RIVERS OF NIHlL: Making it Work (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

ADAM Biggs of Rivers of Nihil has just welcomed a new addition to his family, the second child for he and his wife. As a professional musician in an in-demand international touring band, being a dad of two kids under the age of two has brought about new responsibilities to go along with managing his day job.

“The band has become what I do for work now,” he begins, chatting from home between tours, “so I’ve got to make time for everything. It’s hard to shove off and leave your family at home, but my wife’s great. She’s strong as heck and takes good care of the kids while I’m gone. There’s always some logistical matters to sort out and we’ve got babysitters and family members pitching in here and there, so it ends up working out in the end.”

With Rivers of Nihil getting a huge bump thanks to the US Billboard top 100 slot for their 2018 opus Where Owls Know My Name, Biggs has been able to do the band as a full-time job. It’s a perilous existence for any act, exponentially so for a progressive death metal band. He is well aware of the fragility of his chosen career, but having to provide for his family has given him new focus and drive.

“I understand that it’s tough,” he admits, “but it became a necessity. I’ve spent the last 15 years working on this band in particular, and music has been a big part of my whole life, so it didn’t really leave me a lot of time to get, like, an engineering degree or anything like that!” He chuckles with some self-awareness. “So I better make hay with this while I still can. The family has proven to be the source of motivation to be smarter about everything and make sure it all works at maximum efficiency. I am very lucky and I am fully aware that it is the nature of the business that it could be gone at any point.”

Formed by Biggs, guitarist Brody Uttley and former vocalist Jake Dieffenbach in 2009, the Reading, PA. band has been through more than its share of personnel shuffles. Last year, both Dieffenbach and long-serving guitarist Jon Topore departed. Topore was replaced by former Black Crown Initiate member Andy Thomas, while Biggs decided to take over the vocal role himself. It was a challenging move.

“I wouldn’t say it was easy to adapt to,” he says. “But I think it was easier than I thought it was [going to be]. At the end of the day, the lion’s share of the vocal stuff was written by me. There’s been little parts of songs that I’ve had to run over and over and over, until I can play it and sing it at the same time without losing the quality in one thing or the other. It came naturally, but it’s tough!”

There was also an unexpected side effect: “It kind of reinvigorated a lot of the songs that I’ve played a bajillion times, so now I find a new thing to do with it.”

The band’s most recent album, The Work, was the final chapter in their four-part tetralogy based on the seasons. The Work represented winter, but at least two of the songs, “The Void From Which No Sound Escapes” and “MORE?” were written about the pressures a band faces from their audience. It was a bleak album for a bleak time.

“The whole seasons thing was a metaphor for life, and a metaphor for the life of the band,” Biggs says of it. “Once you go through that whole cycle, you grow up and it’s time to find out what life’s like on the other side. So we’ll be exploring further topics.”

As they move on from that overarching concept, and with a new configuration, Rivers of Nihil released “The Sub-Orbital Blues” in June to give fans notice that they were still very much in business.

“We decided that, with the line-up change, we should show people that the band still has juice,” Biggs explains. “There will be more songs that we put out relatively soon that will be in the same vein. We decided to keep the train moving so people weren’t asking, after such a big change, whether the band was all right anymore. It’s not that big a deal! We got this!”

There are no immediate plans to recruit a new specialist singer, either. For the moment the band is perfectly happy working as a four piece.

“I think one of the major things we’ve learned through this is that the more voices in the pot, the more people you have to keep track of … the harder it gets. When you have four people, even if they’re psychos like we are, you can still wrangle things a little easier. We’re all pretty happy with this format. We toyed with the idea of bringing in a different singer, but it was like, Do we really want to add another personality? ANother guy that we don’t really know that well? It’s not like we didn’t have ideas for another singer, we just wanted to make this work.”

Rivers of Nihil are currently in Australia for the second time, as guests of Ne Obliviscaris, with whom they previously toured in 2019. Following this tour they head to Europe with Lorna Shore and Ingested for shows that are being upgraded to bigger venues as the dates get closer. Following that, Adam Biggs wants to get back to recording.

“[That tour] should be quite the adventure for little old Rivers. We’re very much looking forward to that. After that, I want to crack down and get a record made for everybody.”