The Amenta Speak Out On Being 'Unfairly Pigeonholed'

"I totally understand, we can come across as pretty clinical at times,” The Amenta's founding member and keyboard player Timothy Pope concedes.

Maybe it has something to do with the band's notorious live show – one that has seen them inhabit the stage of tiny clubs where a smoke machine on overdrive has partially obscured the crowd's vision and they come out on stage with faces painted a steely black to obscure any facial expression and matching military-style shirts – but The Amenta certainly don't come across as warm or particularly human.

In the past, when The Amenta has been wrenching out blast beats, gut-busting riffs and layers of ambience, all precisely layered atop one another, they have seemed more like Blade Runner jacked up on nuke, the synthetic drug from Robocop 2, than any expression of humanity.

But according to Pope, that's not what The Amenta set out to be about. They never had aspirations to write dispassionate, Kraftwerk-turns-extreme-metal type stuff. It was more something they kind of fell into, as well as a reaction to their heavily black metal-influenced debut, Occasus.

“Though we sometimes seem clinical, I think we quite often get unfairly pigeonholed as a cold act. I think a lot of that had more to do with production rather than actual songwriting, especially with this album; lyrically, it's more about a personal, human struggle. And I think the mix on this album is the first time we've got something that's sympathetic to that human element in the music. I think it's warmer and more bass-driven, where n0n came out a lot harsher.”

The band's latest record, Flesh Is Heir, sounds more in line with Pope's vision of the idealised version of The Amenta. It rejects the bleak, programmed sound of n0n for a thrashy assault that comes on abrupt, ugly and charged with spontaneity. Likewise, their second effort's lyrical focus on societal decay is swapped for a much more personal approach.

“All of our albums are kind of a reaction to our previous albums. Especially with n0n, which was before Flesh Is Heir; it was really hard work. And there was a big emotional investment, as well as time. So at the end we were really burnt out, and the idea of writing anything became really off-putting after that whole experience.

"So the first thing we do when we write a new album is to experiment and explore and find a new direction so we won't feel that burnt out. Where the second album was really electronic, programmed and quite dense, there were a lot of meticulous little changes throughout it, so with this one we wanted to get something more immediate.

"So the thing that inspired us to write Flesh Is Heir, and what really shaped the record was that we tried to work really quickly. We threw down ideas and if we felt they had magic then we left them as they were. I think we ended up with something a bit more organic.”

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