Denver Colorado’s In The Company Of Serpents are set to release their latest record, A Crack In Everything, July 11. States guitarist and singer Grant Netzorg, “I wrote it during and after a losing battle with alcohol, and a lot of this deals with the despair and darkness I discovered in that time. I felt defeated, physically and mentally, and was drifting into ever-deepening depression.” Powerful, indeed. A Crack In Everything is a powerful sojourn into the depths of darkness, through riffs of mile high doom and gloom, a document not of a victim but as a survivor.
Netzorg continues, “Performing the material is fairly cathartic for me, so that doesn’t pose too many issues. It’s similar to the cliché that knowing a demon’s true name gives you power over it—If I acknowledge these uncomfortable facets of my experience, they are less likely to poison me. The more difficult aspect is discussing these things in a public space. I feel pretty vulnerable about all this, and putting all of it out in the open is an unsettling experience.
“… Once I got sober from booze the songs started to come together rapidly, and that creative momentum can be reassuring. So, as everything started to coalesce into a full record with a cohesive theme, the actual work of the writing felt fairly easy. The difficulty really lies in putting all of these themes out in the open to be dissected and consumed by relative strangers. It’s essentially pointing a spotlight at my weaknesses in a public forum, which leaves me feeling exposed and prone.”
A Crack In Everything could be viewed as somewhat of a departure from previous records. Adds Grant Netzorg, “The nature of this subject matter isn’t something that could be veiled through a bunch of occult symbolism, so the writing on this one is much more direct in that way. There are still touches of esotericism here, but it takes a back seat to the raw subject matter at hand. The album functions for me as a cord-cutting ritual.
The idea there is that you build up a grotesque effigy that is a composite of all the aspects of yourself that you’re trying to confront and overcome, and you then ritually sever its connection to you and banish it. So, in that way there is still a ritual element to the record. That being said, there are also parts of it that aren’t esoteric in any way. The song ‘Until Death Darkens Our Door,’ for example, is an attempt at amends for terrible things said and done during the throes of addiction. That was the last song written for the record, and I wrote the lyrics shortly after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It is my way of trying to acknowledge all the ways I’ve immensely fucked up, while also pledging to be there to the end.”
The concept, natural or esoteric, of light also plays a unique role throughout this album. “I find light to be symbolically rich, and we’ve explored it a number of different ways. The three records prior to this one—Merging in Light, Ain-Soph Aur (limitless light translated from Hebrew), and Lux—all explicitly play with light in their titles, and the idea of light as a sort of primordial root-essence fascinates me. On this record, light is there by implication rather than being right in the title. The album takes its name from the Leonard Cohen song ‘Anthem,’ which includes the chorus, ‘Ring the bell that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in.’ I thought that lyric was a perfect metaphor for what I was trying to convey here. Despite all of the anguish and darkness of the situation, light still seeps in, as nothing is ever truly absent of it.
“It’s a bit cheesy, but there is definitely a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ aspect to it. For all of the despair and gloom of the record, there is still an element of the phoenix rising from the ashes here. One example would be the lyrical shift in the chorus to the album opener, Don’t Look in the Mirror. The first several choruses are “Don’t look in the mirror, lest you recognize this curse. Don’t look in the mirror, you’re chasing your own hearse.” For the final chorus, the lyrics shift in a way that confronts the ills being described: “Go look in the mirror, observe the taken toll. Go look in the mirror, repair this broken soul.”
In The Company Of Serpents were formed in 2011 as a two-piece sludge/doom-focused project between guitarist/vocalist Grant Netzorg and drummer JJ Anselmi. Netzorg has soldiered on releasing four LPs, including 2020’s Lux, an EP, and a standalone single since their inception. In 2023, drummer Andy Thomas (Only Thunder, Tin Horn Prayer) joined Netzorg and bassist/lap steel guitarist Ben Pitts (Nightwraith, Abhoria) to begin work on this year’s A Crack In Everything.
“I initially formed the band as a two-piece with JJ Anselmi on drums,” states Netzorg. “We were eager to just get out there and start playing shows and didn’t really spend any time looking for a bassist. I auditioned a friend or two early on, but I had already tweaked my guitar sound so much at that point that I didn’t feel a bassist was necessary. I was playing (and continue to play) in baritone tunings, running part of my signal an octave down through a bass amp, so a lot of that low end was already covered.
“However, after six to seven years of that, I began to feel that our writing and what we could perform on stage was limited by having only two people, so I recruited Ben Pitts to join on bass and also to pick up the lap steel parts that had previously only been on our records. If we did want to incorporate that sound live, I had to do so via a sample pedal, which feels a lot less organic than playing those parts live. He initially was apprehensive about the lap steel, having never played one before, but he is an excellent musician, and quickly developed his own style with it that grew beyond the parts I’d originally had him playing.”
And have no fear, Ntzorg intends to take In The Company Of Serpents out on the road so fans can get a taste of the band live. “We have a quick tour of the Midwest scheduled this July, as well as two home-town shows. First, we’ll be playing Unhinged fest on July 26, and then we’ll have our record release show on August 9 at the Bluebird Theater. For the record release show, we’ll have a number of exclusive merch items available, including various picks and studio notes from the recording session that will only be available at that gig. Following that, we also have a west coast tour in the works for October/November with our old friends and past tourmates, Goya. All booked dates can be found on our bandcamp page.”
Photo Credit Kate Rose
