When I think of the hottest U.K. metal upstarts in Conjurer, I get hungry—both for whatever weird, heavy shit they will release but also because their music has a perfect culinary parallel. While thousands of miles apart, Conjurer have a clear jambalaya taste, as they put a whole bunch of different, flavorful, metallic influences to great use. That’s most apparent when listening to their excellent new record, Páthos, out now via new label Nuclear Blast. While breakout album Mire was heavily seasoned with progressive death metal (ancho powder?), sludge (black garlic), and metalcore (salt, for the haters/genre purists?), there’s a load more black metal, post-metal, and doom on display here. Whatever musical culinary school exists in my mind, Conjurer are the Top Chefs.
Four years and a lifetime of touring in between records has been long enough for their dish to simmer, so I asked Bassist Conor Marshall, why the long wait in between records? I started by noting that Páthos is much more adept at applying the various influences seamlessly.
“That’s always been the goal, so I guess from what you said, that it sounds like hopefully we’re getting better at it, but obviously, the way it works in songs is like, OK, you have this section and then this section, or we have this idea and this idea, but the point and the bit that we end up getting really bogged down in and spending the most time on is fitting all of these different bits and different ingredients, like you said, but fitting them together in a way that works seamlessly. So that it’s not just, ‘Yeah, here’s the riff, and then here’s the quiet bit and here’s the this.’ It’s like, all those bits are there, but everything is meant to be there, and the way that we get from one bit to another, either just sections of songs or even song to song on the album, everything is meant to be purposeful.”
“We’re just getting better at it,” he continues, “where we’re maybe then able to focus on that even more deeply within sections. Maybe we can tease this one over here, and that’s got the overlap.” It’s definitely, from what you were saying, that’s the main thing that we’re all about with our songwriting. We’re not looking to specifically write black metal, death metal, sludge, whatever. It’s just we have a load of influences. We have lots of stuff we want to do. It’s more just, how do we get it all to work together?”
Thankfully, Conjurer have always been good at that, but they’ve graduated from the Masters courses to a PhD (pretty huge decibels) level with Pathos.
Following up a mammoth debut like Mire is no small feat, but even the band would admit the time between albums was longer than anticipated. Marshall explains why it took so long for Páthos to get out:
“Part of the reason that this is so long after Mire is because we’re terrible at writing whilst doing other things. We were very fortunate when Mire got all this acclaim, and everybody seemed to love it, and so that meant we were getting incredible touring offers, festivals, this, that, and the other, that we just couldn’t and didn’t want to turn down. We were so busy; that left us no time for writing, and then even if we did, it just never happened.
“We needed the pandemic to be able to sit down and have nothing else to focus on, literally legally not be allowed to leave our houses. But apparently, that’s how you get a Conjurer album. If you have to enforce the law to get us inside, OK, then maybe we’ll write an album. But to be honest, it lent itself, because that’s how we write anyway. We’re not a jam band. We don’t get in a room and session or anything like that. It’s very much, we write at home separately. We tab it up; we email it across to each other. People then listen to it, tell everyone that it’s rubbish, and then we’d start again (laughs). But it was how we would’ve written anyway; it was just useful that we didn’t have any other choice.”
Conjurer take the term “páthos” to new heights throughout the record. I feel like I’m literally listening to a character going further and further into this chasm of insanity.
“We’ve never done anything like it,” Marshall says. “None of it’s ever meant to be conceptual. I don’t think we’ll ever do a concept album where we have to fit everything to tell one story, but you’re right. We’ve always written about the similar themes of mental health and all that stuff. That’s the thread that we’ve found is, everything is always written from a human perspective and a human experience. There’s songs on the album like ‘Basilisk,’ about the Basilisk theory and the idea of AI and robots taking over and all that stuff… we’re like, ‘OK, well we’re not going to write a song about robots taking over,’ (laughs) but then taking that idea and the song is now about something related.
“From what I’ve been told, (the theory) is the basic idea that when robots rise up, eventually they’ll be able to see and know anything you’ve ever done on the internet or in life. They’ll be able to tell if you basically helped or hindered their advancement. So, if they found out that you helped them, cool, you’re all good, don’t worry about it. But obviously, they will kill everyone who held them back, essentially. But rather than talking about that, the idea is, what’s the human perspective of that? If you knew that was the case, and you knew that robots were going to be rising up and taking over, it’s the curse of life, it’s like, “Well, would you tell people and be like, ‘No, you have to live your life this way because the robots are going to take over. You have to make sure that you help them,’ or would you keep that to yourself and let people their lives as it is?’”
“So it’s always the theme, and the thread is always from a human experience and a human place,” he continues, “even if it’s not necessarily a topic completely about humans, like emotions and mental health and all of that. But then it also always seems to take a sad or a darker turn as well. That was where Páthos came from. One of us stumbled across the word, and it was perfect. It’s where suffering and all that stuff comes from. It just sums up everything on the album and everything we’ve ever written about in one neat package. That’s where that came from; that’s just always been what we’ve focused on lyrically.”
If it’s not clear, folks, Páthos is not an album to have a chuckle with friends about… Musically, it’s somehow the most oppressive music of Conjurer’s career while also being the prettiest, most comprehensive yet.
“There was one point very early on, like I said before, where (vocalist and guitarist) Dan (Nightingale) will have these artistic, romantic ideas in his head that we then have to talk him down from. But initially, he wanted the whole thing to be that disgusting sludge stuff. Basically, how ‘Rot’ ended up being, he wanted the whole album to be like that. Luckily, it didn’t turn out that way, and he’s of that opinion now as well. Other than that, the only thing that we really focused on is that we didn’t want to do Mire Part 2. It was more just, say we wanted to push anything that we did do, whether it was the more post stuff or the more aggressive stuff or whatever, whatever we wanted to do. We wanted to make sure that we pushed it and took it a little further, so it just experimented more with it, which would probably explain why it’s a little more dense as well. There is more going on because it’s just trying to really see those ideas at their most. It’s a very maximalist album in that sense.”
Order the album at this location.
