CARNIFEX

The San Jose gang is performing in Paris as part of their promotional European tour for their latest album, “Necromanteum”. Let's go interview Scott, the singer/frontman/manager, to learn more about this iconic band in the Blackened Deathcore scene.

1/ "Carnifex" means "executioner" in Latin, and it was the nickname of the Roman general Pompey Strabo. How was this name chosen?

When we picked our name back in 2005, I remember Metalcore bands were really big back then. And they all had really long names, and so we decided that we wanted our band name to just be one word and when we found out “carnifex” means executioner, we thought that was a good name for a Metal band.

2/ What were you listening to when the band was forming in 2005? On top of Death Metal, were there Slam Death and Hardcore (the track "Dead Against the Gates" sounds a bit Hardcore at times) ?

I say it was a combination of CANNIBAL CORPSE, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER and BLEEDING THROUGH. Also, some DYING FETUS in there, that's probably I would say the only band that kind of have Slam sound. Also, some CATTLE DECAPITATION in there. I was listening to MORTICIAN and stuff like that but I don't know if it was an influence. About Hardcore, I would say BLEEDING THROUGH checks the box for Hardcore and Metalcore. Maybe some HATEBREED as well.

3/ Some reviews at the time were not very kind and tended to reproach that your Deathcore sounded just like JOB FOR A COWBOY or SUICIDE SILENCE. Did that affect you back then?

Not really, no. Everyone reviewing Deathcore - except for the fans - was very negative, so that was normal to us. Even as recently as 2019, we were still getting negative reviews just because it was Deathcore. It's only been in the last three years that the tide has turned, and the industry now likes Deathcore. But that's just because they see money, you know. But before they hated it. Now they like it because they can make money on it.

4/ If someone had told you in 2005 that a few years later, your sound would incorporate solos, clean guitar, and symphonic elements, how would you have reacted?

Not too surprised. I was always a fan of DIMMU BORGIR and CRADLE OF FILTH and those influences coming in isn’t too surprising.

5/ Was the title of the song "Death Awaits" from 2006 a nod to "Hell Awaits" by SLAYER?

No, unrelated, I just thought it sounded cool. I didn't really listen to SLAYER.

6/ There's pig squeal on "Hope Dies With The Decadent" (version from the EP "Love Lies In Ashes"); will we have the pleasure of hearing this again someday?

I mean, never say never. I don't think so. But you never know. Maybe.

7/ The French version of Wikipedia says that half of the band was homeless in December 2007/January 2008 during the writing of your 2nd album. This information is not in the English version so I wanted to ask for confirmation.

And that's partially true. I think homeless brings up the connotation that you're living on the sidewalk, that, that's not accurate, but we were all on tour at the time and we were staying all at the same place because we didn't have anywhere else to stay. So I don't know, I guess that's partially true.

8/ And what's your standard of living now?

Much better.

9/ You were the singer (and drummer?) for the Christian Black Metal band SYLVAN FORTRESS in 2001-2002. And Shawn was there for several years starting from 2016. But in an interview you gave 3 years ago, you said that CARNIFEX is not a satanic band because you don't believe in Satan or God... How can you be in a Christian band without believing in God?

Yeah, briefly. That was another guy's band. But we played together, yeah. I also did drum for a little bit.
I was in this band because there were no other musicians to play with. About the involvement of Shawn, I don’t think that’s accurate.

10/ You added that you were nihilists. What's your definition of nihilism?

True nihilism is you believe there's no good in the world. I don't necessarily believe there's no good in the world, but I think that there is a lot of ambiguous existence in the world and different cultures are going to apply good or bad to it. And it's really thrilling to see this from different perspectives.

11/ Is that why we see a skull on most of your album covers? To remind of death and the meaninglessness of life?

There's probably a little memento mori in there for sure. We like the modern style of the artist called “Godmachine” whose most of the artwork is skulls. There is no skull on the covers of “Hell Chose Me” and “World War X” but for the other albums, I think the covers are from him.

12/ On your early releases, the lyrics dealt with heartbreaks and disgust for life. What are your main themes now besides pure nihilism?

It’s not pure nihilism but on the more recent records, we’re definitely looking at more of the duality of life, you know, the good things and the bad things happening simultaneously. And kind of assessing the human condition and response to. Dealing with having something great, as having something sad, but at the same time.

13/ You don't drink beer or soda and don't eat fast food. Does this straight edge aspect impact CARNIFEX in any way?

No, that's not true, I drink soda; I don’t drink beer though. About fast food, if there's no other option, you know, when you're on tour, sometimes there's only such food that's open and close by.
I was straight edge for a long time, from 2005 to 2020, so 15 years. We're focused on our work, but I don't know if that's directly related to being straight edge, I don't think so.

14/ Your evolution towards Blackened Deathcore was gradual and fully embraced on "Die Without Hope", with a strong presence of symphonic keyboards reminiscent of DIMMU BORGIR. This album is your first to be released on Nuclear Blast, which is also the label of the Norwegians. Can we see a connection there?

I would say it was more on “Slow Death”, the next one. But no, no connection to the label. That was just the record that happened to come out after they signed us. It wasn't like we wrote a more Blackened record because we signed with them. We had sent them a demo, about four songs that were on “Die Without Hope”, prior to being signed and they liked them and so we just wrote the rest of the record.

15/ Another influence could be Shawn's (drummer) involvement in the Symphonic Metal band UNICORN DEATH where he served between 2012 and 2017?

No, the other way, probably. No, really it was just our older influences like I said, like DIMMU BORGIR, CRADLE OF FILTH, IMMORTAL, SATYRICON, bands like that. I think we just wanted to bring these elements and embed that. You know, when we wrote those records in 2015, Deathcore was kind of not cool, pretty stale. And so, we were just trying to think of new things we can add that no one was doing and so we started adding Black Metal. Now, doing Black Metal and Deathcore is very popular. But 10 years ago, and even earlier than that (I think we first started really incorporating the Black Metal influences into “Until I feel Nothing”, so 2011), nobody was doing it then, it was us just trying to do something different.

16/ What are your other influences for cold electronic/industrial sounds?

I like some Industrial bands like NINE INCH NAILS. I don't know for Rob Zombie if it’s Industrial but KMFDM, RAMMSTEIN. It's kind of like classic Industrial, I guess, mainstream Industrial.

17/ Shawn handled keyboards on several albums. Who took over and since when?

He's done some, yeah. And then, we've hired other musicians to do so. Most recently we had this guy named Spencer, up in Canada to do our automation and our programing. It was on the most recent album, “Necromanteum”.

18/ Since you are now very symphonic, would you consider performing with an orchestra, like SATYRICON did at the Oslo opera?

I mean, we had the thought, but I don't think it's realistic and to be honest with you, I don't know how much interest the fans have. I can't tell. Maybe, maybe not. I can see it working better for SATYRICON than for us.

19/ "January Nights" is a peaceful instrumental track. It could be nice to play it live to take a break between 2 mosh pits; have you ever thought about it?

No, we haven't. Even if we have written a few instrumental tracks over the years, I don't think we've ever considered thus. Because, when you're playing live, you have to realize what the audience is there for and to play quiet, you know, kind of weird music for 2 minutes, it's kind of a mood killer. Well, we're just trying to make sure the fans have fun. That's really our whole business, making sure the fans have a good time.

20/ It seems that Deathcore has been revived by its Blackened subgenre and popularized by bands like yours and LORNA SHORE. How do you explain this comeback and what interests you in this evolution?

As far as what explains it, I think is just good music. It sounds good. And I think Deathcore always sounded good. But for whatever reason, maybe because it kind of came from Myspace, people just wanted to hate on it. So, I think it's just the more time something's around, the more people will be accepting it.

21/ Some new bands have started playing old school Deathcore. What are your thoughts about this?

Yeah, I've seen some of that too, everything goes in a cycle. To me it's not surprising. Like old school Death Metal, look at all the kind of OBITUARY wannabe bands. That's really popular right now. And I mean, we toured with OBITUARY. No one cared about old Death Metal but now they're popular again, and so is that sound. So, everything's cyclical.

22/ Is it within the trend of Blackened Deathcore that we saw you in corpse paint in the music video for "Drown Me in Blood"?

Yeah, the “Slow Death” record was really kind of embracing that whole blackened concept, and we kind of kept doing it a little bit afterwards, but really it was just meant for that. So that's why we don't do that so much anymore.

23/ You have covered SLAYER, NINE INCH NAILS, SLIPKNOT, and KORN. What's next? Since you’re a fan of Black Metal, can we expect covers of BEHEMOTH, CRADLE OF FILTH, or WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, which are bands you appreciate?

I don't know. You know, we were talking about that. I'm thinking about doing another cover and we couldn't come up with one. That wasn't unknown so to speak. You know you try to look at one of the big popular bands and I feel like, I don't know PANTERA but it may not be really right for us And I know we've talked about doing METALLICA cover a few times, but I don't know, we just haven’t it.
We don't usually cover current bands but more the classic bands.

24/ CARNIFEX has also been covered. I listened to MISSOURI QUIET playing "Lie to My Face". Are there other bands that you know of who showed their appreciation to you in this way?

We played with a local band one time, and they played a cover of us, like earlier in the night, which was kind of funny. I know bands do covers from time to time and sometimes we get tagged on Instagram.

25/ On several of your songs, you've had notable guests like Alissa White-Gluz from ARCH ENEMY, Adam Warren from OCEANO, Angel Vivaldi, and Tom Barber from CHELSEA GRIN. This is a fairly common practice in Deathcore. Should we expect more collaborations, in both directions ?

I don't know, maybe. It seems like a lot of people are doing it and usually where a lot of people do something, we do the other thing. So, we may not. I don't know. Sometimes it's hard to get collaborations to happen.
I do get asked too but I don’t usually. No, I'm too busy with CARNIFEX. It’s a fulltime job and I manage the band too, so I feel like I'm working on the demand every single day, so I don't have the energy to work on someone else's band.

26/ I believe you and Shawn co-produced your latest 2 albums. What additional freedom did that bring compared to before?

It wasn't so much additional freedom as it was about the idea of working with a producer. They show up too late in the process for us. Really, we're doing our producing when we're making the songs, when we're arranging them, writing them, doing all the editing. That's kind of where the songs are produced. And then by the time we get to the studio, really all the producers doing is just hitting ‘record’. The song itself is done. And so, once we went through that process, producers, where it's kind of a producer title only, we just stopped paying for it because there was nothing to produce, the songs were already written. So, they're recording the song as it arrived, nothing got changed or produced, so we just stopped hiring producers because I can't think back to one good idea, I'm pretty sure, they ever had or that we even used. So, we just got rid of them.
Because you know with Metal it's different than a pop song where an artist more likely only write their lyrics, they're not creating their own music in their free time and they're coming to the producer, and they're sort of cocreating the song in that studio time. Our budget doesn’t allow you to be in a studio six months earlier. When we go to the studio, I have four days to record an entire record. There's no time to produce anything. It has to be done by the time you get there because you literally only have enough time to record. So, it's very different for Metal than it is for outside of the Metal world where a producer role probably is a real thing. I haven't really seen it functioning like that in the Metal world where you get a very small amount of money and they say, “hey, you got 10 days, make an entire record”. There's no time for producing in that 10 days. It's only time being recorded.

27/ Could you introduce us to your latest album "Necromanteum" and its idea of the duality of nature?

I mean that's pretty much it. It's about that grey area between living and not living in the spirit world. What is out there, if anything? And then kind of dealing with that internal split as well, like in the track “Heaven And Hell at Once”.

28/ Musically, it presents very symphonic Death Metal aspects, I even sometimes thought of SEPTICFLESH...

Good band, I do like SEPTICFLESH yeah, FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE also, great band. Yeah, it's cool sound.

29/ How is the onboarding of Neal Tiemann (guitar) going and what contributions has he made?

The process was really pretty easy because it was such a good match. We first toured together in 2020 and then after doing that tour together, getting along so well, it was pretty easy to work together. He's a great writer. And so, having another great writer makes putting together a record much easier. So, it was pretty natural, it’s pretty fast. It wasn't really a trial period, we just sort of just jumped in and started writing music together.

30/ Apart from Cory who has been there since the first album, 5 guitarists (Rick James, Travis Whiting, Jake Anderson, Ryan Gudmunds, and Jordan Lockrey) have come and gone before Neal. What explains the difficulty in retaining this second guitarist?

The first three were really barely members. They played guitar on some shows, it's about it. So yeah, Ryan was the first real guitarist. Ryan was in the band for four years. And then, Jordan was in the band for I guess six or seven years. So, you know, it seems like a normal amount of time for people to give it a try. So, really in my mind, Neal’s our third guitarist. The previous guitarists never put anything or contributed to the growth of the band in any way. And I can only think of a handful of shows they played, especially the first 2-3 shows maybe, something like that, four, maybe.
Ohh, so as far as why, I don't think it has anything to do with them being the lead guitarist, so to speak. I think it was just coincidental what they were going through in their personal lives. Ryan left for personal reason. Jordan left to start a business and Neal’s here, so I think it was just coincidence.

31/ I read that you manage to compose during your tours. Is that the case currently? If so, what can we expect next?
Ohh, at a limited pace. I would say we do more writing at home. We were writing some stuff prior to the tour, but we have not written anything since this European tour started.
The next release will be next year, and it'll be a little bit different. Different direction for sure, much more Death Metal.

32/ Next year marks the 20th anniversary of CARNIFEX. What is the secret to your longevity and what do you have planned to celebrate this anniversary?

No secret, just work hard. You just have to tour all the time. Care about your bands. Care about what you're putting out to the fans, your merch, music videos, everything. You have to treat it like a business. Because if you just hand the keys over to some manager, they'll run your band into the ground. That would be the end of that. And as far as what we have planned, we are going to do anniversary tour in 2025, coming again in Europe at the end of the year.

33/ We'll leave the last word to you.

Well, thank you for the support and looking forward to the rest of the tour. Thanks guys, appreciate it.


Thanks to Groaw & Medusa6 for their participation in the preparation of this interview. And to Garmonbozia for facilitating the meeting with Scott.