Pennsylvania’s Rivers of Nihil has been consistently creating albums that build in complexity and exploration of what it means to have Death Metal roots. The critical praise for their previous album, Where Owls Know My Name, only set that bar higher for their new project, and the layers of work that have gone into the aptly titled upcoming release makes it a whole new breed of creature. With The Work, out September 24th from Metal Blade, you’ll find their innovations on previous songs taken to a new level, like the combination of both screaming and clean vocals forming an almost dialog-like expression of song themes. Like their four previous albums, The Work also has strong unifying elements in concept and sound.
I spoke with lyricist and bassist Adam Biggs about these continuing developments for the band, the impact of the pandemic on crafting such a nuanced album, and how they’ll tackle live play on their big North American and European tour throughout the rest of 2021, playing alongside The Black Dahlia Murder, Carnifex, and After the Burial.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I am glad to catch you before you all set off on quite an epic tour. Are you planning to play the music from The Work on the tour?
Adam Biggs: Yes, I think we’ll be trying out a few new tracks and gauging their effectiveness in a live setting.
HMS: Do you usually have to make changes to your songs in order to play them live versus how they are recorded in the studio?
AB: Not so much. There’s always such a different environment when writing music than when you’re playing in front of people, though. You might write a piece that makes you react a certain way, but you find it brings a different energy to the crowd, so you have to gauge how this leaves the audience. Is it more of a song that ends on a low note that you have to pick up with the next song? We get the full emotional spectrum of the song once you’re playing it in front of people who are immediately reacting to it.
HMS: Do you have to put a lot of thought into the sequencing of your live performance, then, alongside sequencing the album itself?
AB: That’s exactly right. When we’re sequencing an album, we always want to make it feel like a journey, like you’re going somewhere on an emotional level. To recreate that kind of thing in whatever amount of time we have to play it is a tricky thing, especially with new material when you don’t know exactly how it will go. Sometimes we’ve played songs that have really gotten a crowd riled up in a way that we didn’t expect to happen, so we’ve had to replan then, and it’s a whole other layer to things.
HMS: I know that the last four albums have had related thematic elements to them, for instance correspondence to each of the four seasons. Is it hard to place songs from these different albums next to each other in a concert since they are kind of from different worlds?
AB: Yes, kind of. Definitely the deeper we get into this whole thing, that becomes an issue. It seems that every album has created its own pocket of fans for us. You’ll see online that some people prefer one album over the other ones, or another one. It’s all our fault, in a way, since we’ve tried to make significant upgrades to our sounds on every record.
Some people really latched onto the more primitive Death Metal sounds of the first two records, for instance, and as we’ve left more of that behind, they’ve stayed. We still want people to like us in that way to come out to a show and feel like they are being honored, so it can be hard to take stuff from our older records and blend it with our newer stuff. We have to conceptualize these songs sitting next to each other in worlds where they might not belong and that can be kind of challenging.
HMS: I know you’re not alone in that one among musicians. The longer you’re around, it’s a thing that poses challenges.
AB: It’s a good problem to have. When you’re a kid making music in a garage, you really don’t think it’s a problem you will ever face, but maybe you hopefully will? [Laughs] It’s actually kind of fun. I’m the guy in the band who always comes up with the tracklisting and what we play and when, so finding that balance of energy within our own music is a fun task.
HMS: As many readers will know, Where Owls Know My Name had a massively positive critical reception. Did you have to try to put that out of your mind in order to work on a new album more freely?
AB: There’s a lot of layers to this as well. We had people asking us these sorts of questions just as Owls was being received well. It’s a fair question and a compliment. But I’ve never walked away from a record that we’ve made and thought, “I can’t top this.” I’ve always walked away with a list of complaints that need to be addressed the next go around.
I don’t think I need to live up to myself or what anyone says about me, but it is hard to keep it out of your head while you are working. Instead of being crushed by the weight of it, I hopefully used that expectation to push things forward. I think we all really examined that expectation and chose the parts that we wanted to live up to. Then we did what we wanted to do and what we could do. There’s no more to it than that.
HMS: Looking at the procession of your albums, the band doesn’t seem to be at all afraid of change. In fact, it seems to be an actual goal.
AB: It’s an inevitability if you’re being honest as an artist and a person, I think. There are a lot of bands out there who will find a nice pocket, then they will exist in it, until no one wants to listen to it anymore. I always have to wonder, “Has their artistic passion dried up?” If they had chosen to step out of their comfort zone at the risk of angering their fan base, would they be happier? Or would they have failed and be miserable? There’s no way to know, but it still seems like a sad way to live.
We started this band when we were kids, essentially, and now it’s going on 13 years later. As people, you go through so much in that time and to remain the same as a body of artistic expression, or as a person, would be disingenuous. It’s a natural reaction to growing. Change isn’t so much a goal as an inevitability since we all change.
HMS: Being adaptable to change has probably been a big plus for weathering 2020 and 2021. Did it affect you at all in terms of setting goals and making progress on the album? Many people, myself included, don’t feel that they’ve been able to work at a normal pace.
AB: It’s been a theme, including the way that the world has been working. Even though we planned to be off and get this record done this year, there’s that constant daunting possibility that things are never going to go back to the way that they were so we can continue our lives. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do these things. It’s easy to lose sight of it.
I had recently moved from Pennsylvania and the band’s central headquarters to Richmond, Virginia, very soon before the pandemic started. I was in a new city far away from everybody and I didn’t know when we were going to go back to work.
HMS: Moving is such an extreme thing anyway, I can’t imagine what that combination of experiences was like.
AB: It’s been a hefty adjustment. Since we had finally gotten to the point of making the band our full-time gig and were touring a lot, I didn’t think it mattered where I lived and it was no big deal. Then the world shut down and it felt like I might as well live on the moon. Things definitely slowed down for me and it was harder to work. Everything was coated in this layer of hopelessness. I think it made its way onto the record in a positive way, or in a way that will evoke that feeling, for better or worse. Art captures the time and who you are when you make it. It was tough, but I tried to make the album that I’d been envisaging for a couple of years.
HMS: At what point in the song process do you work on lyrics?
AB: In my downtime, I’m always thinking of things. I think of phrases that I like, names of things, and random mental junk that I just sort of catch. I’ll write it down and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at first. Then, sometimes, it becomes mantra of sorts. “Where Owls Know My Name” was something that was stuck in my head for many years. Then after a lot of concentration, it became what it is after hefty contemplation of the ideas that that evokes. Then that’s also informed by the music that we make and the raw instrumental versions of the songs.
The Work really isn’t any different. That title and theme sprung to mind during the touring cycle for Owls. It was at the time when we were starting to make the band our job, so I was reflecting on art, commerce, skullduggery, and the drudgery of long drives and long work hours. Life is just enduring a certain amount of tedium until you get to do what you want to do. [Laughs] That was the impetus for the initial ideas for this new record. I’ll take that kind of idea and weigh it against whatever instrumentals we come up with. Then I’ll fill in the blanks from there.
Brody [Uttley] is great at demoing things out and we have great sounding instrumentals to listen to. I’ll listen to them over and over again and mentally fill them in. So the writing of lyrics starts at any point when I start thinking about things and ends around the time we record it. In between, it’s always growing and changing.
HMS: I think it’s really interesting that this album has an opening theme, “The Tower” and that comes up again later in a second song. The cover artwork for the album also has a Tower with lightning hitting it, which is similar to an image in the Tarot.
AB: The image is a reference to the Tarot. The cards started to play more of a role in my life around the time I moved to Richmond. The image started popping up constantly enough that it warranted some meditation. The meaning behind the card is something like a tumultuous transformation and I felt it lined up a lot with where the band was, and where the world ended up being, and where this album was. It just sort of became the thing for me, so that’s a lot of what the record really is about. It’s about this violent reconstruction of your relationship with art, I guess.
There was a running musical theme on the last record, but we didn’t call it that. On this record, it felt a little more deserving of cinematic flair, as if this was the soundtrack to something. So we went with an opening theme, but it is also a recurring theme.
HMS: There’s also a really interesting play between clean vocals and screaming vocals on the album, which brings out different lyrics in different ways. It’s a great experiment.
AB: That was something that we had only started to explore on the last record. I’ve always felt like that was something that I wanted to do. I wanted to overcome a little bit of the Death Metal problem of lyrics being buried all the time. I know that it’s been a solution for other bands before to have some clean vocals. But something about it felt a little more appropriate for what we were writing this time, to have a variation in the voice. Some Death Metal feels like it’s obscuring its content a little in muffled vagueness. While I appreciate that as someone who has played in a Death Metal band for a long time, and the [screaming] style certainly isn’t lost on me, we felt something with a little more clarity was in order.
