One of the oldest marketing tricks out there is the ‘bait and switch,’ something many a doom metal record is guilty of: start off with a couple tracks packed full of great riffs and momentum, only to totally lose steam even before the B-side. Today is Black Friday in the United States, a day entirely devoted to capitalistic avarice, so there’ll be baits and switches everywhere–but not so in South London, with Warpstormer‘s debut full-length hitting shelves (and Bandcamp) right now. The record shows off the band’s penchant for barnburner riffs all the way through, their foot never coming off the gas even in the lengthy ten-minute closer “The Edge of Time.” Drawing heavily on aggressive doom and incorporating speedier strains of heavy metal, Warpstormer is somewhat of a nostalgic look back at what underground heavy music was like a few decades ago, but also a fresh angle of attack on dynamic, genre-melding doom. Internet contrarians be damned: doom metal can be fast, and Warpstormer is the proof.
Technically intricate, but not elaborate or overwrought, Warpstormer is a dense record that doesn’t tend to waste listeners’ time. Every repetition is by design, layering in rhythmic changes and building toward an ultimate goal – though, that goal takes multiple forms. The band isn’t content to stay in any specific lane here, sometimes navigating bluesier spaces or diving into thrash metal permutations of their towering riffs. Every explorative angle taken pays off, coming together into a powerhouse package with exciting variety.
After initially releasing the Here Comes Hell EP in 2022, Warpstormer put together a full-band lineup and started the process of creating their self-titled – although, as the band notes in their track-by-track breakdown below, it evolved throughout its creation and took shape through collaborative creation. They’ve put together a detailed explanation of each track on the album – read on below as you listen to the album.
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Warpstormer Track-By-Track:
1. ‘Black Herald’
Once the album started taking shape, we realised we wanted to kick off proceedings with a great big, bombastic prelude – a kind of fanfare announcing its arrival. For what’s ultimately quite a raw, live-sounding record, this was our opportunity to get as overwrought with the arrangements as we felt like. To do that big, multi-layered guitar thing. Once we started working on it in the studio, Wayne’s (Adams – producer & engineer) extensive synth knowledge allowed us to add even more layers and crank up the spacey vibes. This gave it that feel of a big, overblown opening credits theme, while still feeling quintessentially metal. Sort of like if John Carpenter and Bill Steer scored an ’80s sci-fi film.
2. ‘Oracle’
For quite a while, the intro/outro pattern to this song lived in our repository of demoed bits and pieces which we call ‘The Riff Bin’, but we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Then we realised that after the thick, deliberately multi-layered bombast of ‘Black Herald’, the space in that riff and the interplay between the bass, drums and guitar, would provide a great contrast and an introduction to the sound of the band. Once we realised it could be the first ‘proper’ song on the album, the rest of the composition fell into place quickly.
It serves as a good intro to what WARPSTORMER is all about, all tied-up in a relatively concise sub-five-minute package, which is why we chose to get it out there as the first single. There are big riffs, a punchy chorus, and a mid-song detour into weirder, more psych/prog territory, where the rhythm section really gets to stretch out a bit.
The other thing we wanted to get in there was an absolute screamer of a guitar solo, right off the bat. Scott Black from Green Lung played on our first EP (2022’s Here Comes Hell), and he’s obviously a tough act to follow in the lead guitar stakes, so we wanted to assuage any concerns that we’d had to rein things in on that front as quickly as possible. The reference point that Richard gave Adam for the solo on this was the lead part Brian May launches into right at the start of Queen’s ‘I Want it All’ – the phrase “absolute ‘fuck you’ lead guitar” may have been thrown around during pre-production – and he absolutely came up with the goods in our view.
3. ‘Cursed, Cold’
This is the shortest, and probably the most traditionally-structured song on the album – a snappy little ditty about being extremely miserable. It was initially written in the interstitial period after we’d put our first EP out, but before Adam (guitar) and James (drums) joined the band, and it hasn’t really changed a great deal since. It was one of those songs that emerged pretty much fully formed; as soon as it started taking shape, “what if Cancer Bats wrote a Danzig song?” became the brief and that vibe stayed in place from its inception.
The key addition from Adam was the solo – it’s got that delta-blues kinda feel, which meshes with the loose, swampy vibe of the rest of the song, but blends in shreddier elements. Like Muddy Waters meets Dimebag. Overall, for a relatively straightforward song, we’re pulling in quite a few little influences from all sorts of places.
We said all along that this feels like a side one, song two, so rather than overthink it, so that’s exactly where we stuck it on the record!
4. ‘Beyonder’
When we first went into the studio to make this record, we were still kind of fresh as a full-band line-up, so we were initially envisaging another EP of four or five songs, just get things moving. But then the scope of it kept expanding beyond that, which speaks to how well things were meshing between the four of us. We ended up at a juncture, at the end of the first session, where Wayne said to us, “This could be an album, but it needs another song.” Once that seed had been planted, we decided it would be stupid not to push in that direction, so between then and the follow-up session (which we’d already booked), we put together ‘Beyonder’.
Because the line-up had been bedded-in by this point, it was by far the most collaborative in terms of the song writing and arrangement process. As such, it’s probably the best marker of where WARPSTORMER could be going and contains a whole range of nods to our various influences and things we enjoy – big solos, layered vocals, drum-forward groove sections, and straight-up crunching riffs.
If memory serves, it was James who suggested this song having a more linear structure, which both contrasts with the preceding couple of songs. This in turn led to the decision to present the song as two distinct, and separately sub-titled movements. The whole thing gets tied together by the recurring arpeggiated guitar motif, which as well as bookending the song, also pops up in the middle, counterpointing what might be the biggest, dumbest mosh riff on the whole record.
5. ‘A Liar’s Crown’
It’s a stompy great rocker and a fun one to play live. Chris from London Doom Collective), who we’re releasing the album with, called this our “Orange Goblin vibes” song.
We try to retain a fair bit of ambiguity in our lyrics, or at least have things that can have more than one layer of interpretation, but this is probably as close to an overt political polemic as we get. We’ll leave it to listeners to draw their own conclusions as to the real-world inspiration behind this one.
The song was fully formed in terms of the core parts from quite early on but needed a little bit more to give it a lift. That came from two places – we fell back on our oft-used maxim “what would Bill Steer do?” and cooked up that jarring, off-kilter introductory flurry of chords to lead into the main riff, and then Simon suggested what he called the “roadhouse bar fight” guitar solo section in the middle.
The solo’s a real grab bag of lead guitar influences. It starts out with a deliberately bluesy Billy Gibbons feel before pivoting into a more Randy Rhoads/Van-Halen inspired tapping section. It’s a fun bit of contrast, and then, adhering to Yngwie’s famed principle that “more is more” we threw in an Iommi nod by double-tracking the end of the solo as two slightly differing parts, like in the solo from ‘Children of the Grave’.
Just when you might have thought our grab-bag of influences might be full, we decided to stick on that ‘variation on the vocal part’ lead guitar harmony at the end, which was an absolutely deliberate Thin Lizzy/Baroness reference. It’s something we don’t want to lean too heavily on, as a single-guitar band, but we wanted to get at least one in there on the record, and the way the harmony develops means we can get away with it in a live context without losing too much.
6. ‘Fester’
This was one of the earlier songs written, around the same time as ‘Cursed, Cold’, and is something of a thematic companion to it, couching lyrics dealing with feelings of shame, guilt, and regret in the sort of fantastical setting that’s something of a hallmark for us. Compared to ‘Cursed…’, this went through a much more iterative process of refinement throughout the making of the record, with significant input from the whole band.
James’s approach to the drum parts really helped shape the middle section of the song, with shifts in the timing and groove that provide a contrast to the more rhythmically straightforward verse and chorus parts. It’s fair to say Danny Carey’s work with Tool significantly informed this approach.
The guitar solo in this was the one we spent the longest on, to try and ensure we made something memorable. We often talk about the best solos being ones you can sing and Adam really nailed this after a ton of pre-production on it, drawing in references to the vocal melody and combining them with flourishes that imbue the solo with its own identity.
The cleaner vocal approach in the verses of this – the spacey, ethereal vibe of which ties in with the underlying existential dread of the lyrics – was something that only really came about in earlier stages of the recording process, as Wayne pushed us towards something that would provide more contrast. Realising we could broaden the palette of how we approached the vocals on this one informed the writing of some of the songs we put together after it, in particular ‘Beyonder’.
7. ‘The Edge of Time’
This is easily our most traditionally doomy song, both in terms of the length, clocking in at almost eleven minutes, and the general sonic approach. However, being the impatient bunch of thrashers we are, we couldn’t help but crowbar in a galloping NWOBHM-inspired middle/solo section. Scott from Green Lung likened this song to “proggy Monolord”.
This was one of those songs that really came together in the studio, and it was the one that everyone involved initially had reservations about, until suddenly everything started falling into place. Wayne again contributed synth work which, with this sitting at the end of the album, helps bookend things when set against ‘Black Herald’.
This is the only song with Simon singing lead vocals, in the verses, which was another example of Wayne pushing us out of our comfort zone. It was a great production choice, giving those parts a completely different mood and timbre – it’s much more mournful as a result.
A fun bit of studio-manipulation inspiration on this song came from a perhaps unexpected quarter – the lead bass part following the first chorus is the same part played back twice, with the second half reversed, creating a palindromic structure. We unashamedly stole the idea for this from Bakithi Kumalo’s bass break in ‘You Can Call Me Al’ by Paul Simon.
Two of the songs on Here Comes Hell conclude with slow, sludgy riff-based codas, and to cap off our longest song and the album we wanted to take that idea and push it as far as we could, gradually dropping the tempo and even shifting down in key at the midpoint, doing our utmost to really bludgeon listeners with it. Wonder if Paul Simon ever set out to deliberately test the limits of his audience’s capacity for endurance?
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Warpstormer is out today via London Doom Collective.
Upcoming Warpstormer Live Dates:
