Adzes Interview “I was heavily influenced by early Mastodon and Kowloon Walled City”

Alternative metal has experienced one of the best months since I can remember.

A slew of excellent releases, both familiar and new, have graced the airwaves over the past month or so, and Adzes’ latest long-player is another to an ever-growing list.

The project of Timaru, New Zealand-based Forest Bohrer, while Adzes’ INVER featured last month throughout these pages via our latest Albums Quarterly dispatch, having spent another month in its presence, and the dark, melodic tones sink that much deeper into the bones.

Following the release of Adzes’ 2020 debut LP, No One Wants to Speak About It, INVER is far more refined. While Non One’ possessed the hard-nosed echoes of Hymns-era Godflesh, INVER is far more dynamic and all-encompassing. Slow-building and crushing (Abyss Watcher), INVER is the kind of album that the subconscious nags to re-visit time and time again.

From the metallic ambush of Rainhammer and Antipode, to the gruelling title track and the logical conclusion in the epic finale, Quietus, INVER is an intoxicating journey. As the ’90s alt-rock revival continues at full speed, through the Adzes vessel, Bohrer injects the kind of post-metal reverence that hits in all the right places.  

Ahead of this week’s release of INVER via Jeremy Hunt’s Philip K. Discs label, we caught up with Bohrer to talk about his writing processes, his move from Seattle to New Zealand, and INVER.

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Sun 13: Hailing from Seattle, how did you end up in New Zealand?

Forest Bohrer: “Short answer is a career move for my spouse. Longer answer is that we’d had friends who had worked and lived here in smaller places like Whakatane and Greymouth and had really loved it. My wife had been working really unsustainable hours for a while, and when the pandemic hit she was frontline without much support. We decided to take a risk on a move away from Seattle, and luckily it worked out well for us.”

S13: Listening to your music, and there feels like a deep connection with the country’s beautiful landscape. Do your immediate surroundings influence the Adzes?

FB: “Both Seattle and Aotearoa have had a big influence on the lyrical focus of the record. Both are linked by the Pacific Ocean, and water is a theme that I explored throughout the record. When writing the lyrics for Quietus I was thinking a lot about the Puget Sound, and how it’s both a critical ecosystem and also basically a highway for supertankers and container ships. The heat dome in 2021 hit the Seattle coastline extremely hard, with a massive shellfish die-off, and that had an impact on the lyrics as well. Eroding Tides was influenced a lot by the scenery I was seeing in and around Timaru, with collapsing areas of coastline and major river flooding events. I love the natural environments of both places and can’t help but absorb that into the writing.”

S13: Can you tell us how the Adzes project began? 

FB: “My last band, a Seattle synthpop group, fell apart in 2017, and I was left without a band for the first time in about a decade. I had a few heavy riffs and ideas percolating, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, and at the same time I had twins that were young enough that rehearsing and playing shows was pretty difficult. However, those kids were very heavy sleepers once you got them to bed. I was listening to a lot of Kowloon Walled City at the time and getting to know a number of folks like Will from Wretched Empires and Tom from Allfather, and it inspired me to just start recording stuff at night (which the kids slept right through) and finally to release some songs as Climate // Capital.”

S13: And what about the writing process to INVER? 

FB: “Inver started as a collection of songs I was writing during the run up to the release of the Adzes debut record, No One Wants To Speak About It. I’d had an idea that I would write a couple of different EPs, one that was more death metal influenced and one that was more shoegaze and alt-rock influenced. The more deathy tracks wound up as the split with Putrescine (an absolutely incredible band and great group of friends) and the shoegaze influenced stuff grew until I had enough to fill out a full record. I’d been listening to a ton of stuff like Medicine, True Widow, and Cloakroom, and I tried to bring those influences into the songs.”

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S13: Onto the album, and the title track is so strong. Did you have the album title before you wrote the song or was the decision name the album Inver based on the song itself?

FB: “I had settled on the album title first. I’d seen the word Inver in a few different contexts (Inverness, Invercargill) and wondered about what it meant. It originates from Gaelic and refers to a confluence of rivers, or a river with the sea, and it also brings to mind the word invert, which kind of felt appropriate when moving from the northern hemisphere to the southern. I had been thinking about water as a thematic element, and so Inver felt right for the album as a whole. The title track was written first and then became the title track later when the first set of lyrics I wrote fell flat. I went back and rewrote the entire song around the concept of life as a river, and it felt right.”

S13: Rainhammer and Antipode are a great one-two combo that really underpin the album. Both have the project’s strongest elements rolled into one. Do remember how these songs evolved, and was it obvious that would be back-to-back on the album? 

FB: “I’m glad you like those songs. I think they fit together really well, but they came together at very different times in the writing. I think Rainhammer came up about halfway through the writing process; the opening riff to that song came from just noodling around on these extended chords. That was one where I consciously tried to bring in a dub feeling to the verses, leaning heavily on reverb and open guitar arpeggios with the bass driving the song forward.

“Antipode came around as the last song in the process. I had settled on the idea of a seven-song album, and Antipode was intended to be a B-side for the Capitaleschaton single, but when I got done writing it was strong enough that I had to include it. The track order of the album was kind of a piecing together process. I knew I wanted the album to kick off with the full-band blast of Eroding Tides and to end with Quietus, but the rest of it was rearranging the tracks until the flow felt right.”

S13: I think Quietus is the best song you’ve written. While it closes the album, do you remember where this song eventuated during the writing process? 

FB: “Quietus was actually the first track I wrote for the record. I’d been listening to the track Fever Queen by the band Nothing, which is just unbearably good, and I was trying to capture that vibe in the guitars. I was writing the song Engraver from the Putrescine split at the same time, and that one is a slow and sludgy crusher, so it was kind of a Jekyll and Hyde situation writing these two tracks.  When I wrote to the slow and heavy outro riff of Quietus, I knew that it had to close out the release.  I’d originally used a very cheesy Terminator-esque synth patch on that part and swapped it for piano in the final version, but I’m still fond of the synth demo.”

S13: Environmental issues have played a big part in the Adzes story. Do you think art still has the same power in this modern age to raise awareness for social, political and environmental issues?

FB: “I used to think so, but I’m more jaded these days. I think when we look at the history of the twenty-first century, we’ve had a number of artistic movements aimed at protesting the Iraq War, police brutality, and other social ills, and in terms of impact I tend to think of [Kurt] Vonnegut’s quote about that being equivalent to “…a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high”. Which is not to say that we should stop protesting, or stop making art about these issues, but direct action is the way in which we’ll see changes to society. I’m very inspired by the strike wave engulfing the US as a way of addressing labor issues and inequality; I’m a bit less optimistic about our current climate actions. I address climate and environmental issues in my art because I’m passionate about them, and because it helps me channel that passion into making music I find meaningful.”

S13: With Adzes being a solo project, as a songwriter is it hard to get motivated? Do you have a process and are you working on music every day? 

FB: “Definitely not every day, hah. Parenting and work keeps me pretty busy most days, and so my writing habits are sort of a whenever I can find the time kind of thing. I start from an initial concept or inspiration, which could be a riff, a chord progression, a rhythm or vibe that I want to create, and then I ruminate on it until I get a chance to pick up a guitar and work it out. I find that thinking about an idea while walking back from school dropoff or walking the dog or whatever helps me flesh it out in my head. I love playing guitar, playing bass, and doing vocals, so it’s almost like assembling puzzle pieces together into a song.

“As a solo songwriter, I try to find folks that I trust that I can bounce ideas off or send demos to, and that’s how I’ve come to work with folks like Will Jameson, who mastered the record; db, who runs Euphoriadic and is releasing the INVER cassette tape; and Jeremy, who runs Philip K Discs and plays in Qoheleth. They help me refine ideas and they help me not freak out about the mix sounding weird or whatever.” 

S13: I think metal is the one style of music in our history that will always remain and, by extension the variations of it, such as post-metal. Have you always gravitated most towards this scene and style?

FB: “Not always! I discovered Celestial (ISIS) and Times of Grace (Neurosis) when I was 21, and those two records radically reoriented my musical appreciation. But throughout my 20s I was writing overly complicated prog-death tracks. I thought that if it wasn’t fast and super-technical, it wasn’t good, which doesn’t necessarily make for good songwriting. As I got more experienced at writing, I started to slow things down and really focus on the core of the riffs and how the song incorporates them.

“When I started Adzes, I was heavily influenced by early Mastodon and Kowloon Walled City, and I didn’t really try to write the sort of meandering build-and-release type songs that post-metal is known for. My goal was to focus more on tight and organic songwriting that flowed naturally from idea to idea. With INVER I consciously incorporated influences from ’90s alt-rock, shoegaze, and dub into sludge, and I guess that synthesis has sort of come back around to a more post-metal type of sound.”

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S13: On post-metal, I think a place like New Zealand and the space and time to breathe really fits into the style’s ethos. Is this something you think about?  

FB: “I think it does, especially on the Te Waipounamu (the South Island), which has only about a million people total. There’s a lot of very wide-open spaces here when you venture out from Ōtautahi/ Christchurch, and subconsciously I think that lends itself towards contemplation and spaciousness more so than, say, frantic grindcore.”

S13: Originating from Australia, I know how tough the live music scene is there, as the costs to get international acts from Europe and the United States is so much. I imagine it’s similar in New Zealand?

FB: “I live in Timaru, a smaller town a couple hours from the big city of Ōtautahi, and so there’s not a ton of live music here. It’s interesting because in the ’80s I guess this town was a hotbed for local music, but it’s really died off, which is unfortunate. Not many bands are able to tour Australia/ New Zealand and make the finances pencil out, and when they do tour they generally stick to Auckland/ Wellington/ Christchurch, and ticket prices can be high. That said, I did just get to see Napalm Death and Wormrot at a little venue in Lyttelton and they killed it. Thou is going to be coming through in March and I’m definitely hitting that show. And we’re lucky to have incredible bands like Ulcerate, Beastwars, Alien Weaponry, and Blindfolded and Led To The Woods down here, too.”

INVER it out Friday via Philip K. Discs and on cassette via Euphoriadic. Purchase from Bandcamp here and here.