by BRIAN GIFFIN
IN May last year, Little Rock doom band Pallbearer released their fifth album, Mind Burns Alive. With a marked shift in direction from 2020’s Forgotten Days, it elicited a mixed reaction for its emotional depth and aesthetic, trading its predecessor’s obsession with slow crushing riffs for introspection and dark atmospherics. While some praised it as a callback to earlier work, others criticised the band for going soft.
Vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell is forthright about Mind Burns Alive being a polarising release, but he believes attitudes are changing.
“I think now that it’s out and we’ve actually had time to play the songs live,” he says, “people are really enjoying the new stuff. Even some of the people who weren’t sure about it. Because do that thing you’re not supposed to do: read reviews. I need fucking validation!”
He chuckles.
“There were some people who were like, ‘I don’t know about this new stuff. It’s kinda soft.’ But it seems like those people, experiencing our songs live, are seeing what they’re meant to sound like. I think a lot of our stuff is like that. Once you see it live, you get it.”
Australian audiences will be able to make up their own minds when Pallbearer returns in May for their first tour here since 2018. The band has released two albums in that time, so there will be a lot of catch up on.
“That’s all right,” Campbell says amiably. “Although… half the songs are so long we can only play so much. We’d have to come down and play two hour sets to really fill (you) in.”
Hopefully those plans won’t be upset by a health issue that Campbell has been battling for a few years.
“I was going to get throat surgery at the beginning of the year, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he explains, before elaborating: “I’ve had tonsil issues for the last ten years, basically, and it can be annoying on the road because they’ll swell up and shit, and I lose my voice. I sing anyway, but it makes it a lot harder. I was going to schedule a surgery to get them removed, which apparently is a nightmare as an adult, but I don’t think I’ll be able to schedule it in time to make the tour.”
So far so good on that front, with Pallbearer due to play four shows in Australia in March, with Merseyside crushers Conan in support. In the meantime, Campbell is constantly writing. He can’t say what the next Pallbearer album might be like, but “I’ve got probably an hour’s worth of riffs.”
“I’m always working on something,” he says. “I write a bunch of stuff, and when it really hits, I’ll know. I’ll write a bunch of different sounding stuff, and then usually I get into this zone where I”ll write a ton of stuff in a month, and usually that’s where records come out. I’ll try to write at least four or five sections of songs a week, and whether I use them or not, who knows? But when something really clicks, I’ll develop it into a whole song. Or sometimes I’ll pull a whole section or an idea out of another song that I’ve been working on. So what I’m doing is spitballing and throwing things against the wall until I find a particular sound or idea that I want to pursue.”
Pallbearer’s lyrics typically explore esoteric themes or the dark side of the human condition. Mind Burns Alive is an emotionally-charged journey through loneliness and isolation, shrouded in melancholia and atmosphere. For Campbell, the music always suggests the lyrics, even if they are drawn from whatever is on his mind at the time of writing.
“They’re all kind of intertwined, and once the music’s written, I kind of figure out what I want to write about. So they all come about at the same time, but I don’t really know what the lyrics will be about until the music is done. Literally today I was thinking about writing some lyrics and then writing music around them, which I’ve never done for Pallbearer, so that might be a cool way to do it.”
PALLBEARER AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2025
MARCH 12: Max Watts, Melbourne
MARCH 13: Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
MARCH 14: Crowbar, Sydney
MARCH 15: Crowbar, Brisbane
