Death Metal Martyrdom

At the end of the day, being in a band, if you spend your entire life worrying about what everybody else thinks, you’ll never get anything done. You’ll just play the same thing to the same crowd every time,” Martyr Defiled’s Matthew Jones says by way of justifying the British outfit’s shift from the searing technical death metal of 2010 debut, Collusion, to the visceral fury of this year’s No Hope No Morality. Jones says it hasn’t been the easiest thing for the band to do, but it’s yielding pretty positive outcomes.

“Now we have this amazing opportunity to come out and play Australia, and so you’ve got to be self-assured so stuff like that will ever actually happen. You really have to disregard the whole thought process of ‘what if nobody likes us?’ Because we’re having fun, and that’s the main thing, and if people aren’t digging what we’re doing, it’s not something we’re going to lose sleep over. Because it’s all so subjective, you kind of have to roll with the fact that some people aren’t going to like you.

“We’ve had such a big stylistic change between our first album and now our second album. And we could have quite easily bowed to the pressure and done another tech death metal record, because we kind of pigeon-holed ourselves like that with the first album, but then when we brought out an EP that didn’t sound anything like that we were getting a lot of hate. And it’s very easy for bands to not experiment and not try anything different, because they’re afraid of what people might say. Inversely though, that’s had the opposite effect on us. We started to give less of a fuck about what people think. It’s great to hear positive feedback, but it’s not like a conscious thought like, ‘somebody’s going to like this so we’re going to write like this.’”

Jones believes that, ultimately, the evolution of heavy music will see myriad different styles come into, and then rather swiftly, go out of vogue and that in lieu of any consistency in tastes within the heavy metal community, Martyr Defiled really had to focus on finding what they wanted to do beyond what’s popular in the moment. “Trends will come and go, but at the end of the day, Slayer are still playing the music they were 25 years ago.”

As they continue to evolve, the band find themselves presented with more and more cool opportunities, the next of which being their first Australian tour, which came at the behest of buddies Boris The Blade. Jones is entirely stoked, even if he still can’t get over how it came to be. “They like our music and we like their music so then they say, ‘Oh fuck it, come over and tour Australia with us.’ That’s genuinely how the conversation went. It was that informal, and that’s mind-blowing for us.”