The unsung heroes of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, Byzantine has unfortunately not been able to find a way out of the shadows in the last 25 years. But with each new release comes the hope that the deserving group can catch a much-needed break and push into the upper echelons of the metal scene. Harbingers, their first full-length in seven years, is such an effort, bringing forth the band’s knack for progressive structures and just plain fun heavy metal riffing out in the best way. We spoke with vocalist Chris “OJ” Ojeda to discuss what the band has been up to, moving from a four-piece to a five-piece, their goals at 25 years in, and a wealth of knowledge about the new album.
Dead Rhetoric: How do you feel things went with the Black Sea Codex EP looking back 3 years later?
Chris “OJ” Ojeda: That was basically just a stopgap. It wasn’t even a full-length and there was no new material on it. It was just something we needed to put out because we knew we were in a long hiatus between albums. I even contacted Metal Blade and asked if we could put it out on our own, and they gave me permission to do that. It wasn’t even a Metal Blade release. It was fun. We got to go back and redo four of the first songs we ever wrote back in 2000, plus two very obtuse covers. But as far as fanfare, most of our fans don’t know I even put the damn thing out [laughs]. I’m still sitting on 250 copies of it here in the studio. But that’s okay. Hopefully we land some touring in the future and I can offload them.
Dead Rhetoric: How does it feel to have the band as a five-piece again, with Tony Rohrbough rejoining?
Ojeda: It’s odd. It’s odd yet very comfortable. Tony and I formed the band together in 2000. We have always been a four-piece. I have always played and sang. The oddity of it is me going from a singer/frontman to just being a vocalist. Vocals are my weakest part, I am a rhythm guitar player by nature. So I’m giving up the one thing I’m actually good at for the sake of bringing Tony back. But it’s a very harmonious feeling in the band right now. Everyone loves Tony, and we are all friends. It just makes sense to get mom and dad back together again.
Dead Rhetoric: Was you dropping guitar and focusing on vocals something that came into play when you wrote Harbingers?
Ojeda: We wrote and recorded this album two years ago, so this was before the transition took place. I wrote the album as if I was going to be playing guitar and singing. Thank God I’m not! There is some trickery going on! But here’s the one issue that a singer/guitarist has to worry about. If you don’t write your songs for the live show, you end up with a selection of songs that never get played live. They are just studio songs because the complexity of singing and playing at the same time prohibits that. Now that I’m just the singer, it opens up a lot of our discography that we can go back and play that we couldn’t before.
Dead Rhetoric: So is that something you are actively looking into? I know you have several shows coming up.
Ojeda: We have four shows slated for June and one for August, and we have added a couple of songs into the setlist that rarely ever got played. If we did play it, we played it poorly. Now we can play it proficiently. It’ll be nice!
Dead Rhetoric: How do you feel that Harbingers embodies Byzantine in 2025?
Ojeda: Harbingers, by definition, being one who ushers in great change. We had a lot of change happen in the last seven years. I had two children. I’m started my own recording studio and rehearsal facility, which I am sitting in now and we recorded the album in. We added a new bass player, who is also a primary songwriter now, which is great. We haven’t had that in a long time, coming from a bassist. We added Tony back into the fold – tons of change from the last album to this one. I think Harbingers is very apropos to Byzantine 2025.
Dead Rhetoric: To that end, what do you feel defines Byzantine as a band, twenty-five years in?
Ojeda: I would say that if there is any definitive characteristic that our band has been able to do from beginning to end, we really focus heavily on the studio album and the structures of the albums themselves. We have always been more of a studio band, so I feel that with our first album out of the equation because it was kind of raw, but from the second album to here, our characteristic has been defined by really solid studio album work. We have never been much of a live band. It’s not by choice but by force. We just haven’t ever had the chance to do a lot of touring or festivals. Knowing that, we have always put our chips into making the greatest album, start to finish, that we can. I think if we ended it tomorrow, most of our fans would say that we have a fantastic discography with no duds. I hope that’s what they would say, but that’s what I feel.
Dead Rhetoric: Well, I mean if it doesn’t feel that way to you, then…
Ojeda: Right, right. I’m a harsh critic of myself. There are some songs I skip that some of our fans enjoy. But I enjoy our discography. The first album is a bit raw for me. I’m an audiophile, but the rest of them sound pretty good.
Dead Rhetoric: So did the audiophile bit come into play in getting your own studio?
Ojeda: It does, it plays heavily. I’ve always been the producer of all our albums. I’ve always been a studio rat. When we were in the studio for months, I made sure I didn’t miss a day. I didn’t care if it was bass or drums, I would try to get there – even just to be a positive motivating factor, or a producer sitting over the engineer’s chair. Once it got to the point where I became the tracking and mixing engineer, which happened on this album, I really jumped into that love of being an audiophile, tones, and studio work. That’s why the first album pains me to listen to [laughs], which is odd because most of the songs we play live are from the first album. Fans gravitate to it for some reason.
Dead Rhetoric: There’s always strong lyrical content on Byzantine albums. Could you talk about some of your favorite lyrical topics that come up on Harbingers?
Ojeda: There is one song on here that won’t probably be played a lot, it’s one of the faster and thrasher songs on the album, it’s called “Riddance.” It is about the Menien Festival, which I believe is in the Philippines. They dig out their dead and their loved ones and redress them, clean their skin, and sometimes they dance with the corpses. It’s a morose and crazy-ass ceremony that they do. I wanted to write a song about paying homage to your loved ones by digging them up and dosing their skin with oil and everything. The lyrics in that song are awesome [laughs]! And we name-dropped Meshuggah in it. I think that’s going to be a fun easter egg for our fans. Devin Townsend name-dropped Meshuggah in one of his songs, and he says, “we all rip off Meshuggah,’ but in this song, I named each member [laughs]. It’s a fun one.
The other one, the song called “The Clockmaker’s Intention,” which is based on one of my favorite podcasts called S-Town. It’s one of the most acclaimed podcasts, and it follows the life of this really weird guy in Alabama named John B. McLemore. The weirdest human being, but he is highly intelligent. Everyone in town thinks he is bat-shit crazy. But a lot of things happen, some deaths occur, and then people find out he is this extravagant and exquisite clockmaker. Most people thought he was a crazy, tattooed, gay redneck, but they come to find out that clockmakers around the world were bringing clocks to this guy and he was doing things by hand that most people wouldn’t touch. So that song is about all of his intentions. We love it so much, that our scrims in front of our amps are going to be the internal gears of clocks. I was fascinated with it.
Every song has something like that. The opening song is called “A Place We Cannot Go,” and that song I love the lyrics too. It’s about the problem of mass shootings in America, specifically school shootings. I have been studying, it sounds weird, as I haven’t said this to anyone, but when COVID hit I was looking for something to do besides drink. So I started studying mass shootings and getting really involved with that. I kept statistics on every mass shooting: whether they got the gun legally/illegally, they had emotional issues, so this song goes into my feelings and the conversations I have had to have with my 16 year old about what to do if a mass shooting occurs at their school. It’s a heavy topic. I think there is some lyrical content that some of our fans are going to really dig into.
Dead Rhetoric: What drew your interest in following the shootings, other than just avoiding drinking? Was there something about it specifically?
Ojeda: The first time any of that really hit me was when Columbine happened. It impacted me so significantly, and I don’t know why, but I’ve always kept it in the back of my head. During COVID, when I was drinking heavily, I remember one time sitting on the couch and I found a bunch of moonshine sitting behind my bar. My wife and I tore into it, heavily. I remember sitting around and I said that I was going to figure out the root cause of mass shootings in America and find a simple remedy. My wife told me that I was bat-shit crazy and I needed to sober up.
I did a few months of researching and I found a definitive line for something that stood out to me, a statistic that no one has ever really brought up since mass shootings are so politicized. So I started forming a thesis about it. I have continued, until now, tracking all of the mass shootings, and the statistic that I found then has actually grown. It was just something that had stuck with me, and then once I had children…you are a teacher, it keeps you up at night. We shouldn’t have to deal with it. No other country in the world deals with it, it’s an American problem. It’s not a party thing. It can be solved. But I am thinking about, when the album comes out, doing a lyric video for the song and then doing a social commentary at the end. Explaining how I think it could be solved, but I’m scared to do that. I’m scared I’m going to lose some of our fanbase.
Dead Rhetoric: That is sort of a risky play for a band, with something being highly politicized. Saying how you feel tends to alienate people, and there’s a lot less bands doing it at this point.
Ojeda: Exactly, and we have always been such a non-political band. I don’t even know how the rest of the guys feel [politically]. We don’t care. We drink and play music together, we don’t talk about what divides us, we talk about what unites us. I’m scared to bring it up, specifically being from West Virginia. We are such a Red, card-carrying, gun-toting state. If I put this out there and it tramples on it for one second, I’m gonna get flipped off at red lights. So I have to figure out how to navigate this, and maintain all my friendships.
Dead Rhetoric: Good luck with all of that process.
Ojeda: Thank you. But I think, what if Jon Stewart finds this and gravitates towards it. What if it’s a good idea? There’s nobody on either side of the aisle that is for mass shootings that I can see.
Dead Rhetoric: To get back to less heavy topics, could you talk about the maintained underground support you’ve gotten from your community and Patreon. How important has it been for a band that has been in the shadows for such a long time?
Ojeda: It’s tantamount to us being together right now. We have had such little financial success from this, and such little growth. Normally bands who have been together for 25 years, like Trivium, are doing giant things like that. Our progress stalled early on. I think one of the only things that has kept us moving forward as a band is the select, fervent, hardcore fan base. They contact us and say the lyrics make them cry or they are flying from California to see us in West Virginia. That sort of stuff happens all the time. Those little interactions are what keep us going. I know a lot of my friends that we started out with, that are now in bigger bands, they told me that if they were in my shoes, they would have quit long ago. Not to be mean, but they can’t believe we are sticking it out on the struggle bus for 25 years [laughs].
Dead Rhetoric: What does keep you moving along, knowing like you said, you have seen people who have gone onto bigger successes in the same time span? Outside of the fanbase, that is.
Ojeda: I think probably two things. One, I’m an awful quitter. We broke up for five years in 2007-20012/13. It was an awful period of my life. I don’t ever want to feel that again. So as long as we have a tenant, “as long as we are having fun, and we feel like we are writing top shelf heavy metal, let’s continue this. If it’s no fun or the music is shit, let’s quit.” Right now, we feel like we are putting out great stuff and we all love hanging out. The third part is that we still have a small fanbase that loves the hell out of our music. That’s what keeps us going.
Dead Rhetoric: Not every band gets that sort ot ardent fanbase that pushes you forward. So that alone gives you something to lean on.
Ojeda: Some bands, 20-25 years in, if you listen to their newest album and first album, they don’t even sound like the same band. They will lose core fans. They are chasing a trend. We have kind of slowly evolved. We knew right out of the gate with our first album or two what we wanted. We wanted to be more progressive and musical, so we have slowly kept turning that dial enough to keep our intelligent fans satiated but also enough to keep the boneheaded guys who just want beers happy [laughs]. It’s a hard line to walk!
Dead Rhetoric: It seems there’s a lot of different types of things you do to engage with people on social media. What’s the challenge of playing the social media game?
Ojeda: Our social media push right now is the most we have ever done. We have always been awful at it. Our label has always told us that we have to embrace it. We can’t keep trying to log into Myspace [laughs]. So the last six months, we have really cleaned up our socials, and I have made myself a schedule. The difficulty is trying to maintain my personal and business time. This stuff takes a lot of time! The 13 second clips I put on TikTok is like 10% of the overall investment. Navigating my time with my kids, business, and wife can be difficult. The other thing that’s difficult is figuring out how to crack the algorithm. After 20 years of not figuring it out, it’s not going to crack wide open for us in a few months. It is a slog and it is a long-game point of view. But I think it’s working, we will see when the album comes out.
Dead Rhetoric: It’s kind of like throwing paint at the wall, sometimes you just get lucky too.
Ojeda: People talk about going viral, I don’t know how you do that. I spoke to Brian Slagel at Metal Blade, and consistency was hammered: posting about the same time about the same stuff, and just quality content. As much as I may not want to talk in front of the camera, the algorithm wants that. We will get it sorted!
Dead Rhetoric: Twenty-five years in, what do you feel are the next steps for the band?
Ojeda: I hope it is performing live. We have performed so little in our career. Most of the live shows and touring happened on the first two albums. The last five have been playing a few shows and sit at home. We would love to experience some festivals or see what mainland Europe would be like to perform there. I think it would be a nice feather in our cap.
Dead Rhetoric: Have you been over to Europe to tour?
Ojeda: We have played the island, the UK, Scotland and Wales twice. The last time was 2005, so it’s been 20 years. If we go over now and play, most of the kids who would come to our show wouldn’t have even been born yet. It’s crazy to think. We have never been to South America. We have only been to Canada a few times. There’s 10-15 States in the US we haven’t been to. It’s dumb, but things just never lined-up for us. Breaking up in 2007 probably set us back 15 years. At that time, we were on fire, we were playing shows with Shadows Fall, Kittie, and Lamb of God, all those bands all the time. We were lumped together with them. When we decided to tell Prosthetic “F-U, we are breaking up.” Everyone else kept growing and we came home. That’s a death sentence.
Dead Rhetoric: Do you feel it was something that was necessary for the band at the time?
Ojeda: No, it was an awful idea. There was a lot of family pressure, coming from West Virginia. There were like two bands signed from here, so everyone thought we were just playing in the sand. That we needed to get a coal mine job, or work at the hospital, ‘be a real person.’ At that time, Tony’s family was putting pressure on him, my wife at the time was putting pressure on me to have kids, and looking back we could have done both. But we said we were broke, and we wanted to stay home. If we had stuck it out three years, who knows? We were right there with all of them…so we are trying to repair that.
Dead Rhetoric: Right now, it seems like the metal market is increasing again. It ebbs and flows, but it seems like we are in a good spot.
Ojeda: We are. Jose Mangin is doing great things promoting metal across the world. It’s becoming more mainstream, which is great. In our favor, being a legacy act, everything comes back around – fashion, and everything, 20 years later. I see my daughter’s friends wearing clothes from what seemed like Saved by the Bell. Kids are getting into the New Wave of American Heavy Metal movement that we were a part of. We just have to bide our time, and I think good times will happen.
Dead Rhetoric: What would you like to see more of in heavy metal, related to that?
Ojeda: I really don’t know what I’d like to see more of. I mean, I see metal more now than I have in my whole life. When I was growing up in West Virginia, it was so hard to find an Anthrax album or have Metallica come to town. Now it’s so pervasive. In a selfish way, the only thing I’d like to see ourselves be more successful [laughs]!
Dead Rhetoric: That’s fair! So to wrap up, what are your plans for the rest of this year outside of those couple of shows?
Ojeda: We’ve got a booking agent, we just hired our first manager. So they are working things for us and trying to set up festivals for next year. I think we may have a boat cruise lined up. I’d love to do some podcasting, and now that I have my studio here, I want to start popping out a lot more vocal covers and things like that. It seems like our fans really enjoy that, when we do another artist’s stuff. So just producing more content in the next year. That’s doable. I don’t have an excuse to not, if I own a recording studio I should be producing shit. So I’m going to keep doing that.