While death metal has a tendency to focus on morbid and horrific subject matter, it can also be immensely fun. As much as creatures like zombies and demons can conjure images of terror, in the right hands, these ghouls can be proxies for exhilarating and entertaining narratives. Since their inception in 2018, Rochester, New York’s Undeath has embraced the craft of horror-informed death metal, creating songs that brim with fantastical flair. Undeath vocalist Alexander Jones and guitarist Kyle Beam pull their lyrical inspiration from various horror, science fiction and fantasy properties, and from those inspirations, they create their own chaotically delightful death metal universe.
Two years after the release of their second studio album, It’s Time…to Rise from the Grave, Undeath offer up their third LP, More Insane via Prosthetic Records. Kicking off with “Dead From Beyond” and concluding with “Bones Clattering in the Cave,” More Insane offers consistent thrills and furious, vibrant energy, making for one of the standout records of the year.
I spoke to Jones about the various media inspirations that helped to shape More Insane’s lyrics, the sound the band strived to achieve on the album, and the story behind the band’s connected album cover artworks.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Treble: In the press release for More Insane, it’s revealed that the scenes depicted on the covers of Lesions of a Different Kind and It’s Time… to Rise from the Grave are taking place in someone’s mind. How did that idea originate, and can you talk about the story they tell?
Alexander Jones: We didn’t really have a big master plan from the beginning where we knew exactly where we wanted to go with these covers and how we were going to get there. We knew that we wanted to expand on each cover, and we wanted it to reveal kind of more of this weird, fucked-up universe that we’re making. The way that we did that, from Lesions of a Different Kind to It’s Time… to Rise from the Grave, is we zoomed out from the cave to reveal that it’s kind of a smaller part of a much larger battle scene. With It’s Time to More Insane, now we’ve zoomed out even further. We’ve revealed that this battle is all taking place within this kind of decaying godhead creature. What that means? I don’t have a good answer.
We had some conversations about, what are some of the songs on the record about and what are some of these lyrical themes pointing to? There’s a specific line on the song “More Insane” that’s “my head a catacomb,” and we kind of started toiling around with this idea of having the head cracking open and revealing a big, sprawling cemetery. Then that dovetailed very nicely into, well, what if the cemetery is kind of all pointing towards the mountains from the cover of It’s Time? And yeah, it was very easy to kind of connect the dots from there.
Treble: Is there any overarching story throughout Undeath’s songs you’d like listeners to be aware of? I ask because there are multiple songs that pay tribute to the game Doom, playing on the idea of cyborg monsters. I’m wondering if there’s something to that.
AJ: So Kyle is the primary lyric writer in the band. We collaborate on stuff a lot, but most of the ideas that we have come from his kind of depraved mind. The biggest overarching theme with us is that kind of, like you said, Doom style, grafting weapons onto demon and zombie armies, kind of vibe. That’s really the closest thing we have to a running theme.
We joke in the band all the time that we have a bunch of songs that are part of a “Necrobionic Suite.” Songs like “Enhancing the Dead,” “Necrobionics,” and “Dead From Beyond,” the latter off More Insane—they all kind of take place in this similar universe in which, starting with “Enhancing the Dead,” somebody is amassing this army of the undead and turning them into soldiers. Then with “Necrobionics,” it’s kind of a continuation of that, and it’s the process of the army being converted into these cyborg zombies. Then with “Dead From Beyond,” it’s that army descending upon an unsuspecting world. That’s the closest thing we have, I would say, to a real ongoing story in our lyrics. Besides that, it’s a lot of returning to the same themes again and again, but in different isolated stories.
Treble: Cyborg zombies make me think of the game Warhammer 40K as well.
AJ: Tommy [Wall], our bassist is huge into 40K and he definitely has kind of influenced us a little bit, just hearing him talk about it.
Treble: You’ve mentioned that you worked with producer Mark Lewis (Deicide, The Black Dahlia Murder) to achieve a particular sound. Can you elaborate on that sound and the decision to work with him?
AJ: Starting off with Lesions and It’s Time, those records are, at least to me when I hear them, the songs have kind of like a knotty, claustrophobic feel to them. Like even the ones that are roomier, like the title track on It’s Time and “Necrobionics,” there’s this kind of very cloistered intensity to them, and the production style on those records [lends itself to] that because we wanted [the songs] to feel kind of murky, dingy, and dark.
But then the way that the songs were coming about for More Insane when we were writing them, it became obvious early on that these were bigger, louder, brighter, and more immediate songs than what we had been writing before. The choruses and the hooks were more obvious than ever; the diction and the way the arrangements were kind of beginning to shape up were more in your face than they’d ever been. We wanted to move to a production style, an engineering style that would lend to that kind of vibe a little bit more.
We did our due diligence and research, and we listened to records that we liked that had that kind of big, bright production that we really enjoyed. That was a lot of Black Dahlia Murder and Cannibal Corpse, there’s some Nile records in there too. The common thread was Mark Lewis, and when we realized that he was behind the boards for all that stuff, it was just a matter of meeting him and seeing if he was interested. Thankfully, we clicked immediately, and he was the guy for the job.
Treble: When it comes to working with Kyle and writing lyrics, what’s that process like in creating these horror and sci-fi rich tales? Do you begin with a character? An event? A feeling?
AJ: It all kind of comes from the similar wells of inspiration that all the death metal that influenced us growing up came from. It’s a lot of being inspired by horror movies, the video games that we like, the TV shows that we watch. The death metal that we love and the stuff that inspires us as a band, it excites you in the sense that it feels a little bit naughty, I should say. Not in a way that’s oppressively evil or unsettling, but something that feels a little creepy, the way that a good horror movie, a good B-horror movie does. Stuff that’s just kind of gross-out and a little wacky and sinister but has a charm to it. That’s the stuff that evokes the most poignant response from us as fans, and that’s definitely the same feeling that we’re trying to get across with the music.
Treble: I love that. Funny enough, speaking of B-horror movies, I recently rewatched Tokyo Gore Police. Ever seen it?
AJ: Oh yeah, that’s a perfect example of something that’s just very depraved and fucked up, but also, it’s fun, and there’s a wackiness and an absurdity to it that is undeniable. That’s the same exact vibe that we try to get away with.
Treble: What are some of your favorites in that genre?
AJ: I love House [1977], it’s one of my favorite movies of all time. That’s probably my number one with a bullet. I love Hellbound, the second Hellraiser movie, that’s a great one. And, geez, I mean, I’ll go Tetsuo: The Iron Man. I love that one too. That would probably be my top three off the dome.
Treble: Alongside the Doom influence, what other media has inspired Undeath’s lyrics? One that particularly stands out to me, as noted in the press release, is Bloodbourne. Could you elaborate on that?
AJ: Out of all the FromSoft games, like the Soulsborne universe of games that they’ve made, Bloodborne, to me, and to Kyle especially, the lore and the themes that Bloodborne deals with, it’s just the most interesting to us. It’s a lot of body horror, it’s a lot of old, kind of creepy eldritch stuff. The environments in the game are extremely cool. The scenarios that you enter as a character and the enemies that you fight, they elicit a very uniquely creepy response that you don’t really find in a lot of other FromSoft games, and that’s been something that we’ve come back to over and over. So that influence is definitely still there. Especially in a song like “Disputatious Malignancy,” there’s a lot of pretty overt Bloodbourne influence in those lyrics. There’s reference to a little Suffocation in there too, but primarily those lyrics are Bloodbourne inspired.
Beyond that, a song like “Brandish The Blade,” that’s directly Game of Thrones inspired. It’s not like explicitly, but that one literally just comes from—Kyle was rewatching Game of Thrones, and he was like, I should write a song that has this kind of battle feeling. It really is as simple as that. “Bones Clattering in The Cave,” there’s kind of some Predator influence there, just kind of like being stalked in the jungle by some depraved monster. But yeah, I’d say those are the most directly obvious ones.
Treble: There’s a large history of metal lyricists covering horror, but I’d love to learn about the ones that stand out to you. First, who is a lyricist you think has a strong sense of world building and creating horror? And who you think is really strong at writing scary lyrics?
AJ: I have two people for this. For the first one, I would go with Trevor Strnad from The Black Dahlia Murder. He had a real knack for world building and painting a scene with his lyrics. His songwriting was wordy, but it never felt dense for the sake of being dense. Everything he was writing lent itself to the song as a whole, in creating the atmosphere of the song. That’s something that I thought he was so good at, and I really admire him for it.
As far as somebody who writes stuff that’s just legitimately scary and disturbing to read, I would go with JR Hayes from Pig Destroyer. When you think of grindcore, lyrics aren’t the first thing that pops into your mind, it’s just kind of about playing as fast as humanly possible. But he’s a poet; I think he would kind of blush at that assertion, but it’s true. He is a very naturally talented writer. I remember being 15, 16 years old and reading the lyrics on Prowler in The Yard, and I was like, “what the fuck is wrong with this guy?” This is so dark, and nobody really does it like him. He’s somebody that I’ve always looked to as a very inspiring lyricist.
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