Quickly popping up with tremendous buzz, Gore. surfaced at the end of 2023 with “Pray” and then again with “Doomsday” in January of this year. Their cinematic, striking visuals and effective merger of heavy metallic elements with nontraditional melodic ones caught many ears, and to no surprise, they signed with a label and announced their first EP, A Bud That Never Blooms. We caught up with guitarist Alex Reyes and bassist Devin Birchfield to discuss the band’s beginnings and vision, their first tour, signing with Spinefarm, and more!
Dead Rhetoric: How was your first tour? Any big takeaways for the future?
Alex Reyes: There’s a few things, as far as touring. Not bringing as many covers and blankets. It just occupied a lot of space. Honestly, overall it was just a great experience. I have toured before with previous bands and this was a little bit different because it was like, ‘get there, set up, there’s no fucking around.’ It’s straight business. When I was younger, it was like vacation and like, “Let’s just go play shows!” This was more like, it’s time to get down to business.
Devin Birchfield: This was my first tour so it was all new. But my biggest takeaway was that I overpacked. So I’ll probably skip out on some stuff in the future to save space in the van. Lugging around my giant suitcase every day sucked [laughs]. Overall though, I think it went really well! Don’t trust the hotels when you book a room I guess? We learned that lesson!
Reyes: That’s a story in and of itself right there! We were tired.
Birchfield: It was a long day. We finished loading out in Dallas and it was around midnight or 1AM, and we rolled into San Antonio around 6AM and showed up at our hotel just for them to tell us that they had no availability or rooms. We also don’t have a booking with your name on it. I said, “you took our money.” So we called around trying to find any hotel with space. We found one, drove there, only to find the same exact experience [laughs].
Reyes: We just wanted to go to sleep. To go to bed for a few hours.
Birchfield: It wasn’t great, but there was a Walmart parking lot there. It builds character.
Reyes: We called a bunch of other hotels and they were all sold out. We found out it was sold out because of Comic Con in town. You can only guess at how sour our faces were.
Birchfield: That’s when we were like, let’s go to Walmart. I bought some mouthwash and did a birdbath in the bathroom and went to bed [laughter].
Dead Rhetoric: Could you discuss the concept of ‘emotional gore,’ as I’ve seen it in some other interviews you have done recently?
Reyes: Emotional gore is basically not just talking about the physical representation of bloody gore, but it’s the inner turmoil that one has when they are going through certain points or situations in life, where you know that storm is brewing. It’s emotional. It’s ugly. It’s not pretty to look at, but it’s in you. It’s emotional gore that comes from whatever life throws at you. That’s what we as a band are trying to personify in art.
Birchfield: Those deep emotions that maybe you aren’t super comfortable talking about, putting a sound and feeling to those and trying to convey it through music.
Dead Rhetoric: Could you discuss the band’s use of color? Is it deliberate in terms of the color palette?
Birchfield: The idea was kind of like to contrast the sludgy, gross stuff with some pretty, floral stuff. We wanted to kind of mix those together.
Reyes: When you hear a name like Gore, you think of the heaviest metal in the world, where it’s hard to read where it says whatever the name is, we wanted to give the people a bit of a juxtaposition. It’s really pretty. The colors are very vibrant. We as a group love different color palettes: pink, purple, magenta. These are all color palettes that we really enjoy and love. Plus, we are all used to the ‘everything black.’
Dead Rhetoric: I do feel that the metal scene in general could use some more color. There’s so much black. It’s to the point where you are in the scene where the question can be asked, “Do you really need another black tshirt?” Some people, sure! But it’s nice to see a band embracing the other colors and being forward about it.
Birchfield: To that point, I think bands are latching onto that too. We had a pink hoodie we were selling on tour and it was selling like hotcakes. It’s not something you’ll necessarily see every day at a metal show, but I love it.
Reyes: That’s definitely true. That pink hoodie was so rad, not going to lie. We also had some shirts in there, but the hoodie was selling like Devin said, like hotcakes.
Dead Rhetoric: Along with the color palette, could you specifically talk about the cover? I feel like it’s a great example of how you use the contrasting colors.
Birchfield: I’m not sure if Haley [Roughton] had something specific in mind, since she kind of workshopped that with our visuals guy. But to me, it kind of represents that we kind of look our best on the outsides – the flower and the background looking beautiful. But when you look at it, you see these gross, drippy sludgy things coming off of it. That’s those real emotions coming through that we all have. To me, that’s what it speaks to.
Reyes: We may seem fine on the outside, everything might look great, but on the inside there is that emotional piece that seeps out. If you think of the flower as the human body or consciousness, it’s a sludge drip of those emotions seeping out. That’s how I envision it and relate to it.
Dead Rhetoric: When you are making songs feel different from one another, what do you feel is the core of Gore’s sound?
Reyes: I would say it’s just straight vibes. Whether it is a different song feel or sound, I think the vibe is still the same.
Birchfield: Each song has its own emotion to represent it and I think that’s the overarching theme. If it’s going to be heavy, we are going to get heavy with it. But if we want something super pretty and beautiful, that’s what we do. That’s the biggest thing. Each song is meant to convey an emotion or an experience. Rather than stick to a genre or specific sound, it’s more about representing those feelings.
Dead Rhetoric: This is your first release as Gore. What do you hope people take away from the EP?
Reyes: I just want people to take away that we have range. We aren’t just a one-genre type of band. Of course, at the core of the group we are metalcore, but we don’t mind venturing off into various types of music. I just want people to take away that. We aren’t just a metal band playing metal music, we also like to veer off and see where the music takes us.
Birchfield: I just hope that people find some sort of takeaway that they can connect with. If you are in the metal/rock realm, there is probably something in the EP that you are going to like. I hope people can connect somehow. We have gotten some messages that a song has helped them through “x, y, z thing” and it’s super heartwarming to me that our art can help someone else like that.
Dead Rhetoric: It seems like you as a group are pretty good at ‘playing the social media game,’ which not a lot of bands are, currently. How do you use social media to try to grab new fans?
Birchfield: At the heart of it, social media is there for engagement with fans. It’s hard to gauge a specific social media plan. We have done it pretty well, but there is an element of just putting videos out there and seeing that they do well. We will put some out, saying they are the worst video we ever made, and the algorithm picks it up and there’s 200,000 views so we are like, “I guess they liked it” [laughs]! So there is a little method to the madness in consistently posting and making sure you engage with the fans in comments – that’s crucial. I don’t know that there is a hard rule, like having to put out a specific type of video. We try to try different things there.
Reyes: If only we knew what the algorithm was thinking. It would be so much easier! It would take the guessing game out of it.
Dead Rhetoric: Going along with that, what are the challenges of building up a new band so that people will pay attention to you when there are so many things going on through social media and everything else?
Birchfield: The internet’s attention span is [so small], so being a new band and trying to be strategic about what we put out – if we just dumped all five songs out last December no one would care. It wouldn’t get to people. One of the hard parts is that we put a song out, people liked it, and then we have to keep promoting the same one over and over. People ask where the new stuff is and we say we are working on it. But we have to play the game spacing it out, so that it actually reaches people. Now that we have an EP out, we can promote multiple songs – it’s a little bit easier. Specifically, when we were in that gap between releasing “Doomsday” and waiting for the label announcement, it was particularly rough. People were like, “what’s going on?”
Reyes: I had people, an old engineer acquaintance hit me up. I hadn’t worked with this guy in like almost 10 years. He messaged me saying that he had heard the two songs and asking when the next one was dropping. I’m like, “where did you come from?” and was like, “it’s coming soon!” He was like, “I just want it – when it is coming out!”
Birchfield: Most of the time, we were like “I don’t even know!”
Reyes: A lot of it is when things derailed, in a sense. When the label got involved. We had to play the long game and ‘blueball’ the people [laughter]. We just kept edging them on.
Birchfield: It’s like…’big things coming soon!”
Dead Rhetoric: So all five songs were done before you released “Pray” last year. How deliberate was it that you chose that song out of the five possible?
Reyes: We kind of just wanted to ‘come at you very hard and in your face’ in that song. It’s in your face. It also has an amazing hook. It’s one of the heaviest songs we have, and also, you are going to be singing it…a lot in your head.
Birchfield: It’s a good mix of what we have going. There’s some pretty stuff there, but it starts off right out the gate really heavy. It can grip people with the chorus.
Reyes: With “Doomsday” we threw a curveball. It sounds like it’s going to be heavy as hell, but next thing you know, boom – it’s got clean guitar and very pretty. Then we still hit you in the face with some heavy guitars. It was more of a build-up. It was like, ‘reverse “Pray.”’
Dead Rhetoric: Some pretty heavy lyrics on that one too!
Reyes: We were like, “man, I don’t know how people are going to take it!”
Birchfield: Honestly, most people didn’t really comment on it as much as I would have thought.
Reyes: I’m happy because one of the interviews that we did with a podcast, they really got it. It’s about the desensitization of humans to everything. It’s really talking about us as humans being desensitized through social media to violence, and the negative nature of humans. It’s really painting that picture. But you would never get it unless it’s really in your face with that opening line.
Dead Rhetoric: In terms of having a label come in, what ultimately made you go with Spinefarm?
Birchfield: Honestly, it just felt right talking with the team. They seemed genuinely excited and trusting with our vision. They weren’t going to turn us into ‘whatever they want.’ They are very excited for us to do our thing and help us along with that journey. That really got me excited. I got in there and they were really amped up to get in there and see how they could help.
Reyes: Spinefarm was really down for us. We have had talks with other labels before Spinefarm, and each one was like, trying to gas us up and get us to go with them. With Spinefarm, it felt more genuine. They thought our vision was amazing and wanted to build on it. They aren’t going to try to enclose us in a bubble. They wanted to see what we are talking about. They have really been helping us out.
Dead Rhetoric: It’s to your credit that you have such a distinct vision this early on with the band. I remember finding Gore. a few days before “Doomsday” and there’s a very distinctive flavor. It’s not often that you see that with a newer act. There’s often some flailing, but you have seemed to have locked in on what you want.
Reyes: We did a lot of brainstorming when we first started. We didn’t want to be a typical band that looks cool and ‘we are hard.’ There was attention paid to the planning and visuals and the marketing when it was time to write the songs. We put a lot of time in the mixing/mastering and the songwriting. We wanted to give each song it’s day. I think we were able to do that.
Birchfield: We were starting out as a new band, but it’s like, what if we gave everything the same care as we would to a seasoned project? Why not just spend your time on the little details, because in the end it all adds up. The color palette, the story, how we do music videos, mixing/mastering, all that. We really wanted to come out of the gate really representing the vision we had in our heads. Not necessarily that ‘we want to look so pro’ but we wanted to do justice to the vision we had in our heads.
Dead Rhetoric: Lastly, what’s in the future for the band after the EP?
Birchfield: We are going to be writing a lot, into the end of the year. We will be doing a lot more of that. There’s no shows lined up yet, but there’s going to be a ton of that too next year.
Reyes: Yeah, a lot of writing music, but we’ll see what happens with shows. But that’s pretty much what’s going on now. We are excited. The stuff we have been working on sounds great. It’s also very much Gore. Prepare to be Gore-ifed [laughter].