Interview: Mass Worship
Interviewer: Deegan Armitage
Not heard of Mass Worship before? Well you soon will have. The Scandinavian extreme metal outfit have just released their self titled debut album via Century Media to critical acclaim. For The Razor's Edge it's up there as a contender for album of the year - you can read our review here. So just prior to their recent show in London, we sat down with the band to find out what the road to this point in their career had been like.
The Razor's Edge: Welcome to The Razor's Edge! For those reader's who may be unfamiliar with you guys. Who/what are Mass Worship?
Mass Worship: we are a Scandinavian dark metal band with some death and doom influences, focusing on the heavy side of metal, slow, mid, chunky parts, thats us!
The Razor's Edge: What would you say your influences are?
Mass Worship: It spans across the metal genre, we would say we like both the typical old school stuff like Swedish classic death metal like Entombed, At The Gates, stuff like that... but we equally are influenced by more modern stuff like Meshuggah and Mastodon. That stuff is huge for us, we tried to be somewhere in between that. Its not that we are trying to squeeze ourself in between them, it just so happens to be that we are a mix of the old and new stuff.
The Razor's Edge: Your new album is up there as one of our albums of the year. You must be proud of what you've achieved?
Mass Worship: Yeah we are happy about the album, it turned out great, we worked on it for about a year and took about year and a half to finish it off, its like a really good presentation of this band and a good beginning for it, and the fact that Century Media picked it up, it means doing something right!
The Razor's Edge: How long did it take from initial ideas to actually having the finished the album?
Mass Worship: I would say about a year to a year and a half to starting work on it. Maybe a couple of songs have been with us longer than that but for the most of it was written for the album. We had the idea we wanted to write an album and wanted to take this band to the next step, we wanted to make the best possible album with the best production we can and something unique, our aim was always to release with a big label and thats what happened
The Razor's Edge: It's your debut album and for a prestigious label in Century Media. Whats its been like working with the legendary label?
Mass Worship: Great, they're really cool, they're really awesome people, you can tell they are metal enthusiasts really and they believe in new band and they want to bring to life a new generation of metal bands, you can really tell that, they've really been amazing in every single way. Yhey've given us really good feedback and it's they have been really supportive and very direct with there feedback to us.
The Razor's Edge: Now the album is out, whats next for Mass Worship? Where do you go from here?
Mass Worship: We've been on this tour with Brutality Will Prevail and Dagger Threat for about 8 days now, this is the first real tour for this album and we are planning on continuing in to next year. We have a couple of shows waiting to be confirmed, as well as a couple of tours and one or two festival appearances and thats where we are at right now, we are just waiting for this all to be confirmed.
The Razor's Edge: In terms of touring; who would be your ideal touring partners?
Mass Worship: So many, this is one thing we talk about a lot, especially when we listen to a new band and we always saying ‘we should tour with these guys. We’re such fucking nerds and we really love music and metal and we are always talking about potential tour partners and trying to work our way toward that dream. We would love to tour with Meshuggah, At The Gates and Neurosis, theres also a few bands that we would love to tour with that aren't really in our genre like Mastodon cause we are a bit heavier than them but they are one of the bands we would love to tour with. Really we would like to tour with as many bands as possible without losing our sense of direction.
The Razor's Edge: Are there any locations/countries on your wish list to play?
Mass Worship: I would like to quote Henry Rollins talking about Metallica touring, saying that we would like to play anywhere with electricity. I think that the biggest aim, we've been doing punk bands for a very long time, doing loads of touring all of Europe with different bands and a eventually we would like to conquer the us and other places but at the moment we are looking at conquering Europe and then moving onto the US, thats our biggest goal for now.
