By STEVE MASCORD
IT’S A major controversy in the world of extreme metal but if you are a general rock fan, you could reasonably know nothing about it.
Firstly, the basics: Thy Art Is Murder is an Australian metal band from Blacktown in western Sydney. The members are: Sean Delander, Andy Marsh, Kevin Butler, Chris “CJ” McMahon and Jesse Beahler.
They are very successful, as their social media following will attest; 634,000 on Facebook, 59,000 on Twitter and 336,000 on Instagram.
Vocalist McMahon last month shared a post by right wing commentator Matt Walsh about gender fluidity. The video in post depicted a woman giving her child a choice of gender.
McMahon reportedly commented that the woman in the video should be “burned to death”. It was shared to Instagram stories, became the subject of a complaint and was taken down.
He has now deleted his social media accounts.
The band has moved to quell the reaction, posting a trans-gender flag and saying “Setting the record straight, we stand with you”.
McMahon himself then posted (via band accounts): “Addressing my recent post: I recognise the hurtful impact my words had on the community and I am deeply sorry. I am learning from my mistakes and committed to better understanding, respecting, and supporting every individual.”
And that’s where the story is up to. Release of the album Godlike (reviewed HERE) was delayed a week. Brendan Crabb interviewed the band before the drama unfolded and his feature is below.
By BRENDAN CRABB
IT WAS once posited that doom merchants Black Sabbath’s sonic density meant they weren’t about to pen a series of songs about flowers. When it comes to Australia’s Thy Art is Murder – perhaps the most crushing band to reach the top five of the ARIA album charts – brutally heavy music demands equally uncompromising, dark and chaotic lyrical themes.
The death metallers’ sixth full-length Godlike, their first in four years, is a case in point. “It’s trying to match the topic to a song,” guitarist and lyricist Andy Marsh explains via Zoom from Brisbane. “And then find, like, a device, a lyrical device, whether it’s a metaphor or a mood, or a tone to the lyric that matches. And also is consistent with being a death metal band. Like, we can’t go singing about Barbie dolls and sunny Sundays. It has to still work in the paradigm of what our band is. And that’s where one of the biggest challenges lie.”
On record, the western Sydney-bred, now internationally-based act’s lyrical content has thankfully progressed from the misogyny of early songs like “Whore To A Chainsaw” (admittedly from an era whereby the majority of the current line-up were yet to join the ranks). One of the band’s signature songs, “Reign of Darkness” from 2012’s Hate, addressed child abuse. “Atonement”, from 2019’s Human Target album, explored themes of sexual violence, while also being self-referential; literal reparations for those questionable messages from their formative days. Meanwhile, “Make America Hate Again” from the same album dissected the division created by the US presidential race.
Their career hasn’t been without controversy, however; the uncensored artwork for third full-length, 2015’s Holy War, which depicted a prepubescent, ambiguously religious suicide soldier garnered the band mainstream media coverage.
“In the beginning, I was like, ‘this song is specifically about this thing, and I need everyone to know about it’,” Marsh says in his typically droll, yet likeable, manner. “And that was my ego coming through in the lyrics, like, ‘you have to listen to what I’ve got to say’. It’s not really about that. I can express myself, and that should be enough for me, and the listener should be able to take what they want away from it, too.
“Half the (new) record is about being separated from my daughter for two years because the borders were locked down, which was a pretty dark period of my life. And then we’ve got other ones, like ‘Blood Throne’s pretty generic Thy Art material; overthrow the government and the people that have made their millions and billions on the blood, sweat and tears of people below them. ‘Keres’ is about a lot of what happened in COVID. These propaganda machines that were going up against one another, like, ‘get the vaccine, don’t get the vaccine’. Keres was a Greek god of war… And they would feast on the dead of war, but they couldn’t actually engage in the war. So they had to go around whispering to people to get them to go to battle so they had something to consume.”
The quintet did release standalone tracks like “Killing Season” during the height of COVID but for the most part embraced the downtime while so many peers with time on their hands wrote and recorded new full-lengths as they awaited the green-light to tour again. “I knew pretty early on from just networking in the biz, so many of our contemporaries were working on records, like, ‘we’re gonna be the first one out of the gate’,” the guitarist recalls.”I’m like, ‘you’re all wrong, because you’re all doing exactly the same thing. We’re just gonna do less, enjoy the time off, rather than trying to make a record’.”
Also ensuring the LP’s genesis was a steady one was Marsh and co-songwriter, guitarist Sean Delander not even picking up their instruments for an extended period. “If you didn’t have to go to work for two years, would you like to do your job at home, just for the fun of it?” Marsh laughs when asked about this scenario.
“I think to make music or to feel inspired about trying to make music, or at least for us, you have to live life a little bit. And it’s not often that we get a break for more than, even for me more than a week. This is my first week off this year, and I’m doing press and getting ready for this stupid wedding (Note – his own. He’s even sporting shorter locks for the occasion).
“And then the second benefit is we basically play Thy Art Is Murder songs only, unless we play (Rammstein’s) ‘Du Hast’, which we haven’t done in five years. So we get really good at playing our own music. And one of the benefits is muscle memory, like the neural network between your brain and the muscles and everything to kind of go on autopilot and play as fast as we do. That’s a great thing. But in terms of creating new songs, it’s not as great because your hands go to where they’re familiar. And where they’re familiar is just playing old Thy Art songs. So having that time away from the guitar when we picked it back up, it’s like ‘oh, new sounds, new colours, new chords, new textures’, because we hadn’t been playing guitar for like 18 months, which was sick.
“In terms of making an album about the pandemic, it just seemed like creative low hanging fruit to me. But also I did want to touch on that. In fact, most of the album is about the pandemic but not about it specifically; more about internal reflections and consequences of it. ‘Join Me In Armageddon’, for instance, is a song about self-destruction, because I drank too much wine, because I had nothing better to do with my time,” he laughs. “And I thought maybe I shouldn’t do that anymore. And now people think that we’re like this Russian-phobic band and think that it’s all about the nuclear thing. But you know, just taking those ideas that are from COVID for sure, but not actually making it about COVID.”
Godlike, another collaboration with long-time producer Will Putney, is also Delaware product and drummer Jesse Beahler’s second album with Thy Art is Murder. His greater presence during the composition process seemingly influenced the more atmospheric material. “Our friendship is strengthened a million fold,” Marsh says of his band-mate. “And he’s a big, like, esoteric black metal fan. So maybe he’s flexing that muscle a bit more.”
After previously working with heavyweight metal label Nuclear Blast in overseas markets, Godlike is their first fully independently released record. It’s being issued worldwide via their own label, Human Warfare. Marsh, who describes himself as “the manager, record label, and the merchandise business” for the group felt sufficiently equipped to take this leap with the new release.
“Such is the nature of running your own business is that we could kind of strategise what to do,” Marsh explains.”Like, say, (do) this regional tour and generate an income and use that to fund production of the record, as opposed to taking a loan from a record label that incurs a 60 per cent interest rate, which is insane. I’m better off going to the bank and getting a quarter of a million dollar loan. And (it’s) also about protecting the intellectual property of the band moving forward. We’re an independent band, there’s no union, there’s no compelled superannuation, because we’re all directors of the business. And also learning about those sorts of things, and trying to make records at the same time, tour. It’s a lot to get your head around.
“But in my mind, it seemed the best way to protect our income as we move to the next stage of our career in the next, say, five to 15 years where we might want to tour less, our kids are growing up. Handing over 50 to 60 per cent of your income for records that are not getting promoted and are recouped, for the future seems ridiculous. It’s like me saying, ‘I’ll give you 50 grand today, and you give me half of your income for the next 20 years’. You’d say, ‘fuck off’,” he laughs. “Like, why would I do that? It’s just the same principle. You’re paying me for work you’re doing in the future, for me giving you money 10 years ago. It doesn’t seem very fair.”
This strong-willed approach to the industry feels on brand for Thy Art Is Murder. Front-man Chris “CJ” McMahon bragged to this writer several years ago that the head of Nuclear Blast had to leave his house at 11pm to listen to their new album, because the members would not give him a physical copy of the music.
“I mean, the label has been great for us,” Marsh explains. “It’s been very educational to me in the last 10 years alone, how the business side of things works. But it just seemed like the best time to make that switch, now. We don’t owe anyone any money, we’ve got no loans, no anything.”
There are financial considerations that accompany Marsh’s fondness for the full-length within a streaming culture dominated by singles, splits and EPs, though. “I love that album format,” he enthuses. “There’s a process that’s required to make an album which is persistence, and persistence over time. You get like a broader range of influences, a broader range of outputs. Sometimes as well, you need to write 10,12, 15 (songs). I think this record we did 25 songs or so. And that’s not to say that the first 10 made the album and then we just kept writing. It’s like, sometimes you need to write 15 songs to get one that you wouldn’t have got otherwise; you need to purge your brain of all these ideas, before you get to new things.
“But that being said, I’m probably the first one that would say, in terms of return on investment, the amount of expense that it takes to make a record, which for a band like us nowadays is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; probably approaching a quarter of a million dollars to make a record. To only have like the four singles really hit and start generating some sort of income, I would be the first one to try and push us towards like, maybe in between records, we should start trying to think about getting one or two singles done, (as) they can be made a whole lot cheaper. They don’t require such an immersive marketing campaign or album set-up in terms of all the music videos.
“Look at ‘Killing Season’: I wrote that song in one hour,” he laughs. “It’s one of the top 10 streamed songs for the band, and we recorded it in one day. It was a day off on tour, and we just did it,” he chuckles. “When you start thinking of the dollars and cents, I do have to take that into consideration, which people might say is selling out or cheapening the album format. But to me, it’s like, I’d still have to find a way for the band to generate money to fund our passion projects, which are these longer format records.”
As the new album drops, the band continues to be in considerable demand internationally as a live act. “We want to be bigger than the big dogs … we want to change metal,” they proclaimed to this scribe prior to the release of Holy War. The “deathcore” tag was perhaps a boost for the band early on but what was once a milestone on albums like Hate has perhaps became a millstone around their necks as they seek to grow their audience within the heavy music world.
“I’d love to get to the point where we just get called a metal band,” Marsh says. “I don’t silo myself in that way when listening music, like, ‘oh, I don’t listen to that genre of music’. But I’m sure like a lot of people do, or they follow taste-makers that help guide them.”
The members of Thy Art is Murder – Marsh splits his time between Brisbane and the US, their drummer is from the States, and other members reside in Queensland and Sydney – are accustomed to having their lives planned out years in advance. The looming Godlike cycle is no exception, as they take their blasts and breakdowns on the road.
“I’m starting to close in on the start of 2026 now in terms of planning,” Marsh says. “So we have some tours that are in the pipe for Godlike headline tours. Then hopefully off the back of those, we’ve got a few slots available, where I’d love to go out and support some bigger bands. Everyone always wants to headline, but it’s like, nah, Thy Art is a band that, sure, we’ll headline, but we love to go out with bands that are bigger than us and just continue investing in the possible future growth of the band.
“And just meet new people, new fans, new other bands to tour with. Hopefully this record gets us to a place where we become, like part of that conversation of bands like Lamb of God, Machine Head and Trivium, where it’s like, we’re direct support worthy.”
Publicity photo: Third Eye Visuals
