Like its two predecessors, ‘Wrath and Ruin’ establishes Warbringer as one of the most interesting twenty-first century thrash metal bands. Singer John Kevill shares some in-depth insights into his excellent lyrics, his vocal approach and what it takes to stay relevant as a thrash metal band two decades into its career.

One notable difference to ‘Woe to the Vanquished’ (2017) and ‘Weapons of Tomorrow’ (2021) is a change of producer; ‘Wrath and Ruin’ was produced by Mark Lewis. “Mike Plotnikoff did a great job”, Kevill emphasizes. “But one thing we do sometimes if we’re looking to get a different sound is change personnel, just for the sake of the record sounding different. It’s not in any way that Mike didn’t do an amazing job, or that we wouldn’t have made a great record without him. It’s just that we were looking to make this record sound different than the last couple.

One of the other things we did along the same line of thinking was tuning to D standard. Typically, we had been in E-flat. Changing the sound a little bit kind of ensures that the songs will come off sounding different from the previous record. We were experimenting. And I think we just wanted a darker sound. The record has a lot of grim, depressive themes, and we wanted the thing to be kind of extreme.

Another conscious aim was to take the burners and the epics, and to kind of meld them. On the last couple of records, there’s a lot of separation between those types of songs. On ‘Vanquished’, all the epics are towards the end, and all the burners are at the front. Which is cool, it works. But here, we are just saying: let’s just put those together.”

Artistic Ammunition

“I tend to think the last three albums are pretty much where it’s at for us for front-to-back strong albums. I think we never put out a bad album, but I do think that there’s a level-up that happened when we reconstructed the band after 2013, 2014, when the whole thing kind of fell apart. When we were doing ‘Vanquished’, we kind of creatively refocused. And I think we landed on sort of the sound we are on now.

I also think that’s where I came into my own as a lyricist. Part of that was that I went to study history, and that gave me some artistic ammunition, you might say, and a different way of thinking about stuff. Just thinking: oh, I can use this in my metal band. Which I have. And that’s cool, and I think it sets me apart more as a writer.

Also, we’ve just been around longer, so it was sheer experience. Obviously other people will ultimately judge this, but I think we might be close, if not there, to having the most solid album run of a thrash band. We’re on seven now, and I think they’re all solid. Most of the bands I really like don’t have seven in a row that I flip back over. Especially if you look at the eighties thrash scene. There are a lot of bands that have one or two.”

How the Record Is Different

Through their evolution as a band, Warbringer has always been able to motivate itself artistically. “It’s something I really worry about”, Kevill admits. “Because I always say to myself that when I hit that point when I have to make another record for the sake of making a record, I will bow. I have to be able to tell myself how the new record is different from the previous one. Not even to tell journalists such as yourself, but to myself. You’ve got to respect the art of it.

That’s where I’m at right now. The world doesn’t need another thrash record for the sake of it. When we were just starting out, you couldn’t expect us to reinvent the wheel or anything. But we’ve gotten to a point where now, we’re writing less based off our own influences. We’ve been referring to a lot of our own back catalog.

There’s so much of it now, so we actually can go: this song should be more chaotic, like something off of ‘Walking Into Nightmares’. Or like we did with ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’: what if we did something in the vibe of ‘Defiance of Faith’, but in a smaller package? So we’ll write songs now referring to our own material, which is kind of funny.”

Very Targeted Songs

The making-of documentary series ‘The Science of Thrash’ revealed that on ‘Woe to the Vanquished’ and ‘Weapons of Tomorrow’, Kevill contributed to the songwriting by vocalizing riffs to drummer Carlos Cruz and guitarist Adam Carroll. “This time, I did not do it as much”, he smiles. “We drew on the Adam riff bank a fair amount. ‘A Better World’, for instance, came out of that. This time, I had this Google Doc floating around that I kept adding to. That started out with ‘The Sword and the Cross’ and ‘A Better World’, actually. I had those titles written down.

It was like: ‘The Sword and the Cross’, I want like a dark, epic thrasher about the lords owning you forever from medieval times to now, and I want a riff that sounds like you’re getting ridden down by a horse at some point. I would write things like that. Because that’s my angle: I want it to sound like this, and put an imagine in Carlos’ or Adam’s head, and then see what they come up with. You know what you’re hearing, and you’re going to hear something else back that’s similar and different, and then you’ve got to run with it and write that lyric.

It’s kind of a funny way to do it, but I’ve gotten used to it by now. And it’s cool, because we can write these very targeted songs: this song will be like this. For ‘A Better World’, it was: let’s go something like futuristic-ish-sounding melodic death metal stuff. And we got that. We found the riff. Adam had the main riff, with slower drums, like a half-time thing. But when we sped up the drums, that made the song.

Everything except ‘The Jackhammer’ ended up like that, where there was a song title and an idea before the song. For ‘The Jackhammer’, I heard the riff, and said: that sounds like a freaking jackhammer! And then I realized: that’s a word I’ve never used in a song! That sounds good! So that went the other way around.”

Becoming More Artistic

Warbringer’s music being connected to Kevill’s lyrical ideas is an important feature for the band, as Kevill writes about war in a far more historical and societal context than many of their peers. “The early records were basically just being descriptive”, he clarifies. “Just trying to sound cool. Then the later records are: well, we already are this band called Warbringer now, we’ve already set that up, now how do we progress that and become more artistic and write the best stuff we can within our mold?

That’s what kind of lead me to the last two records. Every great record has to add something, so I try to add as much as I can. Something that’s cool and interesting, and has good rhymes as well. Having studied history gave me a window through which to see the world, and the economic stage we’re in. On the surface, that might sound boring to people. But then, when you think about it, it affects the daily circumstances and the reality of your life more than any big, exciting-sounding event does.

The last two records have this sort of fear of modernity or fear of technology built into them. ‘Weapons of Tomorrow’ focused on how we use our human intellect and genius for more efficient ways to slaughter people. ‘Woe to the Vanquished’ is about the past of industrial warfare, where they started doing that, while ‘Weapons’ is kind of the present and the future of it. If you read about some battles, I don’t know, 1914 or something, you’ll think: oh god, they’re just cutting them down by the bushel here! And that’s before the gramophone record was even invented. Ancient technology, practically.”

Regressing the Standard of Living

“I think ‘Wrath and Ruin’ is more about the inner social conditions of that same world. It was a different angle, and I was consciously going for that. What we’ve landed on here is kind of unique, actually. I’m surprised no one’s written about it before – that I’m aware of anyway. No one in thrash metal, perhaps. I could be wrong: it might exist somewhere else. But I’m surprised I haven’t heard a record that’s hitting at these angles like this. The sort of hopelessness coming out.

Sadly, I think that’s where you end up if you take a sort of sober-minded assessment of the state of the world. And there doesn’t seem to be any solution offered. That’s what ‘A Better World’ is about. It seems like people have just accepted that things are going to get worse. The future of organized human life is in question in a real way.

What’s kind of funny about it is that a lot of the basic concerns here are actually the same things that were voiced on eighties punk and thrash records. We have the same fucking problems we did when I was a baby, and none of them has been solved. In fact, many of them are worse.

I think it’s definitely a thing of modern times that we have increasing technology, and it’s starting to really regress the standard of living in many ways, rather than progress it. Not just in the third world, which has been exploited since god knows when, but in the first world too. In America, certainly, a lot of people are getting squeezed and pushed down.

We have the richest rich, perhaps ever. I don’t think the Bourbons, the Romanovs, or the Caesars were able to rob their people as well as the current lords are. They’ve learned. They’re getting better at it now, and they have more advanced tools. There’s a real ‘ugh’ when you look at what’s going on in human civilization these days. And I kind of wanted to capture some of that. It affects me personally. It affects my vision and my prospects for my own future, and I feel a certain way about that. I wanted to get a lot of that on this record.”

Eternally Reincarnating Warrior

That doesn’t mean that all of ‘Wrath and Ruin’ adheres to that concept. “Actually, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’ is a George S. Patton reference”, Kevill explains. “A US Second World War general. If you like old war movies from the sixties and seventies, which I do, you’ll run across the film ‘Patton’, which is a biographical film of George S. Patton, who was probably the US’s best tank commander in World War II. He was also kind a nutty character, I’ll say. The guy was definitely a hard-ass, but he also turned out to have written some poetry.

There’s a scene about reincarnation in the film. Apparently, as far as I can tell, the actual general George S. Patton believed, for real, that he had lived thousands of times, reincarnating over and over as different warriors throughout history. So he had died on countless battlefields. They give a little excerpt through the poem and the film, so I went and found the whole thing, and read it. It’s pretty damn cool, actually. There’s some good lines in there.

In there, he’s talking about having hunted the mammoth at the dawn of the Ice Age, and then later, he’s marching with Caesar, he rides in Napoleon’s cavalry, and then later, he’s in World War II. It’s a cool idea: the idea of the self as this eternally reincarnating warrior. You struggle, you fight, you die, and then you rise to do it again somewhere else. And after the thousandth time, you must be wondering: why? What does it all mean? What’s it for?

I wanted to kind of capture that Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill feeling of this eternally reincarnating warrior. The line that really got me in there, that I did manage to get in the song, is a line where he talks about having been the Roman legionnaire who stabbed Jesus with a spear in Golgotha: I was that legionnaire who stabbed the savior Jesus, and then I was also Christian soldiers after, who prayed to that same god as they died. That hits the metal nerve right there! Which is funny, because I’m not even religious.”

Serious Organization

Reflecting on that idea raises an interesting question. “Why is it that all the religiosity goes so well in metal?”, Kevill wonders aloud. “It does! The most metal text you can possibly read is the Book of Revelations. You’ve got the antichrist, the mark of the beast, the horsemen of the apocalypse, the apocalypse itself, damned souls falling to hell, judgement and wrath… All the stock metal shit comes from there.

Another thing I kind of thought, and it’s something I thought a couple of albums ago on ‘Vanquished’, is that for me personally, none of the evils or problems in my life were ever caused by satanists. If you want to look at evil at scale, you’ve got to look at the church. They’ve done far more damage than satanic ritual congregations ever have. They have serious organization. They have funding. They have armies.

Look at the Russian czar: they had state church alliances where the church legitimates the czar. This is kind of in verse two of ‘The Sword and the Cross’: the church will legitimate the czardom to the people it’s oppressing. All these Christian peasants believe the czar is chosen by God, so it’s unthinkable to them that the czar might just be robbing them. Which he was.

That’s something I was thinking about on this record. Religion – not as it theoretically exists in theology, but as it actually exists as a system of power – is freaking evil stuff. I’m not the first to observe this, but I just had some thoughts on that.”

Not Unique in Trying to Be Unique

Compared to their earliest albums, it does seem like Warbringer is less concerned about whether their music meets all thrash metal requirements. “Perhaps some songs more than others”, Kevill smiles. “I think we basically just know that what we are doing is fundamentally thrashing, so we don’t need to try, haha! The right hand is flying on the guitar, so we can lean this way or that, and we’re still banging heads.

If we were still playing like on the first album, no one would still be listening to us. Because where would we have gone? What would we have done? How could we have told you the next record is also interesting and worth your time? You have to do something different, interesting, and creative. Because there’s no shortage of thrash metal, or any style of metal, ever, right? Look at the new releases page on Metal Archives. Every day, it’s like a hundred or more. It’s an amount you could never listen to.

We do try to stand out by doing things our own way, and I think some people catch on to that, and find it interesting and worthwhile. And we’re really, really thankful for that. Honestly. We’re not unique in trying to be unique. So we’re glad that folks find something special in our music. Because we could have been doing the same thing, and people could have not liked it. Or cared.”

Targeting the Past

“Warbringer got signed very early in its existence as a band. I’ve actually never been in a band other than Warbringer; it’s my first band. So we were as green as they come when we started. We had only been around for a couple of years before we got signed. Even though we can’t go back and change it, we were probably too green to be put out by a major label when we were. We were a garage band, basically. We had not played a lot, and suddenly, we got thrown out into the international metal scene, and people were comparing us to Slayer or something.

Also, when we first came out, we were known for playing in the classic thrash style. We also had a lot of criticism – the whole movement did – for being what they called ‘rethrash’, which was sort of the derogatory term for it. But the thing is: every metal genre is spinning its own wheels at this point. There hasn’t been a totally new style that’s emerged. Death metal hasn’t redefined what death metal is recently any more than thrash has. There are bands pushing in different directions, but that was already the case in the nineties.

People have targeted the past in all kinds of different ways. Faithfully. And well, often. I think rock music in general have been stuck for a while. I’ve read something I found kind of interesting, that music and art are stuck because society and culture are stuck. I don’t know if I can verify that, or call that true, but that’s a thought that I read, and I thought: maybe there’s something to that in post-modernism and art.

What we wanted in the first place was to reach back into the eighties. We found something special there. We didn’t grow up knowing metal. I definitely wasn’t; I had to go and discover it. What drew us to that rather than stuff of our own time is kind of an interesting question to answer now. I personally think it’s because the riffs are the best. We thought: why did they stop playing riffs that cool? Let’s do that again! That’s sort of where the band started. Right hand going fast: that is cool. That’s a good point to start.”

Leaning Past the Fence

“We very much see ourselves as rooted in the classic metal canon, which could be your thrash, speed, death, doom, power, black… All the major metal subgenres from the early to mid-nineties and before. The whole thing. Also, I’ll say this: if we look at the classic thrash metal sound, which one are we talking about? Thrash is actually a pretty wide genre. The stuff made in the Ruhrpott in Germany sounds pretty different from the Bay Area, Brazil, or the East Coast of the USA. There’s a bunch of different scenes with regional sounds and styles.

Then, the stuff from around 1985 sounds really different from, let’s say, 1989 or 1990. And there’s these random one-offs – your Watchtower, your Aspid – which are almost like roads not taken. When you look at that, or even inside that, there are a lot of different approaches. It can almost be like heavy metal on one end, where you have melodic vocals and mid-paced headbanging stuff, versus the things that are almost death or black metal on the other end. Some of the first vocals you might consider to be black metal vocals are on early Sodom and Kreator stuff.

So before we do any experimentation of our own, if we can even call it that, there’s already this big range of ground to cover. And if you just lean past the fence a bit, like some actual death metal or whatever, it shares a border already. For instance, ‘Neuromancer’ is kind of a death metal crusher. It can easily stand beside the other songs on the record, because it’s not a giant leap in the first place.

I’d say we are thrash at the core, and then kind of lean this way or that. Also, I think the raspy bark style that I do kind of makes it feel thrashy, even if the instruments are tremolo-picking, grim melodic stuff, or whatever. If I was a full-blown rasper, it would sound different. People might have categorized these songs as black metal.”

Rhythm and Words

Kevill’s vocal style and how much effort he spends on his lyrics call for careful enunciation. “I make sure to be as decipherable as I can be”, he says. “As a harsh vocalist, I’m using extremely limited or no melody. So what I have is rhythm and words. So if I’m going to mumble or whatever, then I’m only working with rhythm. And tone, I guess. That’s why I wanted to learn how to enunciate really well while going fast, and try to have catchy twists to everything, to where it sticks in your head.

Because I’m playing with all of these shredders, I have to be really good at what I’m doing, or I’m holding the whole thing back. I’m trying to do my best to be catchy within the standpoint of barking. When I was getting into this stuff, I would look at a bunch of lyrics for the rapid-fire barkers, and there would be a bunch of really sick lines in there. There’s one at the end of a verse in Dark Angel’s ‘Darkness Descends’, where he goes: ‘the judges commit genocide!’ And I remember the delivery. I just made the face reflexively there.

The fact that some songs were written around some of the song ideas I had absolutely gives me room to sort of stretch my legs in that place in the band. If nothing else, if people ask me what makes Warbringer different… Well: me. I do. I don’t sound like anybody. You can put me on and pick me out of a line-up if you know your thrash vocalists even a little.

That, to me, is my biggest achievement. You can hear who my influences are. Tom Araya, Mille Petrozza, Dark Angel, Demolition Hammer, Rob Urbinati… All of that’s in there, but I think you can pick me out instantly. I think I just wanted to do these rapid-fire, aggressive thrash barks, and make them totally decipherable, and as memorable as I can.”

A Hot-Rodded-Up Version of Rock

“I don’t know if I’ve ever sang a freaking pitched note in my whole career. But if you look at rock ‘n’ roll vocals, a lot of it isn’t. Even before metal, rock singers were wailing and screaming. And it’s harsh, but that’s cool. I wouldn’t want an opera singer to front my rock band. Characterful is the thing I value most. Having character and soul in there, where people will think: this guy’s belting it like he means it! Did you hear the thing his voice did when he was screaming mad and cracked in a really cool way?

Metal is obviously a rock-based genre, but at some point in metal history, when you get to really crazy tech-death or something, you’re basically not listening to a rock band anymore. It’s brutal and heavy, but it’s something else. And I kind of think that the extreme end of thrash is sort of about as hard as you can push the rock template, but still being that. Thrash metal is like this really hot-rodded-up version of rock.

Stuff like the middle of ‘Tired and Red’ by Sodom: that’s just like a rock riff. And I love how that’s in there. One of the parts that just cracks me up is when they finish that long, rocking passage, there’s just no transition to the fast part that comes next, haha! So I really like to still be able to bob my head to it, there’s still a recognizable verse-chorus structure. We like to be as catchy as we can, while playing as fast as we do and screaming the whole time.

We want to play as fast as we can, before you get used to the speed and it stops sounding fast. We’re still kind of speeding most of the time, but it’s relative. We have our cruising-speed fast, our ‘oh, now we’re pushing it’ fast, and then we have the occasional lurchers. But we want to go as fast as we can without losing that relative speed. We’re always trying to walk that line.”

Absolutely Unembarrassed

Another task at hand for Kevill is to sell what he’s singing. “There’s a guy who had me do some vocal lessons for him, and I was telling him: you have to imagine yourself as the character of your music”, he says. “You’re that guy. And you have to completely be absolutely unembarrassed, and just ham it out as hard as you can. Be as over the top as possible. Be that version of yourself. Just do it.

If you take a lot of the stuff I do out of context, it probably would look ridiculous or dorky. It’s like the stuff I would do when I was alone, getting into metal, being really stoked about it, and I would act out stuff alone in my room. I just do that same stuff on stage. Just channeling that. If you unapologetically do that, it will come across, I think.

Some of these songs to, the character that I’m inhibiting, the voice that I’m trying to do is maniacally evil. For instance, the end of ‘The Sword and the Cross’ is a lot of fun to sing, because you’re just this cackling, cartoonishly evil villain going: ha ha ha! I’ll own you forever! There’s a character there, so I try to lean in and do it, and not shy away for it. Leaning into the song gives you the most character.”

A Feature of the Metal Genre

As such, Kevill’s approach is theater as much as it is music. “There’s no line between the two”, he emphasizes. “Also, having this over-the-top theatricality is a feature of the metal genre as I know it. I do think that that’s one of the reasons why I gravitate towards older metal: even if the singer isn’t even good, you can tell who it is. There’s some singers on metal singers on classic metal records that aren’t great, but I wouldn’t change it at all, because it’s immediately identifiable. I prefer that to a competent, but standard growl.

I’ve heard a lot of bands where I think: if you swap the vocalist out, I couldn’t tell. And there’s plenty of folks who love that style, but for me personally, it often ruins it. Because I just want some unique character, some unique soul on there. That’s what gives it an intense personality beyond just cool riffs. Which you do need, because most riffs are basically cool. Most people don’t put their worst riffs on their records.

So once you’ve got your collection of cool riffs, what makes the song is: what sells it? What gives it the X factor, je-ne-sais-quoi kind of thing? If you had all the riffs on ‘Bonded by Blood’ without some of the lines and Paul Baloff’s manicness, it wouldn’t be the fun record it is. You really need the whole thing to come together.

As a singer, you have the job to be the voice of the band. That sounds obvious when I say it, but you have to really embody the idea or the vibe of the band. To just be that. I think that that’s something that was either lost or diminished between old metal and current metal. Not everywhere, there are plenty of great singers out there, but just saying as sort of an aggregate claim. I think wanting to do that helped me sound different.”

An Absolutely Ungodly Amount of Water

“I didn’t study so much standard technique. When I was starting, there was the ‘The Zen of Screaming’ thing, which looks at how you keep your voice as a harsh singer. I was looking at some of the techniques, but I didn’t want to go too far with it. Also because the vocalists who did it kind of sounded samey to me, and I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to do a totally perfect technique scream that sounds the same as the other guys. I’d rather to a bad-technique scream that hurts and sounds like me”

That does come with its fair share of challenges on tour. “It goes with some difficulty”, Kevill admits. “There’s an old bit from the old ‘X-Men’ cartoon. You know how Wolverine’s got the claws that come out of his hands? Someone asks him: does it hurt when you do that? And he goes: sssssh, every time! And that’s kind of how I feel about doing metal vocals. It always takes it out of me. I do get shot an blown out on tour, and I pretty much just spend my whole day recovering from the last one.

But keeping my voice in shape is the normal stuff: drink an absolutely ungodly amount of water is pretty much the one I found actually works. Do your warm-ups, do your stretches, sleep enough, have a couple of beers and no more… It’s mostly just those. And then having done it a million times. A lot of times on tour, sometimes by show twenty, I’m in the back trying to do the ‘Firepower Kills’ scream. Some days it’s just cracking and not there, and I have to gargle salt and all of this stuff to get it back online.

Usually the thing that’ll go for me is the high shriek range first, and I can kind of do my mid-range bark indefinitely. Sometimes I’m a little more throaty than I’d like to be, but I can still do it. Sometimes if I’ve been going a bunch of days, with no days off, I can’t do my highs the second half of the set. It’s never been easy for me, and if I make it look easy, that’s because I’m trying to. It’s not. It’s sheer forcing it through, pretty much.”

A Rotating Ad-Lib for Tour Jokes

That doesn’t mean Kevill isn’t enjoying himself on tour. “After the songs are done, the rhyme scheme exists in my head, so every lyric I’ve ever written is now a rotating ad-lib for tour jokes”, he smiles. “One of the old ones from a while ago is ‘Living Weapon’. There’s a line in there that goes: infrared vision, I’ll hunt you day and night, my orders are to murder, and I’ve got you in my sights. So: improvising lyrics, I do it day and night, my orders are for burgers, and I also want some fries!

I do that all the time. But I honestly think that if you’re a vocalist who writes lyrics for your band: do it! Weird-Al your own songs, Weird-Al other songs you like – I’m using Weird Al as a verb here – where you have to keep the same syllables, you have to keep the same rhyme scheme, and it has to rhyme in the same places. That’s a good mental exercise for writing songs. Because if you’re writing a lyric and you don’t like it, this silly-ass game trains you kind of naturally to sift out the words like moving parts.

I’ve been doing this since I was young. Just because I thought stupid, funny rhymes were cool. But it actually helps me when I try to write stuff that isn’t stupid or funny. It gets you thinking along the lines of: how can I keep the musicality of the words here, and then change the meaning, and in how many ways can I flex that?

And you could go: okay, if we’re doing this one, all of the lines have to be about touring. So then you have a concept that your words have to stay within when you do these funny things. That’s helpful when I want to write a song: here’s my title, here’s my idea, so my lyrics have to connect to that somehow.”

A Giant Eagle

Those hoping to hear Kevill Weird-Al his way through a Warbringer song during their current tour cycle will end up disappointed. “Oh no, I don’t do any of it live”, he says. “One time we toured with Enforcer from Sweden, and they have a song called ‘Undying Evil’. And somehow, we came up with the idea of calling it ‘A Giant Eagle’, and it being about touring the United States. So I actually went and got their lyrics, and rewrote their entire song ‘Undying Evil’ to be ‘A Giant Eagle’.

It was pretty great, haha! It was like: creature of flight, Walmart has amazing value. Stuff like that. But it fit completely. It was exactly the lyric scheme. When I showed it to Olof (Wikstrand, Enforcer’s singer/guitarist), he was amazed. And he actually sang it! He sang ‘A Giant Eagle’, and I have that recording, haha! That was the furthest this word game thing ever went.”