Dead Rhetoric: In regards to the US run last year, were there any fun or interesting moments that have stuck with you since?
Hunt: Numerous ones. The overwhelming thing that I took away from it was just the landscape of the place. I’m not sure where you live, but America is such a hugely diverse place just to look at. Driving through the desert and seeing Joshua trees growing and then driving up near the Grand Canyon and seeing the breathtaking landscapes. Then ending up in Canada and seeing snowcapped mountains and forests everywhere. To me, as much as anything else, that was just staggering. It’s such a diverse and beautiful place. To get the opportunity to go through it like that was amazing.
Most of the fun stuff I probably shouldn’t repeat – it was a hell of a lot of booze and so many things going wrong. There were some memorable occasions, I’ll put it that way. Generally we had a really great, eye-opening time. For the most part, the people we met were really warm and enthusiastic. It was an amazing thing to be able to do, and I’d love to be able to do it again if the chance comes along.
Dead Rhetoric: Could you go into the development of the “Powerslave” cover – I saw on your Facebook that you had a short deadline and weren’t even able to hear it when you mixed it…
Hunt: Yes, very simply. The computer broke [laughs]…that’s kind of it. We had set aside about 2 weeks for recording the vocals, to give us time to recover between sessions and stuff. We did that song first because it was done for a magazine in the UK. They had a deadline so we had to work quickly. Right when we were recording it, the computer we were using to mix/master, it just died. It wouldn’t work properly – so it would still operate but we couldn’t listen to it. Fortunately, we had managed to get it into a pretty usable state before the computer broke. Unfortunately, we had to delay the vocal recordings for a few days as we had to scrape together money to buy a new computer. Luckily we were quite happy with the results – I think it came out pretty well.
Dead Rhetoric: So what made you choose “Powerslave?”
Hunt: We received an email from Kerrang, saying they were doing a cover cd of different bands doing Iron Maiden covers. It was kind of strange for us, since Kerrang is a rock music magazine, but it’s not really our area of rock music for the most part – it’s a bit more mainstream and so on. But we thought that would make it kind of fun. We expected to be next to bands like Stone Sour or whatever, and it would be a contrast. And that’s kind of how it turned out as well! Those were the kind of other bands that were on it. But because it was just for that magazine and it’s in the UK, it meant that hardly anyone got to hear it, unless you are in the UK and interested in that kind of music. So we thought it would be a nice thing to include it as a bonus track on the album so the wider public could hear it if they wanted to.
Dead Rhetoric: Anaal Nathrakh is usually associated with a musical version of Armageddon or the apocalypse. A musical bulldozer perhaps – what makes abrasive music so important to you after all these years?
Hunt: The fact that it just comes out – we don’t try to be as harsh as we can or anything like that. We just do what comes naturally, and that’s how it turns out. It’s not so much important to us, it’s just part of who we are. No matter what we did together, it would have some of that flavor to it. It’s less of a conscious choice to do something that we want to represent to the world or anything like that. We are just doing what makes us happy and it turns out that way. Which probably means that we have some quite serious personality problems [laughs], but really, without thinking about it, it comes out as intense about that.
Dead Rhetoric: As you were saying, you are making this for yourself instead of seeing what’s hip or trendy. In regards to that, do you think it gives you the chance to branch out in terms of your sound? If you listen to some of the band’s first releases, you can hear some differences…
Hunt: Yeah – there will be differences because of natural evolution. You have different ideas and get better at doing things. But yeah, we are quite big on, to be pretentious, you might call it creative freedom. We are quite intent that anything that we think is right, is the right thing to do. We simply have no idea what’s going on [laughs]. If we wanted to copy the latest trends, we wouldn’t know where to start. We are very omnivorous ourselves and interested in different things – we simply can’t be bothered to keep up with what’s current in one particular area. But I think that’s for the best in terms of doing something original. If you are copying anyone, for any reason – if it’s what’s current or it’s what you like – you aren’t doing your own thing. If something already exists, and you are going to make a new thing, well make it a new thing. Don’t make it a copy of something else. So a little bit of isolation from whatever else might be going on, aids originality…at least hopefully.
Dead Rhetoric: On the other hand, there’s a portion of the world that hears Anaal Nathrakh, even some parts of the metal community, and says, ‘what the fuck?’ There was a meme on your Facebook about a month ago where a dog heard your music for the first time and it knocked its head off. Do you think there’s a misconception about the band in terms of people hearing it and it being so chaotic, even if there are those cleaner moments placed in?
Hunt: Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t think I saw what you are talking about – I don’t pay attention to Facebook or anything. Mick probably put that up there. If there are misconceptions, I’m not worried. This kind of music isn’t for everyone. Even if we were substantially more light-weight, it would still be past what a lot of people ever listen to. I’m happy with that – we aren’t trying to appeal to a market the size of Pantera or something like that. We are just trying to be ourselves. If that rules out some people, well okay. There’s plenty of other stuff for them to listen to. It doesn’t hurt us. As far as I can tell, there’s quite a lot of people who find something resonant in what we do – they can get into it, and that’s fine. We don’t need everyone to love us. I don’t think any band should think that way. I don’t think that’s a recipe for good, creative work. You have to do what’s right for you before anything else.
Dead Rhetoric: What are the band’s plans once The Whole of the Law is released?
Hunt: We have a few shows booked. The scheduling in some of our shows might seem poor in retrospect. We did our first shows in Japan a few weeks ago. Just last weekend we played a few shows in Europe. Now we have a few weeks, and then around the release date of the album we have a few more in Europe. But then it’s fairly clear – we are plotting our next move after that. We’ll be out there, doing shows and whatnot. Hopefully in some unusual and eventful places, it’s just not set in stone yet.
Dead Rhetoric: The band is more intent in touring at this point?
Hunt: Yeah, we haven’t turned into Motorhead or anything – we aren’t road dogs. But we are looking at what’s out there. There are some cool places we’d like to go to; we’d like to get to America again if possible. We’ve been speaking to our agent over there…it’s just that nothing is particularly set in stone so far. We’ll see what happens.