Interview with Gloom vocalist Bill Calomiris | By Kit Brown
Though Washington D.C.’s Gloom are already well on their way to carving out a sound that’s all their own, vocalist Bill Calomiris certainly understands the pitfalls of being in a group who can’t be pigeonholed and accurately described without at least five or six words. “It’s hard to place us on any tour: do we fit in with death metal? Do we fit in with black metal bands? Where on that spectrum do we lie?” he muses. “What would be wrong with coming to the table and doing what we felt like doing instead of what we felt like a market wanted?”
As it turns out, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the synthesis of death metal, black metal, doom, and progressive metal on Gloom’s debut LP, Solaris, released June 2 through eOne Music. In just nine tracks—and one startlingly clever rendition of Alice In Chains’ “Them Bones”—Gloom fearlessly explore essentially every subset of extreme metal.
“We really focused on bringing our own tastes to the table,” Calomiris says. “I was really sick of being in subgenre bands. Like saying, ‘We’re going to do brutal death metal, and we have to have these kinds of lyrics, these kinds of vocals, [and] this kind of guitar.’ I feel like that whole scene is just getting tired. It’s contrived now. How many brutal death metal bands are out there? How many slam death metal bands? How many black metal or thrash bands? It’s a never-ending sea of sameness, and the one thing I wanted to do differently in this band, vocally and lyrically, was to be as honest as we can with ourselves.”
Gloom’s four members—Calomiris, bassist Jason Sayell, guitarist Dante Dalton, and drummer Albert Born—come from a wide variety of musical backgrounds. Whether it’s Calomiris’ past as the vocalist for brutal death metal outfits or Dalton’s experience as a Music Institute graduate and contributor to film scores, Gloom’s bag of heavy tricks never seems to completely run out. Considering the project was originally meant to be Calomiris’ final hour as a musician, his need to use Gloom as a pure emotional outlet rather than a marketable product seems even more appropriate. “We had no intention originally of making this a professional band or anything like that,” he says. “I personally saw it as the last thing I was going to do in music. I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this very last thing, for the very last time, I’m going to do it right.’”
After being received so well by critics and fans alike, Gloom successfully booked their first major national tour, May and June’s Devastation On The Nation, alongside legendary bands like Cryptopsy and Decrepit Birth, as well as technical behemoths like Rivers Of Nihil and The Zenith Passage. “We’re so unbelievably thankful that we can be on a tour like that,” Calomiris exclaims. “Full steam ahead! We don’t stop, we just keep moving.”
Purchase Solaris here: Physical | Digital
