The Limits Of Heavy, Pouring Out All The Shit Before It Festers & Loving Christmas

Vincent Bennett, frontman of American deathcore mob The Acacia Strain, can exude an intimidating demeanour. Case in point - upon hitting the stage in Sydney several years back, the singer announced, "I'm in a bad fucking mood and I'll take it out on you." Bennett's public persona as an oft-surly, pessimistic figure is further emphasised by his bleak, dark and uncompromising lyrical outlook.

However, subverting many fans' perceptions, upon taking The Music's call he's watching the Bill Murray Christmas flick Scrooged. It turns out he's enamoured with the festive period, although even this is tinged with doom and gloom. "I love Christmas. It's my whole end of the year; the last two months of my year are just Christmas.

"There's gotta be something about everybody that kinda contrasts what you think they're all about and Christmas is my thing. It's just like a good time of year, to see snow falling on the Christmas lights in the dark, and you're out buying presents for your family and friends. It just feels good. But after Christmas, the winter can just go to hell. Snow is no longer magical, it's just annoying and then you have all this extra shit, and all these bills. But up until Christmas, everything's great."

Regularly scheduled programming resumed, The Acacia Strain's crushing latest LP Gravebloom represents a purging of the soul for the 35 year old. "This record was just about how much my life has sucked for the past four or five years. This record doesn't really have a concept, more as like a feeling. And the feeling is that I've had a lot of shit happen to me in the past five years or so, and I needed something to have to get that out of me. Gravebloom was it.

"I had backlogs of just lyrics that I wrote that didn't really fit with the theme of anything else we ever did. And didn't really fit emotionally with it either. Sometimes, I thought, we're never going to put out an 'emotional record' filled with any sort of feelings whatsoever. But this one I had to pour all this shit out and get it out of me, or else it was just going to sit inside of me and fester.

"It was almost like going to a therapist. Instead of sitting on a couch talking to some old guy, I was sitting in a room, screaming into a microphone while [producer] Will Putney listened. He was basically the guy that was listening to my problems while I was there. Now everybody that listens to the record is that person that's just listening to me go through whatever I was going through at the time."

The Acacia Strain are seemingly perpetually seeking to nudge their boundaries of brutality on each release. However, some pundits have posited that there must be a limit of heaviness that extreme-metal acts are eventually going to reach, even if such a marker remains undefined at this point.

Bennett believes the question should be tackled on a band-by-band basis and also considered in proper context. "If we had started recording Gravebloom a day after we started, it could have come up completely different; you never know. So any amount of heaviness and aggressive energy, or any amount of anything; there's always more possible. Because you never know your full potential until you realise it. You never know how it's going to come out until it's done.

"Bands keep getting heavier. People were like, 'Oh, Meshuggah's the heaviest band in the world, no band's ever going to be heavier than Meshuggah.' And then, like, 500 more bands came out that were subjectively heavier than Meshuggah, depending on the person's opinion. That's another thing: it's all a matter of opinion. Heaviness — that's relative to the person, because some people think the new Chelsea Wolfe is the heaviest thing they've ever heard and some people think, 'No, that's not heavy at all'... The truly heaviest band to ever exist doesn't exist, 'cause there's no limit to heavy."

He's also insistent that music is "more than just being heavy and angry". "It's about emotion and pure creativity, and that's what we're trying to achieve. We just want to be creative and we want to be our best us. And if people like it then it's definitely appreciated."