Conjurer – Mire: Exclusive Album Stream

Something wicked this way comes from the Midlands in the form of Mire, the debut album from Conjurer, streaming exclusively on The Independent 4 days before official release

Conjurer, from left to right, Conor Marshall

Conjurer have been whipping up a frenzy in venues up and down the UK with their intoxicating brew of extreme metal styles since February 2015. Their 2016 EP I was an incredibly promising amalgam of sludge, hardcore, prog, black and death metal, even if it never quite managed to re-create the intense pummelling onslaught that was their live show. However, Mire takes many bold steps forward; an increased running time allows a broader canvas for the band to fully explore their idiosyncrasies and expansive tendanceis. Sludgy tar-thick riffs collide with oppressively ominous atmospherics, which are then punctuated with the odd frantic, gut-churning burst of speed to create an unholy maelstrom that has already seen Mire hailed as one of the most outstanding, visceral, sonic experiences of 2018 across the metal press.

The band formed, like so many do, over the quagmire of bitter rants, humble brags and searing, naive political commentary that forms the foundations of social media. Guitarist/vocalist Brady Deeprose made an enquiry over Facebook, asking if anyone would like to form a death metal band in the vein of Gojira and The Black Dahlia Murder. Fellow guitarist/vocalist Dan Nightingale heeded the call and alongside powerhouse drummer Jan Krause, they promptly began to hammer out songs that sounded like neither Gojira nor The Black Dahlia Murder. “Me and Brady would get in a room and play each other all these bands that we liked,” says Dan “but whenever we tried to write anything that sounded like them, it just didn’t work.” “I think once we got Jan in, that really opened up new things for us” adds Brady. “We had a pretty narrow-minded vision of where we could take this; we were writing fairly straight-down-the-line death metal songs and I think Jan would’ve just been bored if we’d continued doing that.”

Mire is certainly loaded with sudden turns of pace and outstanding technical chops that demand a nuanced and hugely accomplished drummer man the tiller. But there are more elements at play in Conjurer’s complex blend than merely an exceptional drummer. The midlands-based quartet gradually began to discover their own sound organically by playing with a cavalcade of bands, all of whom are pushing the boundaries of extreme music and the db limits of venues across the country. It’s telling that in place of a bio under the ‘story’ section of the band’s Facebook page, it simply says ‘We’ve shared stages with’ and then proceeds to list 70 bands, as if this were all you needed to know about the Conjurer origin story. There are so many ingredients in their thick sludgy stew that combined, they create something resolutely fresh.

“I’ve thought about this quite a lot” says Brady “because there seems to be a lot of people writing about how we blend styles and genres so seamlessly but we're never really thinking about genre when we approach song-writing. I think more in terms of technique; so rather than saying in the practise room “let’s write a black metal section”, it’s more a case of “let’s write this fast picked tremolo part and put blastbeats underneath it. I think the key to making it feel so natural is to take influence from specific techniques and ideas as opposed to a genre as a whole. Once you start thinking about song-writing in terms of genre, you're automatically setting up barriers between parts.”

This way of thinking has allowed for an extremely fluid approach to the construction of Conjurer’s songs, which vary wildly between all facets of extremity whilst still playing out in a completely natural and logical fashion. It is perhaps the clarity with which they have amalgamated so many styles that has impressed critics the most, with blogs, online zines and printed press falling over themselves to bestow praise upon Mire. Whilst these accolades no doubt make it a rather excellent time to be in Conjurer, it’s also bemusing and baffling for these four humble, down to earth, midlands lads who’ve somehow managed to create a post-sludge-core masterpiece simply by dicking about every Wednesday at practise.

“It's one of those really weird things because nothing actually changes for us” says Brady. “It's not affecting our approach to the music, we’re just playing to more people, which is wicked and we're selling more merch, which again, is really helpful because it's well expensive being in a band! But getting a 9/10 in Metal Hammer from Stephen Hill was a big deal and 5Ks in a magazine like Kerrang!; it’s stuff that we’d never have expected at all, regardless of how well the band is doing.” “I feel kind of confused by it all really” adds Dan, seeming momentarily like a rabbit in the headlights. “It's really nice but it’s a very surreal thing to try and process. My Dad was saying the other day 'you realise you've got 5Ks in a magazine you grew up reading? If I'd have told you when you were 13 you were going to get a 3K review in Kerrang!, you wouldn’t have believed me.’ It's just this strange thing that we never expected to happen, as wonderful as it is.”

It seems unlikely that the accolades will be subsiding any time soon, especially considering that live, the material on Mire is even more bludgeoning than it is on record. It’s remarkable that a band who played their first gig just 3 years ago can be so potently savage. Perhaps the reason why the material on Mire is so expertly refined is that the majority of it has been tried and tested in a live environment since their first show on 1^st February 2015. “We’ve been playing most of these songs since before the release of the first EP” says Brady. “’The Mire’ was in a state of half-completion when we went in to record I and the only songs that have been written since then are ‘Choke’ and ‘Thankless’. It’s really interesting the amount of people that have commented on the progression from I to Mire; in reality, the majority of the songs were all written around the same time.” “We’ve had a lot of people say that ‘Of Flesh Weaker Than Ash’ is such a mature progression for our band” adds Jan “but we played that song at our first gig. When we recorded I, we only had enough money to record 4 songs, so we simply chose the most blunt and brutal songs we had so we could make a cohesive 25 minute EP. Whereas now, we’ve got 45 minutes to work with, so we can push those expansive elements a bit more.”

There’s lyrical substance as well as musical, with "Choke" castigating the paparazzi and gutter press, "Thankless" scrutinising themes of privilege and ‘The Mire’ taking its inspiration from an old English poem in the Yorkshire dialect. “I’m fascinated by English folklore” says Dan. “That poem is about what the soul goes through once its host has passed away” says Dan “and it talks about walking through mires and barren landscapes. If you were greedy in life, the path will be much more treacherous, so you would have to walk through a field of thorn bushes and if you were selfish, the thorns would prick you to the bone. Some of the songs are more personal now but I've always enjoyed writing about shipwrecks or science fiction, stuff that’s more fantastical. I've never been much of an introspective writer really but now I’m having more experiences growing up, there is more personal things starting to creep in there.”

With such a phenomenal start to their career and with no plans to compromise what-so-ever, it seems Conjurer are in a perfect place to join their peers, the celebrated likes of Employed to Serve and Venom Prison, as one of the UKs finest contemporary extreme metal acts. They certainly are onside with critics and their fanbase is rabid, and will surely increase rapidly once Mire is officially release. "It's great that other people like the music as much as we do" says Jan "but at the same time, even if they didn't like it, we'd still be immensely proud of it. If we didn't think it was good, we wouldn't have released it but it's nice that there's a growing number of people who also think it's good!"

Mire is released via Holy Roar records on Friday 9^th March