The self-proclaimed hardest working metal band in Australia is back on the warpath with a new album and this time, they’re taking no prisoners.
Thy Art Is Murder have spent the past few months touring relentlessly through Europe on the back of their hugely successful sophomore release ‘Hate’, and vocalist CJ McMahon says the continental response has been superb.
“Europeans are really good to us,” CJ explains. “[Europe]'s the first place we started touring internationally and European fans are just really welcoming, lovely and hospitable... We keep trying every time we come to Europe and the band’s just getting bigger and bigger here. It’s just awesome, Europe, especially Germany, Holland and Switzerland; they’ve just got their shit together.”
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The band’s upcoming release ‘Holy War’ is the third studio album for the Sydney quintet, an essential milestone for any band with their sights set on a successful long-term career, a fact that has not escaped CJ’s notice.
“'Holy War' is a record that needs to solidify our band in the top tiers of bands. So it has to push us into the next stratosphere of bigger shows and bigger money. We’re all getting older: Lee’s [drummer] getting married in October, I’m getting married next year, so we can’t just tour the world and live of fucking free beer and water and Doritos, which sucks a bit.
“So we decided that we’re going to write the best album of our lives; we feel that we have done that and it’s extremely controversial in some points and then extremely informative in others, so hopefully the world likes what our new record is about. It’s just one of those things that we’ll have to wait and see if it’s something that people are going to vibe on or not get at all, we just don’t know.”
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To make the new record, Thy Art Is Murder have thrown caution to the wind, defying current conventions of songwriting and giving a big ol’ middle finger to the culture of political correctness that CJ says is strangling creativity and freedom of expression in music.
“We were aware of this before we started writing and my band’s guilty of it, as well as other bands like us: we kind of tiptoe around certain subjects and use different metaphors or similes to explain what we’re trying to sing about without trying to piss anyone off or upset anybody because everyone in the world is too PC and, ‘oh, you can’t say this word because it’ll upset these people’ – fuck that shit, man.”
In this spirit, the band has done away with the subtlety and subtext, instead opting for a lyrical approach that CJ says goes straight for the jugular and is more representative of the band’s combined vision.
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“We’re not going to hide anything,” he says with determination, “we’re not going to try to be crafty and trippy, we’re just going to get straight to the point about a lot of things: some religious, some not religious, some are environmental, some are social issues and it’s pretty much just straight to the point.
“Our band is a very different band from any other band that walks the Earth. We’re very powerful, very different individuals from each other and other people, then you put us together and it’s a fucking strange group of people.”
While it isn’t released until late June, ‘Holy War’ has already caused controversy for its original artwork which featured a young child wearing a vest strapped with explosives, a la suicide bomber. Although the cover has since been altered for retail release, CJ says the striking image served its purpose exactly as the band intended.“It’s like I said before, I think a lot of people are missing the fucking point,” he says. “It’s not just about this bomb jacket, we have photos of this child without the bomb jacket which is signifying the same thing if he was to wear it or not. We have a small, eight-year-old boy with blond hair and blue eyes in a white veil, symbolising purity as a child and purity as a devout Christian-wearing pure cloth.
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“There are so many other points we were trying to get across and we knew what would happen if we graphically put a bomb jacket on this young eight-year-old boy. So everything is playing into our hands, people have no idea at the amount of effort and thought process we have gone through to make this the way it is. We’re extremely intelligent individuals.”
‘Holy War’ is out 26 June.
