Metallic KO

Right, let’s take an Irish rock band. They’ve been going fifteen years, during which time they’ve survived numerous label hassles to release five albums. Their latest is expected to sell 20,000 worldwide and they are hugely respected by those in the know across the globe. They’re a band that everyone in the Irish music scene should view as some sort of model for success but will you have heard of them? Will you fuck.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Primordial, the most successful Irish band you've never heard in your life. The reason? Well, they play metal and it seems that we’re just not interested. So given that they’ve had to function out in the cold and deal with immeasurable amounts of crap along the way, how have Primordial kept it together where others have just given up and walked away? “It was really a question of concentrating on making the best music that we could and then letting the rest sort itself out,” explains vocalist Alan Nemtheanga. “It’s not that it was always difficult; we did the best with what we were able to do. There’s a difference being on what you might call a mid-table label to one that has the potential to sell an awful lot more records and have a bit of history behind them. It takes away a lot of the problems that underground metal bands might encounter. At the same time all the shit made me more hell bent on standing up to it and not changing or altering our vision of what the band was.”
That vision is a pretty bleak one though. “We’re a metal band and the way we sound is part and parcel of that. We came from the late '90s underground death and black metal scene so the music was always supposed to be dark, challenging, melancholic music. We don’t really deal with day to day things in our songs.” What can they deal with though? With death and destruction pretty much a unifying theme on excellent new album The Gathering Wilderness, does Alan feel that he’s limited in the kinds of subjects that he can write about? “ I think you can basically tackle anything you want. Some people will pigeonhole you into various categories, for example the whole pagan metal thing where you write about folklore and mythology. The band does have its roots in that but generally we do have this dark world view.”
Are his themes based on real events? “Absolutely. In a magazine like hotpress people’s image of metal would probably be Iron Maiden or Judas Priest and that fantastical escapism, but come the early '90s a very serious strain of the music arrived through the underground that never really made it to the overground over here. These are the kind of bands who are being handed Grammys in other countries while we don’t even have that category here or whatever. It might come as something of a surprise to people if they were to delve into some of the stuff that’s been out over the past fifteen years to find out how serious it is and how the shackles of the '80s have been dropped. Everything we write about is very much based in the here and now, even if I use some historical base for the lyrics or something from mythology.”
He sounds frustrated by the lack of profile his band enjoys at home. “Not so much anymore, maybe a few years ago when I was a little bit younger and before I understood the workings of the music industry in Ireland. Metal was very popular here in the '80s and it still is to some degree but the main problem for us is that there is no radio, there is no media, the music that we play is too dark and too challenging to fit into what’s going on at the moment. The music that is popular here reflects the attitudes of society, hence this slew of singer songwriter fluff.
"When the country had to struggle a bit more it gave the world more challenging music. We only play here a couple of times a year. After fifteen years, a lot of venues still wouldn’t book an Irish metal band. We can go to Greece and play to a thousand people and we’re hard pushed to get a show under our own name here. In other places metal bands are viewed as classic rock, not some ridiculous anachronism that are there to poke fun at. The people in the Irish music scene do watch what hotpress and the mainstream media write about but they realise that it won’t get any coverage.”
“I say to people that we sell more records than whatever stupid shitty band are able to fill Whelan's this week and they go what? They don’t understand the concept that we’re signed to a label that’s worldwide, we go on tour all over Europe. They’re quite shocked. You just accept the fact that you have this outsider status. As I said, the music that’s popular here seems to reflect this bloated, self-important image that we’ve acquired since we got a little bit of money.”
So if the call came through to play Oxegen, would they do it? “ If somebody said to us that we could play it we would of course. The true power of a metal band always comes when you see them live, that’s when they come into their own. The problem is that people don’t really want dark or challenging music or if they think that they have found it then the people like us who make it for real will look at it and go, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to be joking, right?’ Probably we’re too much for people.”

The Gathering Wilderness is out now on Metal Blade. Primordial play Whelan's on May 7th.