Q & A: Brady Deeprose (Conjurer)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

THOSE who enjoy dark experimental metal have hopefully discovered Conjurer. Lurking in the UK metal underground since 2016, the band’s 2022 album Páthos brought them to worldwide attention. Their forthcoming third album Unself continues and refines their experimental nature, as guitarist and vocalist Brady Deeprose elaborates.

Hot Metal: How are you?
Brady Deeprose: “Good! It’s been real busy, prepping for the album, prepping for tour … remembering how to play guitar, because we’ve had some time off doing anything musical since we finished recording the album. So it’s just a big few months of prep! But we are barrelling towards the end of that. So it’s crunch time, really.”

HM: I’m really looking forward to being able to immerse myself properly in the new Conjurer album. The previous one is still one of my favourites from the last few years. It was also the album that put Conjurer on the map for a lot of people – would you agree?
BD: “Yeah, I think so. I think everything for us has been about slow and steady growth. There’s never been a want to be defined by one kind of thing. We put out an EP and a few people in the UK heard about us, then we did an album and it spread a bit further. Then Páthos was the next evolution of that. I think for me, I think it’s really cool – and it’s with any band – the album you find a band on kind of defines that band to you. That kind of defines that relationship. So as we continue to put out new music, I think it will be very interesting hearing what people think this band is.”

HM: It is difficult to classify a band like yours, and whenever I see someone trying to do that with Conjurer, there’s a long list of adjectives either before or after the name. It does seem to be one of those bands that defy a proper pigeonhole.
BD: “Yeah I think that’s definitely by design, as a reflection of who we are. We have always kind of hated genre boundaries. It’s not like we’re mixing ska and EDM and death metal. It all falls within heavy metal music. But I think with us, the distinctions between post-black metal and sludge and doom and all of our favourite bands straddle the link between a few different things. So I think we were, from the jump, never going to stick with a genre. It never felt appropriate. It’s always just been our approach to songwriting and the ethos behind what we do is more who we are, than any particular sound. The sound will shift in direction but it’s always going to be some form of distorted guitars and shouting. But I like that we’re free to explore whatever that looks like without having to follow a set of rules.”

HM: If you look at Pathos, there was a lot of stuff going on. You had a song like “Suffer Alone” that was almost grindcore. That probably threw a few people off. One of the things I liked about it was that it was far from one-note.
BD: “For sure! That’s my favourite frustration with most of the music I listen to. You have either got to be, if you’re doing one thing, you’ve got to be the absolute best at that, or I’ve got to be in the perfect mood to want to listen to just that one thing. Especially when it’s over multiple albums. Like, I really like The Black Dahlia Murder, but I love only a couple of those records and I don’t feel like I need anymore. That’s not in a disrespectful way, it’s just not for me. We want to be a band where, I don’t think any of our records will cancel out any of the others. I think there’ll be enough new ideas and enough new creative passions and influences on every record. It may get to the point where our music isn’t for you and you’re only into certain eras of the band, but not because it’s the same thing. A band like Melvins … I’m slowly working my way through the discography and there’s different eras and different sounds. There is a lot of crossover but you can really hear what they were doing in the nineties and what they were doing in the mid-thousands. Really inspiring.”

HM: What are you exploring on this album that you haven’t done before?
BD: “‘Shaken off the shackles’ is how I feel about it. I definitely hear limitations on the last record, mainly due to time and making an album during COVID. We didn’t get to play any of those songs in a room together before we recorded them. So a lot of that album came out feeling quite claustrophobic and overbearing, and uncomfortable to play. So there was a real big focus on how do we give ourselves the time and space and the prep time to feel comfortable? There was a lot of pre-production, a lot more jamming in the same room with the songs and getting on the same page. Giving us the time to experiment: try a vocal technique or a production technique or try a XYZ, because we weren’t racing to the finish line to get the album done on time. There was a lot more room for trying things out. We could waste a couple of hours trying a real stupid guitar tone, just to see if it worked. That sense of freedom that really informed the songwriting. Especially a lot of the vocal choices, like some of the clean vocals. We wouldn’t have had the time to try out those ideas on the last record. I think there’s a lot less restrictions on this album in terms of sound and sonics and it’s really just us at our most open and willing to experiment with different sounds and ideas.”

HM: The clean vocals will certainly throw people. They always seem to.
BD: “I think it’s something we’ve always been open to. Danny’s confidence as a singer from the start of the recording process to the end has changed dramatically. But really, we were taking a lot more influence from folk music and that tradition and just being experimental … there were times where Danny would say he wanted to try a clean thing here. I was definitely thinking, ‘I can’t see that. This is definitely not going to work. But let’s try it’. And having the time to take a few passes at things, and we recorded many different vocal takes and styles and phrasings and even lyrics, and boil down to see what felt most natural. I think it will throw some people and it will absolutely put some people off! But I think it’s quite tasteful and I don’t think it’s really shifted what that the songs are doing. I think it is used well and the songs needed it. It will be interesting, but if you start writing for how you imagine how people want to hear you, then you’re absolutely shafting yourself before you’ve even started. All we can do it make the kind of art that feels exciting to us, and if people don’t want to get on board with that, then that’s on them!”

HM: I think all bands should do that, regardless of what direction they want to go in. It’s really the artist presenting themselves at that point in their career and development. There’s sure to be people who didn’t like Pathos who might like Unself, and the other way around. If the artist stays true to themselves, that’s all you can do.
BD: “One hundred percent. And we’re at the stage with this album where I’m just excited to have it out there. I’m so proud of what we’ve done that it doesn’t really matter to me. It would be disappointing if it was universally hated! Like if everyone thought ‘this thing is terrible’!  But it wouldn’t change my mind on it. I’m still really proud of what we’ve done, and I stand by it. I feel like I’m talking about it as if it will be really controversial! But it’s probably like 85 percent the kind of thing we would do. In these times of so much music and so much diversification of music, people like to hone in on those little changes. For me, all of our records sit firmly within the same kind of sound.”