Baroness Is Breaking All The Rules Of Metal

Metal-heads are a hard bunch to please. They want it hard and fast, savage and relentlessly ripping. The riffs must cause the guitarist’s fingers to smoke, the drums must be like machine guns and, depending on which metal sect they claim (black, christian, death, sludge, crust, whatever), the vocalist must sound like either a howling wolf, a castrated wizard, a growling demon, or a satanized pig. Them’s the rules. Break ’em, ya get got.

But Baroness doesn’t sound like any of those things. At least not anymore. Like Mastodon and Torche, they’ve become sorta “softer” with time. The songs are more melodic and structured, less grizzly and brutal. As a result, they’ve taken a lot of shit from fans, who decry them for taking a more “commercial” turn. Baroness’ upcoming double-album, Yellow & Green, isn’t gonna make the haters hate any less. The first single, “Take My Bones Away,” sounds like it was born to jump right into the mainstream rock radio rotation. The band is currently on tour with Meshuggah and Decapitated, so we talked to guitarist and lead vocalist John Baizley while they were in the van heading to Detroit.

Noisey: How’s the tour going?
John Baizley: It’s going well. We intentionally put ourselves out on a tour where we know the band’s not gonna be an easy sell. We’re sandwiched between two very definitively metal bands, and the stuff we play is a little different than that.

How has Baroness’ sound evolved in the last five years, since the Red Album?
It has consistently evolved since the beginning. That was the idea behind the band—to have an open mind about where we were going, and to let our tastes and interests and musical passions drive us to wherever we needed to go. Sometimes we’ve gotten a little heavier and darker, but in the past five years, we’ve been focusing more on songwriting. Nowadays, our songs have a bit more melodic feel and there’s a heightened sense of dynamics.

Change is risky because so many fans just want their favorite bands to make the same album over and over again.
We just refuse to be that band. It might not be the smartest choice for our career, but in order to be interested in the band as we get older, we need the music to suit our tastes and mindsets at all times.

Is it a goal for Baroness to challenge its fans?
That’s always been the goal. We challenge ourselves every time we sit down to write a record. We always hold ourselves to very high standards, and we try to musically dig in and go to places that are unchartered for us. The only result of that type of thinking—that we are always challenging ourselves—is that we’re also offering a challenge to our listeners.

What specific challenges did the band face with Yellow & Green?
The idea was to approach each song as its own sub-entity on the record. We wanted each song to be a very pure version, where, in the past, we’ve oftentimes brought a mixed bag of ideas to one song. And, doing the double-album thing was a weird idea to begin with, but it was something we felt was necessary.

A double-album’s a powerful statement.
It was meant as a powerful statement. We attacked this thing like any other record—write songs, record them, and put them out. But we knew there was going to be a lot of material, so much, in fact, that in order to get our point across, we had to write a lot of songs. We actually wrote about 30. The concept was not that it be an epic scale event, but the reason we split it in two was to make it more digestible. We didn’t want listeners to feel like they had to subject themselves to 80+ minutes of music. Rather, we felt that the offering was two small, close to 40 minute albums, neither of which need to be listened to simultaneously. But both of them fit together and make up some kind of whole.

Do you still see Baroness as being a metal band? Or has that category become too limiting?
It’s super-limiting. But any category would be limiting given the band’s mindset. The process for us was just to pay credence to that, and to then just go wherever the music took us. If it had been in a more metal direction, we would’ve gone there. But it turns out that it was not. We love having been associated with the metal community for so long. It’s been great. Everybody in the band loves metal. It’s our home base, and that’s where we feel most comfortable. But, because of that fact, sometimes we need to get out of that box in order to keep going.

Baroness debuted “Take My Bones Away” this week.

@elliotsharp