(In January of this year Personal Records released a powerhouse new album by the Spanish death/doom band Onirophagus. Our Comrade Aleks gives it a very good quick review below, along with his very enjoyable interview with the band’s vocalist, Paingrinder.)
Catalan death-doom band Onirophagus have been through a lineup rotation since the release of their second album Endarkenment (Illumination through Putrefaction) in 2019, and with two new guitarists and a bassist in the lineup, they have recorded 45 minutes of material under the title Revelations from the Void.
Initially, Onirophagus focused on the legacy of the grimmest death-doom bands of the past, those that avoided melodrama and “gothic sentiments”. And how could it be otherwise, if almost all the members either previously performed or still perform in thrash and death bands? Perhaps that is why the new album is so heterogeneous, although sustained in a single style.
In some places, Onirophagus pulls the veins with classic depressive doom, a model of dissonance; in others they deafen with a death metal attack in the name of Incantation; and in others they invite us into the paranoid nightmare of Esoteric. The mixture of these influences serves the purpose of creating the individuality of the band. Even the violin, appearing in “Black Brew”, plays its part in an unexpected schizophrenic style.
I guess, you can hear the rebellion of the bands from the noughties in Onirophagus, those who found the key to depicting madness with the help of new combinations of familiar formulas. These crushing and murderously dark compositions can be majestic and even melodic, and in this contrast lies their aesthetic value. The band almost never returns to the theme played within the track, preferring to move on from plot to plot. After all, Revelations from the Void is a conceptual album and the musical accompaniment of this story is appropriate. Onirophagus did everything right.
Hi Onirophagus! How are you doing? How are the gods treating you?
Hello, thank you very much for having us for this interview.
So far so good, the gods are treating us very well and right now I’m listening to High Impact Violence by Gutless, a real madness.
Gutless? Even the artwork is damn sick. What do you find attractive in such stuff?
Yes, their cover reminds me of albums like Torture Existence by Demolition Hammer, one of my favorite Thrash/Death bands of all times.
Gutless remind me a lot of bands like Cancer from To The Gory End mixed with Demolition Hammer-like drum rhythms and breakdowns more in the vein of Dying Fetus, but with an early ’90s Scott Burns-like production. A great discovery along with Mutagenic Host’s latest and Sepulchral Curse’s new one yet to come.
Revelation from the Void was released in January by Personal Records, and it looks like the album got good coverage. I saw announcements here and there, do things go according to the schedule?
We honestly expected a good reception, but we didn’t expect so much. It’s crazy the amount of reviews, interviews, youtubers, etc. We are glad that the album has been well received. For our part now we have to work and present the album live.
We have fit in very well with Personal Records and Jacobo is giving us a wonderful treatment and very good communication between band and label.
Do you receive more invitations to play live too? Is there any practical side-effect of this underground popularity?
At the moment we have some proposals for some Underground festival, but unfortunately in Spain if you move within the Underground it is much more difficult to find promoters who risk taking you to their city without knowing if they will cover the costs of travel, room, etc..
It’s something that we have always found, so we often choose to organize our own concerts together with friendly bands or bands similar to our style and as a result of people seeing you live, more proposals appear, but as I say, the big promoters don’t even answer your mail and the small ones don’t risk losing money.
Well, there were five years between Endarkenment and Revelations from the Void. How did the band spend it (besides quarantine)? And how comfortable is it for you to have such a big gap between the albums?
Like many bands, the quarantine hurt us a lot as the pandemic exploded just when we released Endarkenment, so we had to cancel all our tour dates and lock ourselves away again. It’s as if that album doesn’t exist in people’s eyes.
It’s been 6 years and 3 of our members left the band amicably. So that interval has been good for us to resurrect the band and to be able to work without rushing on RFTV.
We have always been a band that doesn’t like pressure — we don’t need to release an album a year, because rushing is bad and constant albums can be mediocre. But of course, we have a problem: the longer it takes to release a new album, people forget and think that Onirophagus doesn’t exist.
But what has hindered us the most is putting the band back together again. Thanks to the addition of Obszen, Sir Bellum, and Chaos Reaver we have been reborn and now thanks to them we have many more ideas and faster ways to compose.
Was it easy to find the right replacement for those former members?
Yes, it was easy because we already had an idea of who to contact to replace them.
In Onirophagus we have always bet that the members that enter the band will be old friends of the Catalan scene. We don’t want to risk that someone we don’t know enters our circle.
Chaos Reaver is the guitarist of Estertor, a band in which I also sing; Sir Bellum I’ve known since I was 18 (and I’m almost 40) and I know he is a Death and Doom enthusiast. Obszen is also an old friend of the band and fan of Onirophagus since we started. He is also a Death Metal enthusiast and a collector with whom we spend a lot of money on vinyl releases every month.
Thanks to this philosophy of ours it was very easy for us to find new members.
Onirophagus was founded with a goal to perform old school death-doom, and you managed to record a third album in this style, but the band’s sound really upgraded. It’s in the composition’s structure; it’s in the sound too. How much effort did you put into Revelations from the Void? How do you rate your craftsmanship nowadays?
Our intention has always been to worship the old glories of the early ’90s, but we don’t want to sound the same as them, nor have a similar compositional line up. We have always chosen to merge those two styles, balancing between Death Metal and Doom but without sounding like more of the same.
In RFTV we have experimented with the sound, with the composition and even with the vocals. We didn’t want to sound like Incantation clones or Paradise Lost clones. The key is to find a middle ground, and that’s sometimes a problem when looking for a record label, because we don’t sound rotten enough, but we don’t sound melodic and melancholic enough either, and that has always given us a lot of problems.
We think we have worked very hard on this new work, and thanks to that, it is paying off very well at the moment.
Yep, and I think that you succeeded! But how do you see the band’s position on the regional and world scenes from this point of view? You have a strong album, you have a proper coverage, but that doesn’t make you significantly bigger because of the scene’s limits, so to say.
Even with a great coverage worldwide in terms of media, we have not stopped working on that promotion. That is, unfortunately you have to give content every day on social networks to make yourself visible, and for our part we keep sending mails to labels to edit cassette or vinyl, promoters, and festivals, etc..
Having a good album and a good label is not enough; the band has to keep working or you end up in oblivion. Nowadays with the vinyl fever few labels will risk to release you, that’s why we’ve decided to self-release the vinyl ourselves with the good income we’ve had with the CD on bandcamp. It’s sad, but we can’t wait for them to knock on the door; if you want something, do it yourself, no matter how much it sucks to spend so much money on it.
As I remember, five years ago you worked as one organism sharing duties of music writing almost on an equal scale. Did the situation change since then?
The addition of Sir Bellum and Obszen has given us a lot of life when it comes to composing. They are the true definition of Death Metal on one side and Doom on the other.
They have different and more modern ways of composing and recording riffs at home. We were always more old school, working at home and without so much computer stuff, but thanks to them things have changed and I think it’s much easier. They would bring recorded tracks from home, and then we would work on them at the club, all of us equally. But you could say that the great weight of the album lies with the two of them.
You still perform with three guitars, but it seems that due to the changes in lineup you played with twin guitars for some period of time. Is it so important for you to have three guitarists in the band?
With the departure of Shoggoth, we were left with only two guitarists and Sir Bellum switched to bass and recorded the bass and guitar tracks in the studio. With the entrance of Chaos Reaver on bass Sir Bellum returned to guitar, as it is a formula that we tried in Endarkenment and it worked very well, especially for live performances, as we can try many sequences of melodies and it gives a much fatter sound.
It’s funny because in Onirophagus we have four guitarists, but one of them is on bass.
Hah, that’s really funny! How do you fight the very presence of so many guitarists in the band? Is there someone who tends to make things more technical and progressive despite Omirophagus’ nature?
Hahaha fortunately no. We don’t like technical and progressive stuff and luckily all the members are rowing in the same direction. Having four guitarists is very productive, because they all bring something different and if we get stuck on a riff, the other one solves it. It’s something new for us as Onirophagus started with one guitarist, one drummer, and vocals, now we have more than enough members haha.
The Onirophagus lineup got three new members, and it looks like all of them came from other bands – Bizarre as always, Estertor, Street Lethal. How do you plan your schedule now, due to obligations before other acts?
We have always been in many projects at the same time and we have never had any problems when it comes to managing gigs or recordings.
In fact Estertor and Onirophagus share the same rehearsal space and we are very meticulous when it comes to not overlapping live shows or recordings. As long as that doesn’t happen, you can have more bands; besides I think it’s necessary because being in other bands of different styles makes you grow more as a musician, in my case my voice.
The Prehuman lyrics were focused on total negativity, on a man’s “return to the disgusting mud from which he was born”. How did this concept change through Endarkenment and to Revelations from the Void?
Endarkenment was more focused on purification through putrefaction. A denser and more spiritual album, I would even dare to say with a more occult touch.
Revelations From The Void is a concept album, a cosmic and apocalyptic horror story out of Moregod’s mind. It tells the story of an individual who, living a nondescript life, gradually feels disgusted with reality, dizzy in the earth itself. That leads him to discover an ancient tome, a cursed grimoire that he always had in front of him but did not look upon with the right eyes to realize it. Through this infamous tome he is given the formula to create a black brew that, when taken, will lead him to madness, to the most absolute emptiness.
Does it mean that there’s no any Lovecraftian influences in sight?
We are Lovecraft lovers, but there are thousands of extreme metal bands that already make references in their albums. We wanted to create our own cosmic horror story without having to introduce characters or gods from the Providence universe. Moregod created the story and we linked it in each song until its fatal denouement Stargazing into The Void. In fact the cover suggests a lot and even many people compare it to Sulphur Aeon, but fuck, it’s made by the same artist haha.
Do you feel that Onirophagus’ philosophy was embodied efficiently both in the album’s sound and lyrics?
We think more than ever. We had not yet made a concept album, bordering on the anti-cosmic, but without being just another band talking about Lovecraft’s ancient gods. To create something of our own, our own nightmare.
How much of Catalonian culture (in the wider sense of the word) do you see in the band?
We love our land, but we have never been a band that incorporates folklore or history of our land. We have always wanted to move away from that, to deal with other themes and I don’t think we will do that in the future.
And the spirit? You know like some nations have or pretend to have their own regional features. Stubbornness, relaxed attitude, tendency to artistic freedom, or whatever.
Neither in spirit. We have always wanted to separate our origin from our music. As I say, we love our land, but we want to separate it from our message. We want to give the listener the feeling of immersion in something terrifying, that they really believe what we narrate, and even with the voice, there are paragraphs where I give more emphasis, as they say in some reviews: voice of a mad reverend, black magician, or demon of sleep paralysis.
What are your further plans for 2025?
To be able to present live our new work and Endarkenment, since we didn’t have the opportunity to do it at the time. And try to participate in more than one festival.
Thanks for the interview! It was good to chat!
Thank you very much for the interview, cool questions and hope we can drink some beers some day!
UGH!
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/revelations-from-the-void
https://onirophagus.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Onirophagus