you a long and twisted story about all sorts of torture devices he’s spent the last 30 years concocting in the back of his mind and unfortunately it was the only one we had lyrics for and we needed a bonus track for the first pressing. So it’s this one. We actually have two more songs that are way better that we just didn’t have the lyrics for. That’s my fault because I had no lyrics.
Holy War Tour Dates
w/ guests Aversions Crown, Feed Her To The Sharks*, Colossvs
Wednesday 14 October – Amplifier, Perth (18+) *
Thursday 15 October – Fowlers Live, Adelaide (Lic/AA)
Friday 16 October – Corner Hotel, Melbourne (18+)
Saturday 17 October – The Factory, Sydney (Lic/AA)
Sunday 18 October – Woolly Mammoth, Brisbane (18+)
