Simon & Garfunkel. The Everly Brothers. The White Stripes. Mantar.
What do these musical acts share in common? Not much, other than they were (or are) duos. Also, the first three artists listed above are dead, while Germany’s Mantar are still raging harder than… well, most Americans these days.
Ten years into their career, the two-piece are marauding back with a new slab of sludge, black metal, and melodic doom, Mantar unsheathe their fourth LP, Pain Is Forever and This Is the End, out now via Metal Blade Records.
One of the Bremen behemoths is Erinç Sakarya, a white-bearded drummer who hits harder than a carpenter hammering a nail into a stud. His partner in crime and good times is guitarist Hanno Klänhardt, who while soft-spoken in person, delivers deafening screams onstage. Sakarya plays the Straight Man, and Klänhardt the Wise Guy, with aplomb.
“A lot of the live sensation of Mantar is pure volume — which is great because it covers up that we’re not super-good musicians,” Klänhardt says, either humbly or sarcastically. He is wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt, a cap promoting German brewery Oettingen, and a permagrin. “We’re just loud.”
Like, really loud. Klänhardt and Sakarya bonded, in part, over their love of thrilling heavy music. Sakarya recalls having heard about a bassist who was “killing it” in a local band at just 15 years old. As if on cue, Klänhardt whips out a photo of himself, donning a Metallica T-shirt, on his 15th birthday.
“You had very long hair,” Sakarya quips.
“We both had long hair,” Klänhardt shoots back, without missing a beat.
He further expounds: “I fell in love with Erinç because he was several years older than I was, and it’s always cool to have a big, strong buddy.”
The dastardly duo’s comedic rapport isn’t always this visible, as they rarely discuss their music together in public. But on a rainy evening in May, the perpetually vaping Klänhardt and Zen-like Sakarya are clearly enjoying each other’s company during a virtual conversation online.
They’re also acutely attuned to each other’s answers to questions, so they don’t pass up the opportunity to crack a joke. They also lock gazes during Mantar’s live performances.
“We don’t know the songs good enough, so we have to stay in eye contact all the time,” Sakarya says. “If one of us forgets one part, the other one remembers.”
Klänhardt adds, “We started playing live very, very quick(ly) after we started rehearsing with this band. It was a natural thing for us to set up onstage just as we rehearsed, facing each other. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to pull off the songs. It became this image/stage persona kind of thing, but in the beginning, it was practical. We could look at each other and see there’s some nodding here, a wink there …”
One would expect Mantar to be brimming with confidence following the wild success (in underground metal, at least) of 2018’s The Modern Art of Setting Ablaze.
But making Pain Is Forever and This Is the End was as tortured an experience as the album title suggests. Klänhardt — who recorded, engineered and wrote the album — candidly admits that the entire process was downright nightmarish. Songs like “Hang ‘Em Low (So the Rats Can Get ‘Em),” “Grim Reaping,” “Piss Ritual,” “Of Frost and Decay,” and “Walking Corpse” mirror the sentiments behind the LP.
“The last one-and-a-half years were so shitty for Erinç and I (that) recording this album was no fun,” he says. “It completely blew and sucked through and through… Several times, I had to call up Erinç or write him, claiming, ‘… I don’t like the songs, and I don’t think it’s any good.’ Erinç had to reassure me: ‘Hey, no, trust your instincts. It’s good’ because I lost hope several times.”
Sakarya concedes that Mantar crafted Pain Is Forever and This Is the End during a difficult time. As for the quality of the material, though, he disagrees with his bandmate.
“Because I was not the person who wrote most of the stuff, I have a more objective view of it,” the drummer avers. “I was a little stressed about not having enough time to do it properly. But I was always sure that the songs… were the best we ever did.”
The admittedly obsessive Klänhardt chimes in, “I’m really glad that Erinç had confidence that the songs were good, because I (didn’t). The way I feel about writing music is, you’re building a house. But (if) you build it from the inside… you’re going to walk into walls. When you build a house from the outside, (you can) step away for a day or two, come back, and check it out from a different angle.”
Klänhardt says it’s no coincidence that the first lyric on the album is, “I live in a house that is made out of bones. On every wall hangs a cross.”
He further explains that the making of the record led him to states of depression and anxiety. Making matters worse, he spent time in the hospital recovering from a torn meniscus and ACL. The injuries occurred in Germany, where he had traveled to make the new record with Sakarya.
“It felt for the first time ever that the universe was (pitted) against us,” Klänhardt reveals.
On the other hand, Sakarya maintains that Mantar’s trials and tribulations led to an album that is more melodic and pop-structured than their previous studio albums, which also include 2014’s Death by Burning and 2016’s Ode to the Flame. Whether Sakarya’s or Klänhardt’s assessment of the new album is more accurate will be in the ear of the beholder. What matters most, though, is that Mantar endure.
Watch the video for “Odysseus” here:
For more from Mantar, find them on Bandcamp, Instagram, and Facebook.
Photo courtesy of Metal Blade
