Interview by Kris Peters
The seeds for Oceanlords debut album Kingdom Cold were sewn before the world was forced into isolation in 2019.
Starting when bass-player Jason Ker joined guitarist and singer Peter Willmott for a serious drink to ponder work, family, mortality, and the hellscape of corporate existence the conversation soon turned to music and with the later addition of Jon May on drums the sludge heavy riffs began to gestate and swell, with the COVID enforced layoff actually benefitting the fledgling band when Willmott built a home studio to pass the time and found himself tracking songs for what would eventually become Kingdom Cold.
With an assortment of thematic influences centering on the writings of New England author Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Oceanlord set about plotting for the albums release with a firm eye on what direction and shape they wanted the future to hold.
With Kingdom Cold being unleashed on the world on May 26 all three band members joined HEAVY to tell us more.
"It's unbelievable," Ker smiled at the thought of having the album out for public consumption. "If you'd told me ten years, five years ago that we would be doing this today I would have laughed. We put in a lot of hard work and Pete has been pulling out riffs and lyrics left right and centre, moulding this stuff together. We've been working really hard and it's amazing to be able to have someone like Esben Willems do our mixing and mastering and then having Magnetic Eye pick us up is brilliant. I had a series of goals that I wanted to achieve with this band and I think we surpassed that a long time ago."
We press the band on the musical aspect of Kingdom Cold.
"We've got a few musical aims that we're looking to achieve," Willmott measured. "One of them was massive, doomy, wall of sound riffs. That's something we all love, so we really wanted to capture that. There's something about three piece doom that's sparse but massive at the same time. It's not massively intricate but it's thick. With that we really wanted to capture more melodic... a contrast of beauty and heaviness so that was the goal throughout writing songs and making the album. We kept coming back to those two points. How can we make this heavier? How can we make this more beautiful? And then how do we keep those two in balance."
In the full interview the boys talk us through Kingdom Cold in greater detail, talk about the thought process going into a debut album, their doom based sound and how it came together, their thematic inspirations and how they translate to the music, their early band vision and how it has changed,tracking the album from Pete's home studio, upcoming shows and more.