Munt: Fatal Attraction (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

WHEN is a grind band not a grind band? When that band is Munt, according to guitarist and founding member Spud Robertson. 

“People see us described like that and they think we’re a grindcore band,” he says. “We definitely use aspects from that genre, but the way we’ve kind of coined the term for ourselves is that it’s sort of a grind of genres. There’s grind in there, but once you start to get to sub-genres and stuff, it starts to get messy. We’re not really like that.”

Pieced together over the last eight years since Robertson moved to Melbourne from Edinburgh, Munt’s line-up is completed by drummer Seedy, vocalist Tim “Mothlord” Richmond from the deathcore band The Seraphim Veil, and guitarist Sol Laskowski and bass player Ron Dixon, who also play together in the sludge band Class Traitor. Each of them has brought elements of their other bands into Munt, yet dissonance and speed remain at the core of their sound.

“There’s lots of blastbeats and we chuck in frantic tempos so it’s very much the mentality of [grind] bands because it’s played raw and ferociously,” Robertson explains. “I enjoy death metal myself, but I love grindcore for its insanity. It’s what it’s supposed to be: it’s music that makes people who are into heavy music think, ‘Whoa, this is too much!’”

The band’s new EP Pain Ouroboros highlights the variety of influences. The seventy-seven seconds of pure grind mayhem that is “Zero Sum” rubs up against the murky sludge of “Communion of Thorns” and “Children of Delirium” is infested with black metal inspired tremolo picking. The EP began to take shape during the pandemic and a string of events that continued to stall them on the live front convinced Munt to go in and record.

“We kind of had it started and then we had a year of setbacks in the second year of the pandemic when shows were trying to come back. Some shows were happening, and some were getting cancelled left, right and centre, so we hit a real streak of bad luck for a whole year where, I think, six shows we had planned for the whole year all got cancelled at the last minute due to lockdowns, sickness and various things. That was when we basically made the decision that we were going to go into the studio and record, because it was like, ‘OK, it’s been a year. We have to cancel shows. We still don’t know when this thing is going to bugger off, so let’s put all our money and our minds into recording these songs’, and so that’s what we did.”

The title of the EP was inspired as much by their experience of the pandemic as it was by an overarching philosophy of life itself as a cycle of unending struggles.

“The symbol of the Ouroboros is the snake eating its own tail in a circle, a metaphor for the endless cycle of disruption and rebirth,” Robertson says, getting into further detail of the EP’s themes. “That’s kind of where Pain Ouroboros comes into it: it’s basically just an endless cycle of pain. That’s what existence is. It’s cycles of pain beginning and ending again. People are trying to find a way out of it and live without pain, but it’s really more about the acceptance that it is what existence is. Again, the songs were born out of the frustration of the pandemic, and lockdown and stuff, and that was at the forefront of thinking about that, all the struggles we have to face together, and it’s endless, and basically not going to get better, ever. So that’s the way of it. We have to accept it.”

The title and artwork were a careful choice to make their audience engage with the complexities of Munt’s music and the fatalism of their outlook.

“The more we sat on [the title], we intertwined it with other ideas we were doing, and it sort of came out on top. It’s kind of subtle, and it’s good because we wanted something that was a little bit different, as well. We wanted something that makes people think and make it interesting, because there’s a lot going on in this EP with the music.”

Robertson suggest that his beliefs aren’t quite so bleak on a personal level as those Munt projects: “I’m glad I have the band as an outlet for all this audio and visual experience, because I’m not very good at talking about my feelings.” Nonetheless, a definite sense of nihilism still pervades.

“I don’t think in terms that black and white, that things are going to be better or worse. We’re just stuck in this weird reality for a short time, and some of us have it better than others. You have moments of greatness and then you have moments of crippling lows, and I think that’s the important thing for me – we all kind of go through those things together. I personally think that a lot of people try to find satisfaction and happiness from having no problems in life, whereas I think the satisfaction from life should come from solving complex problems, which nobody instinctively wants to do.”

The tribulations endured bringing Pain Ouroboros to life would certainly support this belief.

ORDER ‘PAIN OUROBOROS’ HERE.