TO THE GRAVE: Making the Cut (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

SYDNEY extremists To the Grave don’t take any prisoners when it comes to the brutal message behind their savage assault. Not content with mere mindless gore and splatter, To The Grave use their violent imagery to disparage humanity’s inhumanity to the other living things that share this planet. 

“Lyrically, especially more so than ever on this record,” says vocalist Dane Evans, “[we’re] focusing on animal cruelty and perhaps more on this record than the last one, [and] calling out bullshit where I see it – racism, whatever… police brutality, things like that.”

To The Grave don’t hold back. The cover of their album Director’s Cuts is a slaughtered animal, and the videos accompanying the singles so far mirror Evans’ lyrics that turn the cruelty humans inflict on other creatures onto the perpetrators. It’s powerful, unsettling imagery that  could easily backfire on the band, given the extremity of their music. For Evans, such a level of visceral violence is merely a reflection of the message the band is attempting to convey.

“What I think is happening is quite violent,” he says of what he sees as the suffering and cruelty animals are subjected to in the process of farming them for human consumption. “What we did with the cover art for those singles is take actual photos that were taken in Australia on farms, and if those photos are violent and indigestible, that’s the very point we’re trying to make.”

It’s a point that’s hammered home, again and again, across Director’s Cuts’ monstrous but compelling 45 minute assault, a crushing powerhouse of deathcore that rises above the some of the usual, murky cliches of that genre in its openly direct approach to its content and themes. These ideas are conveyed with unflinching, gore-drenched brutality in the accompanying videos To The Grave has so far released.

“You look at how easily our music can fall into the hands of someone quite young,” Evans says, addressing the issue of presenting such barbarity to its audience, “[so] do we want our lyrics – and sure, it’s death metal – to be all about killing people and negative shit, or can bring our heavy, horrific music and pair that with a pretty heavy, horrific message? It seems to go down well.”

To The Grave have been going down well on the live front too, ripping crowds to shreds on their recent European tour and getting the opportunity to terrify the uninitiated in broad daylight at the Good Things festival in Melbourne late last year when a spot opened up at the eleventh hour.

“We loved it actually,” he says. “We were the first band on, so all the kids who managed to get there in time, it was like, ‘This is your fucking alarm clock! Let’s go!’ We knew that, going in, that this was going to be, obviously, Bring Me the Horizon’s crowd, so they can be won over.”

It’s been quite a long time since BMTH made music with the kind of ferocity To The Grave does, but it was a good way to bring their message to a wider crowd. Exposure beyond a fanbase that would typically accept and understand can also mean the type of misunderstanding of that message. It’s a double-edged sword: “Just hitting a wider audience, you’re going to have people that digest it to varying degrees. I’ve encountered several people online who, because our lyrics are so direct, think they mean something else, and I’ve tried to tell them otherwise, and they’re like, ‘Well, it means that to me’.”

While there are some who still doubts its origins, there’s consensus that the COVID pandemic was caused by the exact practises that To The Grave highlights in their songs, and the band has looked at it in their material.

“There’s a song about that actually,” Evans says. “When it was going on, I thought, ‘This will get swept under the rug. Either that or this is it for us – or, it will be get back to work and try to forget this ever happened’. And it ended up being that! So the song I wrote tried to withstand the test of it. Did we really look at the source of it, and try to address it? I don’t think we did. I think we learnt fuck all. Evidently. Everyone was locked inside, which is fair enough, but all the slaughterhouses and farms stayed open, and that’s where these viruses and diseases come from, which confused the fuck out of me at the time.”

Because of COVID, the band weren’t able to tour as hard as they would have liked on their previous release. A recent European jaunt has helped to make up for that, although a big US outing backed by their label Unique Leader had to be cancelled because due to Evans suffering some health issues. They’re keen and ready to make up for that now.

“We didn’t really get to tour much off the back of our last record because the world went to shit, so… for example, we made it to Berlin before we ever made it to Perth, so we want to get there this year. There’s a lot of Australia that we haven’t really covered, so that’s on the cards for this year.”

He makes a promise that To The Grave will get back to the US during 2023 too, and while he agrees that the touring environment is more expensive than ever, his band has a good team behind it and it’s all worthwhile in the end.

“It definitely wouldn’t have been manageable without the efforts of the team behind us, making the right moves, not accepting dumb offers and things like that. Touring is more expensive but – and I’ve not been able to find someone who can put their finger on why – shows have just been better since everyone was locked inside. You could argue that touring is expensive and quite debilitating, but it does really well for your band and it’s a measure of whether it’s worth it or not.”