Ready For Death Interview: “If it’s not fun there’s no point”

A hard-edged, snarling force, Chicago’s Ready For Death – consisting of singer Artie White (formerly of Milhouse, Indecision, Concrete Cros and The Shemps), guitarist Dallas Thomas (formerly of Swan King and Pelican), bassist Luca Cimarusti (Luggage, Annihilus), and drummer Shawn Brewer (Haggathorn) – is fast becoming one of hardcore’s hidden treasures.

Ready For Death emit the kind of eruption that moves planets. Following their 2022 no-nonsense self-titled debut, the band reaches new levels on Pay With Your Face – a raging representation of punk, thrash, metal and hardcore that calcifies into a black hell-storm indicative of these times.

Sparking the same senses as High On Fire at their peak, Ready For Death don’t guide you into their world: they hurl you into it headfirst. The burning thrash-punk of Spacebreeders, Cannibal Cops and Doomsday Everyday – a three-pronged assault of Thomas’ crushing chords and ray gun riff-a-rolla smashing into Cimarusti’s and Brewer’s lightning-speed rhythm section, evoking the tension of a panic attack.

Elsewhere, the dystopian horror of God Send the Asteroid should have been titled God Sent the Asteroid, because that’s exactly what it sounds like. Alongside the title track, it sees White coming into his own; his primal screams, likened to being chased down by a pack of pit bulls.

All bile and rancour, with each passing track, it becomes evident just how much the singer’s performance is one of the best captured on tape this year. Transcending Thomas’ steamrolling riffs on the malice-hearted Digital Witch and the marauding Lawbreaker and Utopia of War, White’s vocal range orbits from the belly of hardcore to the rugged frontiers of metal.

And before you know it’s done. Pay With Your Face, one of those albums that finishes in a flash, as Ready For Death’s unhinged racket causes the kind of giddy hysteria where the only sensible thing to do is start again from the beginning.

Following the release of Pay With Your Face, White and Cimarusti took the time to answer some questions about the band’s history, the current state of creating art, and how Ready For Death conjured up one of the year’s finest hardcore releases.

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Sun 13: Firstly, can you tell us about how the band came together?

Luca Cimarusti: “The Ready For Death origin story starts years ago when Dallas and Artie met each other in their kids’ Taekwondo class. A few play dates in and they discovered that they weren’t just regular dads, they were punk rock metalhead weirdo dads. Artie hadn’t been in a band for eight years and thought that part of his life was behind him, but Dallas asked him to try out singing on a few demo tracks he had recorded. Dallas always talks about how blown away he was by how crazy Artie sounded, even after nearly a decade of not screaming in a band. He told me, ‘He could have kept going, but he ran out of lyrics and I ran out of riffs’. Those became the first Ready For Death songs.

“Those guys invited Dan Binaei, who plays guitar in political grindcore band, Racetraitor, to get in on the project, and he suggested Shawn Brewer to come play drums and me to come play bass. I probably have the least amount of heavy metal experience out of everyone in the band, a few years ago I made a couple of solo black metal LPs under the name Annihilus, and Dan played a guitar solo on one of the songs, so I think that’s why he thought I’d be a good fit. They let me join the band even though I biffed the audition…”

S13: You’ve each played in so many different bands over the years. Do you think these contrasts contribute to Ready For Death’s overall sound?

LC: “Yeah, we’re all from ‘rock’ backgrounds, but they’re from all over the spectrum, so I think all those elements come to play in the way we sound. Artie’s fronted a bunch of hardcore bands, Dallas spent a decade playing heavy riffs in Pelican, I spend a lot of my time playing drums in an experimental noise-rock band… when you have a bunch of disparate elements coming together, it’s going to come out sounding pretty unique. At this point we’re not just a thrashy metal band, we’re covering a lot of ground, even if it’s in the subtleties.”

Artie White: “In my mind our previous bands have a little to do with our sound, but a lot more to do with our DIY attitude and how we operate as a band. We all come from what can be summed up as ‘punk’ backgrounds and we carry that with us in everything Ready For Death does. Between the four of us we’ve seen the best and the worst of what it means to be in a band, and so we balance our love of music and being creative with a very un-serious and joyful attitude. I guess that’s not very metal! But we’re never going to sell a zillion records and headline stadiums, so if it’s not fun there’s no point.”

S13: Ready For Death feels like so many things mashed together that it’s almost difficult to explain. Do you consider the band something of a world building exercise?

AW: “Unintentionally yes, that’s how it’s worked out – at least lyrically. When we started, we wanted to write fun, insane songs like Cyborg Priest and Wasteland of Peace, but it wasn’t until later that we started connecting them together in the same reality. Obviously, it’s not unusual to bring some kind of dystopian nightmare to life with metal, like Xentrix, Voivod, D.B.C., Nocturnus, etc. We’re not quite as sophisticated as some of those but we have the advantage of living in 2025 when a lot of those ‘end of the world’ type scenarios are more within reach than ever. So, world-building comes easy when artificial intelligence, genocide, and technofascism are daily conversation topics.”

S13: Can you tell us about the process behind Pay With Your Face?

AW: “Some of these songs were written simultaneously with the first record’s tracks, so thematically everything coalesced fluidly. The themes of the first album are a little more fleshed out in PWYF but it all poured out of the same collective mental soup of metal, sci-fi and comic books. The title came from an Apple Pay advertisement that Dallas saw while pumping gas, which is pretty Blade Runner in my opinion.”

LC: “Musically we approached this record is pretty much the opposite way that we did the first. The first record was thrown together super fast and loose in our practice space and originally acted as a demo that we were sending around. When the guys at Translation Loss heard it, it was deemed better than ‘good enough’ and became the record.

“When we started getting ready to get things in line to make this second record, Dan Binaei quit the band, so we kind of had to retool our dynamic a bit… we went from being a band with two guitars riffing off of each other to suddenly being a more traditional lineup with one guitar, bass, drums, and a vocalist. So we had to learn how to be a different band in ways. We had to slow things down, tighten up, make everything thicker and chunkier. We mad to hat-tip other ‘power trio’ configurations like Sabbath and Melvins, and we came out on the other end heavier.

“We made this record in a studio this time, and tried to focus a bit more on space and room this time around. There are some synth soundscapes thrown in, a few things here and there to elevate the sound. It’s still very much us, but there’s a bit more depth and dynamics there.”

S13: What was the most important aspect you wanted to achieve with this record?

AW: “Above all I am hoping it’s a fun, memorable thrash record that is worth repeat listens for some people. Not only because I’m proud of my lyrics, even when they’re comically absurd. It’s a lot of work to carefully create this type of hysterical nonsense. I have been a part of eight different albums and who knows how many EPs. split 7”’s. and PWYF has some of my favourite tracks of all of those.”

S13: With songs like Cannibal Cops, God Send the Asteroid and Utopia of War, I’m guessing that politics aren’t too far from the band’s conscious. Would you consider politics as the band’s primary source of inspiration?

AW: “Not the primary source but also not an insignificant one. Politics is implicit in any good hardcore and metal music, which will always reflect the worst aspects of the world at large. Obviously, danger and terror loom over everything, all the time. Obviously, reality is a spider’s web and any attempt at creativity is like a dying fly flailing at the strands. Obviously, then, Ready For Death has no bandwidth for soul-searching interpersonal relationship songs or self-actualizing anthems. The clock is ticking. Dallas and I have kids, and that comes with a perpetual, knife-twisting fear of the future and everything that could go wrong. Which, currently, it is. There’s no way for politics to not be a backdrop to any musician worth hearing from.”

S13: The artwork is great, and really feels like a nod to punk and hardcore. Was that the idea behind it?

LC: “The artwork was done by Ed Repka, who’s done covers for the likes of Megadeth, Death, Australian Death Machine, Merciless Death, and now… Ready For Death. Ed is a legend, and having the same guy who designed Vic Rattlehead do our artwork is an honest-to-goodness dream come true.

AW: “The cover of Leprosy has haunted me since I was a teenager and still does. Having Ed Repka conceptualise and execute the cover art for a record I appear on feels like a milestone accomplishment.”

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S13: Again, being involved in so many different projects over the years, does your process and methods change when writing songs for Ready For Death?

AW: “Speaking (I think) for Dallas and I, honestly there is just less time in the day, and necessity breeds invention. In the punk bands of our youth, we didn’t have a career or a stable relationship, so it was easy to devote a lot of time and effort to exploring inner angst and similar navel-gazing bullshit. As a grown-ass adult, we have very few minutes in the week to do cool stuff. So, we try to make it count, and that can add an urgency and a ‘no brakes’ vibe that we might otherwise miss.”

S13: How vital do you think Chicago is to the band’s DNA?

LC: “Any musician from Chicago will tell you that it’s impossible to not let living here work its way into your creative work. There’s just a real, no nonsense, rawness to Chicago life, and that seems to be in the ethos of Chicago music, whether you’re talking about Shellac or someone like Immortal Bird.

“We’ve also got a great community of other really cool bands here in Chicago. So many real ones out there that we are lucky enough to play with.”

S13: These days with art basically being dismantled by capitalism, it feels like bands like Ready For Death are the last line of defence. Has your approach to being in a band changed from when you first started playing music in other bands?

AW: “First of all, if RFD is your last line of defence, I hope your grave is pre-dug. But yes, the approach has probably changed a lot. At the risk of sounding ancient, I think younger bands have a vision of ‘what could be’ that propels them forward – what if we play this show? What if those people like us? What if our dreams come true? etc. And that’s 100 percent valid and great. Been there. But a band like RFD doesn’t have those ambitions. Our whole life is not ahead of us, it’s mostly behind. We see the future through a narrowing lens, but it (sometimes unconsciously) helps focus art as something worth creating just because it can still be created. That sense of finiteness is partly just regular mortality, but also the severely diminished prioritisation and / or commodification of honest creativity by capitalism like your question states. At the end of the day, what we do doesn’t move the needle in any tangible way, but personally it’s more rewarding than capitulating, getting into golf or talk radio or whatever, and just relinquishing life. Which is ironic coming from a band called Ready For Death, I know.”

S13: How much do you think the music in Ready For Death reflects your personalities?

AW: “We do what we love and what we love is generally weird and dumb to 99.9 percent of the population. I think this sums us up as a band and as individuals. But we like to party, and this is a very volatile time to be partying in, so Ready For Death seems like a good way to be these days.”

Pay With Your Face is out now via Translation Loss Records. Purchase here.