“This about how you stay positive, how you can’t be negative”: After loss, illness and hardship, Fuming Mouth have come back brighter and heavier

Mark Whelan isn’t sure what sort of bell it is that keeps ringing in his head. It could be the type with which Black Sabbath birthed metal: a mournful death knell signifying fatal condemnation or final committal from dust to dust.

Equally, it could be the sound of celebration. Bells have been used in worship around the world for millennia. Christmas would hardly be the same without those jingle bells. Matrimonial vows are often still marked by the sound of tintinnabulation, as are the final sessions of certain medical treatments. Rather than picking one, maybe there’s power in harmonising all of them.

“Lately I think it’s been open to interpretation,” ponders Fuming Mouth’s fascinating bandleader, considering the title of his band's new album The Ringing Bell. “A lot of my songwriting is about perspective. This ringing bell could be a wedding bell or a funeral bell. It could be in the foreground, or, like on the album art, the smallest part of the picture.

“There’s a song on this record called The Ringing Bell which I think of as the stand-out. It’s the track that really encapsulates everything I wanted to achieve: a positive message, being strong, moving forward, keeping eyes on the prize. And it is a ringing bell. Metallica already kinda cornered the market on bells that toll!”

The period since the November 2023 release of Fuming Mouth’s last album Last Day Of Sun has been the best of times and the worst of times. After the shutdown of COVID, Mark’s 2021 diagnosis with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and the subsequent gruelling treatment, returning to the road has felt like a liberation. Mark has been on tour in the UK five times in the past two years. He’s put rubber to the road in Europe, Asia and all the way across the United States, too.

“Being exposed to the whole entire world put me in a different mindset,” he reflects on how travel can expand consciousness. “It became about wanting a better outlook on things – and having it!”

Those years have also been coloured deeply by loss and grief. 2023, in particular was punishing.

Following a period of uncertainty, Mark and friends had reconnected with Fuming Mouth’s former drummer Cayle Sain, also a veteran of Twitching Tongues and Ghostemane, with countless FaceTime conversations establishing that he wanted to – and would – return to the Fuming Mouth fold. But Cayle passed away suddenly in December. Earlier in the year, Mark had said goodbye to his old high school friend Ryan, too, who was integral to expanding the frontman’s musical horizons beyond the world of hardcore, and who spent long hours chatting while receiving treatment in the same hospital as Mark. And those are just two names from a winding list of casualties, from the worlds of hardcore and beyond, to addiction, mental health and other ails.

“Fuming Mouth has always been a very introverted band,” Mark explains, noting that responding with fatalism simply wasn’t an option. “It’s where I put all my dark thoughts and negative emotions, which have ranged from feeling super bleak to giving up and just submitting to powers that be.

“This time there was a conscious decision that that it would not be about that. That’s not what my life is about any more. It’s about how you stay positive. It’s about how you can’t be negative.”

Glancing through some of the first few song-titles on The Ringing Bell – Cheat Death, Finally Fearless, After Oblivion – some observers will surely see this album as a continuation of the Last Day Of Sun, where Mark processed his battle with cancer through apocalyptic concept storytelling.

“This album has nothing to do with that,” he says, firmly. “Maybe it bleeds in, subconsciously, but it’s not what this record is about. That pathway from the first song, Cheat Death, to the last, Barbarian Scourge, is this whole ‘return to power’ type journey. Even a song like Blaze Of Nihilism walks the fine line between being consumed in a blaze of nihilism, watching yourself go out in flames, or burning away nihilism and believing in yourself.

“I can see how someone might interpret it as defiance. It is audacious in the sense of going out there, doing your thing. But it is nothing defiant. It’s not rebellion. If anything, it’s less about a personal journey than shared experience. Because the reality is that I wasn’t the only one affected. And how if I stay positive and uplift myself, I hope that everyone else can do that, too.”

That doesn’t mean that there’s anything soft or fluffy on offer. Promo materials for this latest release are served up with the genre in bold: ‘death metal’. Tracks like Self-Exhumed and Flourishing Flesh are disgustingly heavy, evidently taking cues from old tour mates Suffocation. Even the photographic album art is a nod to DM legends’ third-album classics like Morbid Angel’s Covenant and Entombed’s Wolverine Blues.

While Mark once hoped that the great Mariusz Lewandowski, who provided the cover for 2019 debut The Great Descent would become to Fuming Mouth what Derek Riggs is to Iron Maiden, his death in 2022 was another that reshaped their outlook.

“We wanted him to paint for us forever,” Mark shrugs, sadly. “But forever doesn’t last.”

Still, the night-time flash photography of a church graveyard by Briscoe Park (who also provided the striking sleeve of Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To) once again bridges metal gnarliness and cutting-edge hardcore.

“I feel totally comfortable with how we bridge the worlds of metal and hardcore,” says mark, Mark following the theme. Indeed, last time they visited the UK they played with Bathory tribute Blood Fire Death at London’s Incineration festival but also with rising Scottish hardcore crew XtemplarX in Glasgow.

“That crossover between the worlds of metal and hardcore has always been a thing with bands like Hatebreed and Converge. Getting older and becoming friends with some of those guys has made me comfortable that we’re not the first. Maybe it’s a New England thing.”

Converge guitar legend Kurt Ballou once again produces on The Ringing Bell, but Mark stresses that it’s the work he doesn’t do that keeps their relationship so strong.

“As much as I think I might drive him crazy I never ask him to come up with ideas for me. I ask a lot of technical stuff that I don’t understand but I’ll never ask him to write my riff for me. I’d never want that, anyway.”

The other big name involved this time, alongside Mark, guitarist Pat Merson and bassist Chris Berg, is more surprising. Following Cayle’s passing, Mark had no idea who would be the new Fuming Mouth drummer for a long time, but the idea that ex-Slipknot and Suicidal Tendencies man Jay Weinberg might be interested hit him, in the least corny way, like a bell ringing in his head.

“I just emailed his website,” Mark laughs. “He got back to me, it went straight to my spam folder and I didn’t even see it. I could have missed him entirely. But then he texted me and here we are.”

The Ringing Bell is still just the beginning, mind. Budget was tight. Money was tight. Time was tight. And as pleasingly raw as the recording has ended up, “full of mess-ups, mistakes, heaviness and brutality”, it wasn’t necessarily intentional.

The next album will be bigger and better. And in terms of spreading their wings in the live arena, Mark is up for working with anyone from Metallica to recently-reactivated Massachusetts legends Scattered Remnants, with Crowbar and Dethklok specifically singled-out. As much as they’re keen to keep building, though, Fuming Mouth are not the kind of band to blindly scrabble for success or make a single move that doesn’t quite feel right.

“I spoke to someone recently who asked my about our ‘fanbase’,” he smiles, wryly. “That’s always grated for me. it’s never been in my mind that we want to ‘grow a fanbase’. There’s a recent interview with Kurt where he talks about the ‘intersection between art and entertainment’ which is what I’m really trying to [tap into]. Fuming Mouth will play the smallest show on Earth, but we’ll also play the biggest show on Earth. It’s always been that mindset right from the beginning. We’ve played record store basements. We’ve played skate parks. We played a practice space once where I saw a woman die of an overdose.

“I don’t think music works in any calculated way where you can go to a city, play a show, then come back and automatically sell more tickets next time. Music is more special than that. It’s the most important thing in the world!”

The Ringing Bell is released on July 17 via Triple B.

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