Here Comes The Kraken: “Let’s Go To The Dark Side”
The Mexico deathcore band talks Pirates of the Caribbean, & their indifference to the devil
To read in Spanish, click here!
“Here Comes the Kraken” is a threat. A warning. An exclamation of terror. A monster is surfacing from the deep with designs to consume your village. And yet something — perhaps the promise of witnessing something mythologically mindbending — keeps you from running away.
Here Comes the Kraken’s deathcore performances are a bit like an unearthed carnivorous beast, yet you can’t help but stand and marvel. You’re entranced by the unison, full-body headbanging, the tight, ever-shifting blast beats, the incomprehensible growling by vocalist Daniel, and the chord-synched flickering lights. At Vive Latino 2011, support for the Mexican band was so intense, at one point the audience lifted a young, wheelchair-bound man from the ground — wheelchair and all – to headbang above the moshpit. (Later, Daniel told us he was thrilled by this, since he worked with disabled people in his home country, Austria. This of course only deepened our massive crush on these surprisingly sweet guys.)
Fresh from the release of their LPs Omen and most recently Hate, Greed & Death, Here Comes the Kraken’s Daniel and Alexa chatted with us about deathcore in Mexico, abortion, and their Greek-based namesake. Here’s what they had to say.
So, what band do you want to see the most today?
Alexa: Nortec Collective for today. And for the festival, I guess The Chemical Brothers, too.
Any metal bands?
A: Sepultura.
Are you the youngest metal band here? They’re all pretty old.
A: Yeah, I guess we’re the youngest.
How does it feel to be among these greats?
A: Really, really cool. We’re very excited and it feels really cool.
And you were not the vocalist on Omen or Hate, Greed,and Death?
A: No.
So you’re brand new? How did this come to be?
Daniel: I played with my former band in Austria in Europe with Here Comes the Kraken in the show. They asked me, ‘Hey, do you want to come to Mexico and play with us?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’
So you were opening for them?
D: Yeah, Yeah.
So what in your expert opinion is the difference between death core, death metal and
metal core.
A: I think that the only thing that separates death core from death metal is the breakdowns. Death metal is more like fast and doesn’t have slow tempos, and death core it’s only like a copy of death metal with the breakdowns. And the metal core is more like I think commercial, it’s not too loud or not too fast as death metal, and it also has more breakdowns. So I guess that’s the difference between those three genres.
And you guys occasionally use clean vocals, as you call it. So what made you want to
do that?
A: We were playing death core and that’s tough. But we just realized that in this time everybody plays that. It’s more like a trend. We always wanted to give something new, something from only us. And we were thinking about let’s do more brutal stuff but with clean vocals because no one is doing that. Everyone is like brutal brutal or super brutal and the other side it’s metal core. So we were like, let’s get in the middle of those.
Are you also the vocalist? Who does the clean vocals?
A: No, no, there’s another guy.
Are there purists, people who say clean vocals don’t belong in metal?
A: Yeah.
What do you say to the haters?
A: What can we say? I think in some way they are right. I will get pissed off if one band that has two records that sound brutal then comes with clean vocals. I will be like, ‘What the f***?’ So I guess they are right. Maybe. But we try to get everyone pleased. You can’t always do that.
There’s a little bit of religion in your lyrics. Are you guys religious?
A: We are not religious. We don’t believe in like God or the devil. We just feel that hard music or brutal music goes well with that kind of lyrics. I wrote some lyrics so I don’t feel like love or normal stuff goes well with that kind of music. I’m like, ‘OK, we play really hard, let’s talk about the devil.’ I think it goes well.
Well, there’s a song about abortion that I noticed. That was pretty foul. What went
into that one? Something in the basement?
A: Yeah, “Into the Slaughter Basement.”
What inspired that one?
A: I don’t know. That one was written by the drummer. I don’t know. We just grabbed the paper and started [writing] and all this stuff is coming in the first place. I think it’s for the music. We want to give a message of hard music. And I personally like the fact when bands have a personality, and I was the one that talked with all the guys, like ‘Hey, let’s go to the dark side. It’s cool for a band like us.’ But we are not like satanic or something like that. We talk about that stuff but it’s only for fun.
That’s cool. And Daniel, how do you do it? Do you drink a lot of tea?
D: No, I smoke a lot of cigarettes. I don’t know. I think it’s only the feeling to do that. I don’t know.
Does it hurt after a show?
D: No, no.
So live, what can we expect? Are you pulling out any fun tricks?
A: We are going to try to do a really energetic show so all the people see what we’re trying to do with the music and everything, so everyone gets the feeling of this ‘hey, move everyone!’ I don’t like to say brutal but something with more energy. Because this festival is more like, you can’t rock. In Mexico, everything is more soft, and we like to do get very loud with the sound.
So where are your fans from, do you know? Mexico? Europe? I know you’ve been to
Europe. Do you have a lot of fans? Where are most of your fans?
A: We sell a lot of merch to the USA through our merchandise website. We’ve been in Europe three times because a lot of kids ask us, ‘Hey, come.’ That’s the way we went to Europe because some kids started asking, ‘Hey, we would love to do a show with you guys.’ And I was like, ‘OK, and do you know another guy from another city near from you?’ That’s how we went to Europe, and I think in Mexico it’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger because we have toured a lot in this country. We try to play in every single town or city, whatever it takes to get the band more known. I think it’s getting bigger in Mexico. So I guess the best place for us right now is here. But we really want to go to America and to Europe again and all that stuff. But I think that most people are here in Mexico.
Are there any places that really surprised you, like why do I have so many fans here?
A: Yeah, in Europe we were really stoked about people coming to the shows and we’re going to Asia in June of this year. So we were really like, ‘What? Asia?’ We’re going to Malaysia and Indonesia. So we’re like ‘People know us there? OK, that’s great.’
So the name, Kraken, the Kraken of Greek mythology? What do you like about the
Kraken?
A: It came from the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. We went to watch the movie and we were like, ‘Woah, the Kraken.’ We were like, that’s the thing we want people to think about our band, like the Kraken. Like, ‘Here comes the Kraken.’
So it’s a threat?
A: Yeah.
Are there any metal bands besides Sepultura that aren’t from the States and aren’t
from Scandinavia, like bands from Japan, anything like that, that interests you? Maybe
from Asia?
A: Maybe Australia has some cool bands, but really the most are from U.S. or from Europe.
Is there a lot in Austria, metal bands?
D: A lot of little metal bands but not the big metal bands. I think the big metal bands
come more from Germany and England.