Polish metal legends Kat appear to be more ambitious than ever on their new album ‘Death Is Not Enough’. There is an international line-up, there are fresh, energetic compositions, and the band simply sounds decades younger than they are. Founding guitarist – and only constant band member – Piotr Luczyk lets us look behind the curtain.

“When I was composing the first songs for the new album, I was living in the UK”, Luczyk explains. “Naturally, because of the distance, my relationships with some of the guys in the band became a little less close. The only person who remained fully involved in working on the new Kat album the whole time was Harris (bassist Adam ‘Harris’ Jasińsky).

At some point, the material started to take a very definitive shape. I played the demos to Qbek (Weigel, former singer), who honestly told me that this kind of metal was too heavy for him. I had no problem with that. Qbek is an excellent vocalist, and he knew what he was talking about. Later, I sent the material to Mariusz (Prętkiewicz, drummer). When we heard his versions, Harris and I came to the conclusion that we needed to find a new drummer.

Then I thought: when it comes to composing and recording an album, where you live practically no longer matters these days, then why should we limit our search to just one country? Harris was looking for musicians, I was checking his suggestions and contacting the people who, in my opinion, suited the new material best. That’s how we found Guilherme (de Siervi, singer) and Pedro (Tinello, drummer) from Brazil, and Sieg (singer) from South Korea.”

Temperament, Musicianship and Unique Skills

“My partner Esther found Jason Stallworth, who wrote the lyrics. He, in turn, lives in the United States. On top of that, Valeria, our manager, is from Italy and lives somewhere else again. So, actually, a little by accident, Kat became a very international band, haha!

The most important thing, however, is that geography did not make our work difficult in any way. Quite the opposite: everything went very smoothly. Everyone knew what I expected from them, and I could concentrate mainly on the music. In the end, it never mattered to me what country someone came from. The only thing that mattered was whether they understood the material, felt its character and could give it exactly what it needed.

Looking back, I have to say that it was one of the best changes that could have ever happened to me. It opened Kat up to people I probably never would have met otherwise, and musically, it gave me exactly what I was looking for.

I composed the entire album from scratch. We didn’t use any ideas from years ago. As for Guilherme and Pedro: the guys received demos from me of the compositions that had already been recorded. We didn’t want to change anything. Their job was to bring their temperament, musicianship, and unique skills to the album, and to give everything they had within this genre. And they did it brilliantly.”

Complete Musical Awareness

“Compared to ‘Without Looking Back’ (2019), ‘Death Is Not Enough’ is a more condensed album. Apart from two moments, there are no long solo sections. The songs are generally shorter, but they deliver exactly the kind of impact I wanted to achieve. In terms of atmosphere, ‘Death Is Not Enough’ is a little darker and – from the listener’s perspective – more aggressive as well. A lot of that comes from Guilherme and Sieg.

But that aggression isn’t created by thirty-second notes: EEEE FEFF C-sharp B C F-sharp F-sharp F-sharp CCCCC B C-sharp, plus blast beats and rhythmic vocal sibilants with no defined pitch. The aggression and power come from the character and the sound of the vocalists, and above all from their ability to communicate a full spectrum of emotions and intensity.

What is very important to me is that Guilherme and Sieg sing clearly defined melodic lines, built from many different notes that together create a melody. Because ultimately, music is melody. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that’s an approach to music I’m going to stick with.

Another new element on this album is the incredible precision with which Pedro fits his playing into the structures of the songs. Before recording the drums, Pedro asked me for a demo containing everything: lead vocals, backing vocals, solos, as well as my suggestions for how the drums should work within the song. It was the first time I had played with a drummer for whom the vocal line was more important than what he himself was going to play. Pedro simply has complete musical awareness. The same is true of Guilherme and Sieg. It was brilliant.”

A Level Never Reached Before

“Another difference is that on ‘Death Is Not Enough’, I didn’t incorporate such obvious blues elements. Overall, ‘Without Looking Back’ is a more American-sounding album, more rooted in the atmosphere of the nineties. ‘Let There Be Fire’ is a good example. ‘Death Is Not Enough’, on the other hand, contains precise echoes of what I was composing on ‘Metal and Hell’ (1986), ‘Oddech Wymarłych Światów’ (1988), and ‘Bastard’ (1992), but without being weighed down by the past, and filtered through time, experience, and the musical awareness of the band today.

This is music we created consciously and, above all, music that we ourselves want to listen to. It isn’t part of any race or an attempt to follow the market. We are not trying to catch up with anyone or adapt ourselves to whatever happens to be fashionable at the moment. And there is one more element, perhaps the most important one: the new musicians and the lyricist. Working with Guilheme, Pedro, Sieg and Jason allowed me to take Kat to a completely different musical level – one we had never reached before.

Before we go into the studio, everyone knows what they are supposed to record. That’s how it has been on every Kat album. The spontaneity happens while I’m composing. In fact, many songs and riffs came about when I simply picked up the guitar and played the first few or dozen notes. If I have an idea in my head and start working on it, then of course, sometimes spontaneity comes into play, and I change the direction I’m heading in. But once the song is finished, all that remains is to record it as well as possible.

Quite often, when I get bored with what I’m playing, I immediately record a new version without taking a break. Then I combine it with parts of the old version and leave it that way. But I guess that’s normal for all guitarists.

My solos usually start with improvising. But quite often, I already have the solo in my head, and then I build the backing around it. That was the case, among others, with the beginning and the solos in ‘Soulless Liar’ and ‘Dark River’. For me, solos are melodies that are supposed to get deep into the listener’s head and stay there. My idols are guitarists like Ritchie Blackmore and David Gilmour, so I guess that explains everything.”

The Product of Two Different Concepts

“Working with Jason was completely problem-free. Besides writing lyrics, Jason is also a guitarist and a vocalist, so we understand each other very well. For me, the vocal line and the music behind it are two inseparable parts of a composition. They have to complement each other and work together. Jason, being a guitarist, understands that perfectly and has the same approach.

If a vocalist is singing something different from what the band is playing, singing in a different time signature, or the lyrics go outside the structure of a composition, then of course you can say it’s original, haha! But in the end, the listener unconsciously switches to another song where every note has its place on the staff and every syllable fills exactly the part of the bar it’s supposed to fill.

For me, the vocals should be an inseparable part of the song. They should be a driving force that emphasizes the drum beat and pushes the whole composition forward. If that doesn’t happen, the song remains simply the product of two different concepts – a musical one and a vocal one. Jason and I worked on every single syllable of the sung lyrics. That’s how it is in the best compositions, regardless of the genre. And nobody is going to change that.”

Eastern European Metal Folklore

“I always wanted Kat’s albums to be in English. English sounds completely different from Polish, and above all, it allows you to reach an incomparably larger audience. Basically, we play music that comes from Anglo-Saxon culture, and I believe it will always sound best in English. Of course, when I formed the band, I had no idea that one day I would be releasing them outside Poland.

Back then, in 1979, Poland was a communist country, politically subordinate to the Soviet Union. Even today, in some areas, we still carry the baggage of that era. We didn’t have free access to passports, the Western market, Western music or good instruments. But sometimes life surprises you. It turns out that our first album, ‘Metal and Hell’, was released by the Belgian label Ambush Records. An album like that had to be recorded in English. We believed it would be our ticket to the Western market, haha!

Roman Kostrzewski (former singer) didn’t speak English, but even worse: he didn’t want to learn it. We had serious problems with that while recording the English version. Roman wouldn’t accept any advice from the producer regarding English pronunciation. He would pull out a Polish-English dictionary and explain to everyone how words should be pronounced in a language he didn’t actually speak.

After the recordings were finished, Roman announced to us that he would never sing in English again. This way, Kat effectively became confined within Poland’s borders, and for everyone outside Poland, our music became a linguistically incomprehensible piece of Eastern European metal folklore. Of course, the music itself stood on its own. But the fact remains: to this day, no label has been interested in licensing our only fully English-language album ‘Metal and Hell’.”

Distorted to Death

“Over the years, I have used all kinds of gear: Marshall and Mesa amps, processors, power amps, and lots of effects. In the end, I stripped it down to a Marshall amp, a cable and a guitar. For clean sounds, I have been using a Line 6 POD XT Pro for many years. It’s a very old processor now, but if Tony Iommi or K.K. Downing uses it and everything sounds good, why change something that still does its job? Of course, I have a Kemper and plenty of effects, but I recorded ‘Death Is Not Enough’ with just a Marshall.

Kat’s sound on the older albums is a little different from the albums we have recorded since 2005. I stopped using distortion all the time – both digital and analog. That one change has made a lot of people decide that we are suddenly playing a different genre, haha! They write that we are a different band now, or that we are playing different music. It’s a bit like those stories about Metallica not being Metallica on ‘Load’ – that only ‘Master of Puppets’ and ‘Ride the Lightning’ are Metallica.

So apparently, bands aren’t allowed to change their sound because some body might not like it, haha! But I believe that even in metal, not every single note has to be distorted to death.”

A Much Stronger Impact

Luczyk is the only guitarist on many of Kat’s albums, but his guitar arrangements are sometimes fairly elaborate. “Some things simply can’t be avoided”, he smiles. “If you record six guitar tracks in the studio and you’ve got one guitar in your hands on stage, there will always be moments when something is missing from the sound. You start playing a solo and suddenly there is no rhythm guitar underneath it.

The interesting thing, though, is that most people at a concert don’t notice at all. It’s mainly the guitarists in the audience who hear it, because they are the ones paying attention to things like that. I recently went to see Disturbed and Megadeth. As you know, Disturbed have only one guitarist. But I couldn’t hear any difference in the power of the sound between the two bands, and both of them were playing really loud.

Of course, there are various things you can do live to recreate the effect of a studio arrangement. In Black Sabbath, Geoff Nicholls provided a huge keyboard backing for years during their live shows. Sometimes, there’s an additional guitarist playing behind the curtain. With Ozzy, Adam Wakeman did that, playing both keyboards and guitar. Sometimes samples are used as well. Basically, all of this is there to fill out an arrangement that consists of many layers in the studio.

Interestingly, playing live with one guitar can actually be even more dynamic than playing with two guitarists. One guitar spread in stereo across the left and right channels will always be perfectly tight. Add a rhythm section that plays right on the beat, and the audience can feel a much stronger impact than they would from several guitars that aren’t perfectly locked together.

I know this from my own experience because I have played that way many times and recorded live shows like that. There are officially released recordings documenting it, so you can simply listen to them and judge for yourself.”

The Real Art of Playing

“I don’t divide music into metal and other music. For me, every song has to have musical value, regardless of the genre. If, for example, a metal guitarist can’t play a slow blues or has trouble playing the rhythm guitar part in David Lee Roth’s version of ‘Just a Gigolo’, he still has a lot to learn, because he doesn’t understand where the real art of playing actually lies.

I have played in the band DDD together with Józef Skrzek (keyboard player and vocalist) and Jerzy Piotrowski (drummer) from SBB. I have to say that having the opportunity to play with musicians of that caliber was a great honor for me. It was an incredible lesson in music, but also in respect for other musicians. All I had to do was listen to the sounds they were producing, where they placed the accents in a phrase, where they left spaces, and where the shared melody appeared. That’s exactly how I approach music in Kat.

Working on a project with musicians like that made me realize one more thing: among real musicians, there are no divisions. Not between genres, not between styles. Everyone understands each other without words. The most important thing is to listen to the others and learn as much as you possibly can from working with them.”

Enough to Start a Band

“I started making music by learning the riff to ‘Smoke on the Water’, playing it with one finger. Later, I took a one-year classical guitar course at a local music school. I had a very good teacher, and that’s where I learned the basics and harmony. I should have carried on studying, but after a year, I thought I already knew enough to start a band, haha!

The truth is that I’m mostly self-taught. I learned by watching and listening to great guitarists. At first, I didn’t really understand why what they were doing was so good. I could simply hear that there was something special about it.

Over a relatively short period of time, I went through phases of being fascinated by Judas Priest, Metallica, and Testament. All of those bands have a very distinctive sound. Technically, they all play metal, but each of them sounds different. At the same time, they all draw on the timeless principles of classical music, yet each follows its own path. I was interested in every aspect of what they were doing, not just the riffs or solos.

Eventually, I understood that the most important things are being aware of what you are playing and being original. At some point, you have to free yourself from your musical influences and start finding your own path. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you have a chance of being noticed. And after that, it’s just work, and many hours of practice, haha!”

Choose Your Own Kat

“Kat doesn’t belong to the spectrum of extreme metal – black, death, satanic, brutal or doom metal. The simplest way to describe us musically is somewhere between heavy and thrash metal, with a few elements of hard rock. And importantly, if we want our music to sound good, we actually tune our instruments, haha!

If you are curious what Kat sounds like, I would suggest listening to our new album ‘Death Is Not Enough’. Songs like ‘Looking for a Fight’, ‘Soulless Liar’ and ‘Falling into Darkness’ are a good representation of what Kat is today. If you like that, I would recommend ‘More’, ‘Walls of Whispers’ and the ballad ‘The Promised Land’ from ‘Without Looking Back’. From ‘Mind Cannibals’, I would choose ‘Judas Kiss’, ‘Uninvited Guest’ and the more mellow ‘Dark Hole’. If you like acoustic guitars, I would recommend the album ‘Acoustic – 8 Filmów’ (2014) and the song ‘Łza Dla Cieniów Minionych’.

If you want to go even further back, to the period before our first album was released, it’s worth listening to the first two songs that helped Kat make its mark on the Polish music scene: ‘Satan’s Nights’ and ‘The Last Convoy’ from the album ‘The Last Convoy’ (2020). All our albums are available on Spotify, so the best thing to do is simply listen and choose your own Kat.”

Despite the band members being spread out as much as they are in Kat now, Luczyk doesn’t rule out a tour with this line-up. “The ambition is certainly there”, he says. “Whether we will be able to make it happen… We’ll see. You never know what the future may bring.”