The Kerrang! Chart
The Kerrang! Chart: The best new music this week
The ultimate new music countdown – every Friday on Apple Music!
Navigation menu for Kerrang!
The Cover Story
Lamb Of God: “Things are demoralisingly stupid. We need to develop community and figure out how to survive”
With his 55th birthday fast approaching, Randy Blythe could very well decide to simply shut out the world, put his feet up and enjoy the fruits of a triumphant three-decade career in heavy metal. But, he says, he’s “not built that way”. And on Lamb Of God’s brilliant 10th album Into Oblivion, he’s more motivated than ever to be a force for good…
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Travis Shinn
Randy Blythe hasn’t had the internet on his phone for eight days, by his count. On the fridge in his kitchen, he’s installed a device, a brick, that blocks his apps from connecting. He’s got it set so that email and texts can get through, but other than that, nada.
“I’ve deactivated social media, I took the internet browser off my phone,” he says. “My girlfriend and I have basically turned our phones into dumb phones.”
Randy admits he’s prone to losing hours staring at the black mirror. This solution might not be airtight, but it makes idly falling into the internet more difficult. Should he need to get online, it requires the use of an actual computer, or a trip down to the fridge to log in via the digital gatekeeper, a process that both requires the physical job of going and doing it, making it much less appealing, and the more cerebral knowledge that you’re actively slipping into the temptation. “It basically makes it all a pain in the ass.”
It’s internet news that’s the real page turner. “That’s one of my bigger addictions,” Randy admits, “it’s a problem with me.” Twice a day he allows himself to get his fill, using a bias checker to see where the lean of his information is coming from, but avoiding swimming around in news-related content. “You have to stay informed, but sitting and doom scrolling endlessly is not going to help me.
“I’m consciously trying to disengage from this constant use of this technology, this addictive, never-ending quest for the next serotonin hit. I want to think: what I can do right here, right now, to make my life and perhaps other people’s somewhat better? Sitting around on the cellphone is not going to do that at all.”
An avid reader, Randy has noticed while sitting with a book that “my ability to concentrate and focus has been affected by the phone and the internet”. What he’s really worried about, though, is the lack of connection, the lack of community. “Most people are more isolated than ever.”
“How many people know their neighbours?” he puts to K!. “I know mine. Several of them have the key to my house. They can come and go when they please. I’ll watch their dog. They’ll watch my cat when I’m out of town. If they need something, they can just come in the house. It’s not a problem. Why? Because we are building community.”
This has always been important to Randy, but it’s becoming ever more crucial. When he unpacks the title of Lamb Of God’s new album, Into Oblivion, the main point is it’s a signpost to where things are headed.
“I am not happy with the way the world is right now,” he says. “We are careening towards some sort of crash, and there are people who not only recognise this, but are trying to hasten it in order to profit from it. [With] the distribution of wealth, the gap is getting wider and wider and wider and wider. I don’t just think that’s true: that’s a fact.
“We need to learn how important we are to one another. Because the super-rich aren't going to help you.”
Into Oblivion boils with this anxiety and anger, occasionally spilling into downright confusion at what Randy sees. There’s a natural looseness and immediacy to the strontium-plated music, probably their best since 2015’s VII: Sturm und Drang, with an extra layer of petrol on it all. For his vocals – here sounding as raw and throaty as a man yelling directly into your ear – it was suggested that Randy head to Total Access studios in Redondo Beach, California. A punk place that previously captured the itchy violence of Black Flag’s My War, the snark of Descendents’ Milo Goes To College, and the pessimistic middle finger of doom legends Saint Vitus’ Born Too Late, walking in and seeing memorabilia of “bands that I’ve listened to since high school, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m in the right place.’”
America, as Randy sees it, like Henry Rollins before him, is in the wrong place. ‘The Empire rots from inside,’ he seethes on The Killing Floor, ‘Escalate the conflict and erase the kompromat / Jack the ratings to the sky and bring back the draft.’ On St. Catherine’s Wheel, it’s observed that, ‘Truth erodes, tension rising, the experiment has failed,’ talking of a people ‘Overloaded and rewired until we don’t fight back at all’.
Randy will tell you he takes his lyrics very seriously. “I think about words constantly,” he says. “Since I was a child, have been attracted to the written word, so I read voraciously. I have whole notebooks full of lyrics, rewrites, unfinished things.”
What he doesn’t like to do is explain them, not wanting to “spoil someone’s interpretation if it turns out to be wrong”. Metaphorical as they can be, you don’t have to dig deep to get the measure of where he’s coming from. He does, however, talk a lot about the nature of what he does. At one point, he brings up the late Nina Simone, the legendary High Priestess Of Soul, and noted Civil Rights activist.
“That was a very complex time, what with involvement in the Vietnam War, and black people trying to become equal citizens here. In her time there was segregation and Jim Crow laws. She was in a very tumultuous time, and she created great art during that time. She said it is the duty of the artist to reflect the times.
“For me, that rings true.”
“Nina Simone said it is the duty of the artist to reflect the times. For me, that rings true”
We join Randy at home in Virginia, in a room filled with books on floor-to-ceiling shelves. “We’re only a couple of weeks in and I’ve already read three books this year,” he proudly tells us.
Smiley, friendly, with a sharp intelligence wrapped in a warm, not-quite-Southern accent and with a genuine curiosity about life, he’s one of metal’s great conversationalists. When asked about Lamb Of God’s appearance with Black Sabbath at Back To The Beginning last July, he rather endearingly becomes a fan. “Every band was nervous. My girlfriend and I were walking with Lars from Metallica to the stage and he was like, ‘Holy fuck, man, I’ve never been this nervous in my life.’ That’s fucking Metallica!”
His reluctance to deconstruct his own music is matched by an apparently unstoppable willingness to discuss its more general themes, talking at a length that makes Lars Ulrich look concise. There’s a wisdom to him that might be called street smart, but it’s more a grubby intellectualism with a keen eye for bullshit.
Randy’s also looking at soon turning 55 without having become a cranky old man. He points out a lot of things that are wrong, he has worries and fears, but though he “doesn’t have time for fluff anymore”, he also doesn’t hate the new, or simply scream that the world is moving on without him. Things ain’t what they used to be. A grumpy old man would try to move them back there. Randy wants to navigate the dangers he sees on the horizon for everyone.
Asked where the oblivion of the album’s title is, he quickly gets to talking about his worries relating to what happens when the wealth divide becomes insurmountable, and a middle class disappears. Historically, “this is the moment at which empires fall. We’ve seen this again and again and again. So without sounding too doomsday-ish, I think we’re in late-stage capitalism, and I don’t think it’s going to end well.”
The problem is, he continues, that things are rotten all the way through. “There are obscenely wealthy people dictating policy, whose only concern is enriching themselves.” He points to disaster capitalism in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as a particularly distasteful example. Having had their homes and lives destroyed, a huge number of people were displaced, having been unable to afford to rebuild, and hit by the economic impact of the catastrophe. “Then people with money come in and buy up what they can, develop it and profit off of it.
“These people know that things are fucked up, and their answer to this is to become as rich as they can in order to isolate themselves and protect themselves from the rest of the populace.”
Backing this up (and chuckling in agreement that it might sound to some like a page-one conspiracy theory), Randy points to a book, Survival Of The Richest: Escape Fantasies Of The Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College, and a man once named as one of the world’s most influential thinkers by MIT.
These credentials led to the author being invited out to a spa in the middle of nowhere by a group of billionaires to give a presentation on the state of the world, economic trends, tech developments and influence, that sort of thing. They picked his brains on cryptocurrency and environmental issues. Eventually, this group of billionaires revealed the ends to which they were seeking Professor Rushkoff’s counsel.
“They said to him, ‘We are constructing bunkers, and we want to know after the collapse what would be the best way for us to ensure the loyalty of our security staff,’” Randy explains. “Once money is useless and you’re in your bunker, you have to have people to protect it. What’s going to stop these security people from going, ‘I’m in here safe. Fuck you, rich person. I’m going to kill you and take all your shit.’
“It’s a very weird, self-serving agenda that these people have. And it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not. It’s a little too late to change or stop this. I think the only way to approach it is to start developing community and figuring out how the best way to survive it.”
“There are obscenely wealthy people dictating policy, whose only concern is enriching themselves”
A step Randy suggests is to “stop staying glued to your fucking phone”, and to “get the fuck off social media all the time”. More seriously, though, the actual interaction between humans needs to be reforged. Being old enough to have grown up in music scenes pre-internet, he has known a life where turning up and being actively involved was the only way of being connected to what was going on.
“That was one of the main things that attracted me to it. And if you look at the history of metal, you look at all the scenes, like the Bay Area thrash scene and so forth, where this stuff developed, it was community. It’s not just a genre of music, it’s community. It is people coming together, being together. I still feel that at concerts. I still feel that overwhelming vibe of being together when we play.”
At one point, Randy turns the analysis on himself, and why he cares so much. As a musician with the good fortune to tour at the level Lamb Of God do and take home a decent amount of bread from it, and with a healthy and highly respected position in the world that ensures it could last as long as they please, he is aware that he isn’t a have-not.
“I’ll catch myself whining to myself sometimes like, ‘Yo, you’re 55 you’ve been doing this 30 years. You make a good living. Shouldn’t you be able to just, like, relax and enjoy this?’”
Randy says there’s ways like that in which he can be selfish. This in itself is bollocks. When we point out that he looked happy onstage when LOG appeared at Louder Than Life back in September, he recalls that his particularly good mood came from spending the afternoon with a sick fan, something he often does on the road. Caring about what’s happening around him is just his nature.
“I let things upset me. I try not to let it consume me, but things still upset me, and I think that’s a sign of having a correctly calibrated moral compass. Selfishly, part of me wants to sit back and think, ‘Oh, my life is great. So what do I have to worry about?’ But I’m not built that way.”
There is one track on Into Oblivion that Randy will give a deeper look into. El Vacío, Spanish for ‘the void’, sees him wondering what two departed men with a keen ability to digest the world and skewer it would make of a world they didn’t manage to live long enough to see, peppering his lyrics with references to their own works.
One is legendary writer Hunter S. Thompson, godfather of so-called Gonzo journalism and one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. The other is Randy’s late friend Dave Brockie, better known as GWAR frontman Oderus Urungus. The former was a writer who seemed to exist on a diet of cocaine and cigarettes. The latter played the part of a monstrous barbarian from Scumdogia with a two-foot plastic cock, who sprayed audiences with blood and jizz while dismembering effigies of public figures. Both had a genius insight and ability to read people and situations, and the gift of being able to deliver their thoughts with astounding astuteness.
“Things are, frankly, demoralisingly stupid,” Randy says. “If there were two people that I wish were still alive to comment on this, or are to comment through their art on this fucked, upside-down, bizarro world, it’s them.
“I would love it if Hunter S. Thompson hadn’t fried his brains with speed and coke and was around to write about the current political situation here, because it would be savage. I loved reading his stuff during the Nixon era. What’s happening now makes Nixon look like a schoolboy.
“The second verse is about Dave, who would undoubtedly have amazing socio-political commentary. We live in the dumbest timeline, and I really wish he was here to comment on it. I had this feeling of just missing these two people – one as a person, one as a friend – and their ability to incisively comment in an intellectual manner. Even in a rubber monster suit, Dave was making very smart statements.”
The third character in the song is Randy himself, pondering if when he goes, someone might think of him in the way he thinks of his two muses. “The last part of the second chorus is about me dying, and hopefully someday someone will remember me. I’m not in any hurry to die, but I’m going to go where both of those guys have gone, and I can only hope that I can leave a fraction of the art of worth behind that they did.”
This is part of what still drives Randy creatively, being able to reflect things through his words and works. “Being able to say things is very important to me. Long after I drop the microphone from this band, when we get too old to do it anymore and I can’t jump around like a lunatic onstage anymore, I’m going to be writing.”
Thirty years in, Lamb Of God themselves are, Randy says, in a better space internally than ever. This, he puts down to being able to “shelve egos” and think about the greater whole. “A whole bunch of us being sober now, it doesn’t hurt.
“There’s no guidebook to how to be in a band, right?” he continues. “They hand you the manual when you get together in the basement with what’s important and what’s not. You have to learn that on your own. For us, it was a lot of years of butting heads and all of us, including myself, being a little too precious about our contributions to the band.
“As we’ve gotten older, we’ve learned to deal with that, and we get along better now than we ever did before, which is odd for a band. To me, it’s significant.”
As for heading into oblivion, things might be less secure, but Randy’s offering when asked of what to do is simple. “We have to learn to lean on each other. We have to learn to connect with each other as human beings.”
As for his own contribution, Randy says that his ability to help make those connections, help build what could become community, and perhaps even have his words give someone pause for thought, may not be the most, but it’s also not the least.
“I’m not really good at much, except for, like, writing and screaming in a heavy metal band and taking photographs,” he smiles. “I’m an artist. That’s all I’m good at. I can cook, and I can roof your house. I think maybe my purpose is to foster this sense of community by bringing people together who happen to enjoy our music.
“It’s not curing cancer, I’m not a diplomat who’s going to solve international conflicts, but I can bring people together around the common interests. I think that’s something valuable.”
Into Oblivion is released on March 13 via Century Media/Epic Records. Lamb Of God return to the UK this summer to headline Bloodstock.
Read this next:
