On Being A Metalhead, Dressing Like Dracula & Working With A Dream Producer

Listening to The Black Heart Death Cult's latest single, She's A Believer, you could be forgiven for thinking you detect some The Beatles-inspired sitar. "No, no," the psych-rock outfit's founder Sasha L Smith corrects. "That sound is the organ pedal. So the pedal's got different settings and the setting that is: the Mellotron flute. It's got a real '60s vibe about it."

This song is the first taste from The Black Heart Death Cult's debut album, which Smith advises they're "about halfway through" completing. "It's taking a while, I think it started in April of 2015," he adds. "That was when I first started recording. So I'd been writing a coupla songs and then went and had a jam with my mate Bill Patching and then, you know, three weeks later we were in the studio after I'd shown him a couple of tunes. So it happened very, very quickly once it was started."

"I think that really came about by being a teenager and being a metalhead."

Smith says The Black Heart Death Cult "came out of the process of [his] old band breaking up" and his compulsion to continue to write songs. "You wanna have that avenue for your writing," he tells. After showing Patching some songs, Smith reveals, "The opportunity sort of arose to go into the studio with this guy I've wanted to work with for a while." Ricky Maymi, The Brian Jonestown Massacre's original drummer, is the guy Smith is referring to and he acknowledges, "So [it was] just some stars aligning, I guess, in the way it happened all so quickly".

After confessing "melody is really important to me", Smith observes, "I guess in a way, in this band, it's always pulled back into getting this droney sort of sound, which ties it all together, which is maybe the element that runs through all of it."

Something Smith remembers "quite vividly from [his] childhood" is listening to "really melodic stuff" on the radio during family drives. "Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass: you hear stuff like that and you're just like, 'Oh, wow, that's pretty amazing'," he recalls.    

When asked what inspired him to wanna pick up a guitar in the first place, Smith offers, "I think that really came about by being a teenager and being a metalhead." So did he try to play along with his favourite songs? "Nah, not really; I was hopeless," he admits. "And you couldn't sing anybody's songs, 'cause you couldn't sing. So it just naturally leads to writing your own stuff - that's sorta how the progression happens - and, you know, it just goes from there." On whether he saved up to buy himself his first guitar, Smith chuckles, "It was probably stolen, I dunno".   

For their next gig, The Black Heart Death Cult are playing as part of a very Halloween-inspired line-up. "We've got Demon Parade and The Braves and Wars playing with us so it's gonna be a pretty good old night," Smith enthuses. So will he don appropriately ghoulish dress-ups for the occasion? "I think I'll be doing a bit of Dracula for that," he threatens. Smith also warns those punters "going to the horse races the next day [will have] a hangover".