When Kataklysm launched Victims Of This Fallen World in 1998, the Canadian loss of life steel band took a pointy stylistic flip that shocked — and alienated — loads of longtime followers. Leaning closely into groove and nü-metal aesthetics, the album stays one of the crucial divisive releases in Kataklysm‘s catalog.
In a brand new interview with Suicide Silence guitarist Chris Garza on The Garza Podcast, vocalist Maurizio Iacono defined that the file was very a lot a mirrored image of the time and the band’s inner state: “It was our nü-metal file. Each band does it. In order that was the file that once I was telling you, generally you simply received to let issues take its time, proper?”
In accordance with Iacono, the shift adopted the band’s extraordinarily chaotic 1996 album Temple Of Data, which pushed extremity to its limits: “After you do a file like Temple Of Data that has, I do not know, 250 riffs per track… it was simply an animalistic sort of file and it revolutionized quite a lot of issues. That was the head of that period for us.”
“We would have liked a whole break and rebranding and restructuring of the band on the time. You would see it instantly — [the album art] did not look loss of life steel. It shocked folks.”
Iacono acknowledged that Kataklysm weren’t alone in experimenting through the late ’90s, a interval when many heavy bands flirted with nü-metal as its reputation exploded. Nevertheless, the native response in Montreal was brutal. A hometown present with Morbid Angel shortly made that clear.
“We come on there and the followers are identical to [flipping the bird], throwing bottles and shit. I used to be like, ‘Fuck, we’re carried out.’ I assumed that was it.”
Behind the scenes, the album additionally mirrored a deeply tough private interval for Iacono: “It was darkish years. My father had died in ’97. It was very laborious on me. That album got here out with agony behind it. It is a very darkish interval within the band’s profession.”
Regardless of believing the band may be completed, Kataklysm pushed ahead with a beforehand booked European tour with Vader — and that modified all the things. That surprising reception abroad gave the band a path ahead.
“I used to be like, ‘Okay, there is a motion right here.’ What if we mixed a bit of little bit of the outdated stuff with this new route? That is once we began fine-tuning it — a hybrid of chaos, groove, and construction.”
That hybrid strategy would in the end information Kataklysm out of their nü-metal detour and again towards the crushing, groove-driven loss of life steel sound that later outlined albums like Shadows & Mud and past.
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