Goth and Glam Rock band The Ritualists released their new album, Too Pure To Cure, in April, and hit the road soon after to deliver the new music to fans. Following their expansion to a wider lineup for the previous album, Baroque & Bleeding, the new album takes a similar tack of pushing the possibilities further now that the things that they can conceive of in the studio can also be translated effectively live. Also fueling that development was working with Grammy-winning Producer Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Prince, Willow) and urging to help them build a more ethereal and psychedelic sound this time around.
I spoke with vocalist and bassist Christian Dryden about these fortuitous developments on Too Pure To Cure, including experimenting with having some songs that are more vocally driven, some that are more bass-driven, and some that are more guitar-driven. We also discussed the band’s live presentation and Dryden’s views on the role of live music in modern society.
I know you’re a New Jersey and New York area band and are about to play several shows down south. Are you a band who tries to make the shows different every night, or do you try to stick to a particular setlist?
I intentionally try to make the shows different every night. That’s in part because it’s fun and it’s challenging, but also because my favorite band, Suede, known in America as the London Suede, basically put on a different show every night. I’ve actually been over to the UK to see them, and I saw them three nights in a row. We weren’t ready for what we were about to experience. Every single night it was a different experience, and I think that’s really cool. It’s impressive, too, if you have the songs to pull it off. You need to have the material for it. There are certain songs that we always have in the set, but for the rest of the show, I might just call a song out and see if the guys are into it. We try to read the room.
I was impressed a few years ago to see how active Suede still are. They were releasing new music, too.
Absolutely. They stopped for a while, then they had a whole resurgence, and are on their fourth album in their new era. Their energy is really admirable, as a band. Bret Anderson, the lead singer, still sells it. He’s in that Mick Jagger world of frontmen, and he really pulls it off.
Is that something that you think about, that frontman thing? I’ve seen some of your videos, so I know that costume and presentation is a big part of how you all express yourselves. Can you think about when you’re performing, or do you have to put your attention elsewhere?
I do think about it. I think the entire show is living art. There’s the banter between the songs, obviously what you wear, how you move on stage, all of it. It’s not that it’s all premeditated, but I think as you get better at stagecraft, I think that, in itself, is an art form. I think that, in many ways, it’s been lost a bit. Newer bands that I’ve seen recently performing on television don’t seem to have it. It’s all so choreographed and premeditated. I enjoy the stuff where it seems like the artist actually cares about presenting the music, but it doesn’t seem to be premeditated. That’s what I try to present with a band. We’re actually human beings. We’re not doing what I call “robot music.”
If I imagine The Ritualists performing on a late night talk show, as bands often do, in the clothes that you wore for the video “The Wake”, I see the contrast, because people would react to that. Everyone seems very spare now, like that’s the only way to be taken seriously. What I appreciate about that video is that the presentation is fun, and it kind of gives people permission to express themselves. Costumes, style, and fashion are fun. They are not a sign of weakness or that something is not serious art.
I agree with that. I think there’s an element of escapism, particularly with Rock ‘n Roll. I think that’s one of the reasons that Rock became so huge. These rock stars were larger-than-life figures, and people would go to these concerts, and it was ritualistic. It was a form of escapism. It relates to the Greek theater, where people were communing with the gods at the theater. There’s the term “Rock gods”, and it’s not that people think of them as gods, but there’s an otherworldliness, and people think of them as something outside of society. I think that it’s important to bring that when you’re performing.
The front person or the band are the leaders of that ceremony, I agree. The people taking part are the audience. I particularly feel that way, sometimes, when I’m at outdoor performances. It feels really similar to a Greek play or something like that, but most of us don’t think about that, and we don’t know why we do it. But I think it’s good for people.
Absolutely. I think it’s an innate thing and people need it. You saw that during Covid. There were shows percolating in the Lower East Side where we would play inside an empty bar, and people would just sit outside in outdoor seating. Everybody wanted to come out. People were opening their windows and listening from their apartments because they needed that.
That was the context for your last album, right? I think you were using that time to do a lot of writing, and released Baroque & Bleeding, but really only got to do much playing after that. What was your headspace like for wanting to do this new collection, Too Pure To Cure? Was there anything particular on your mind?
Part of the way that Baroque came about is that I solidified a lineup of live musicians. I felt that we had a really good core group, and we did quite a lot of touring. I was really feeding off the audience, I noticed that there were a few tracks on Baroque & Bleeding that were a bit dancier, and got people moving. The crowds was really feeding off of these songs, so I took the band in that direction more aggressively for Too Pure To Cure. I’m definitely happy with the results. It allowed me to stretch out more with my bass playing, which was fun.
But it was really only because I had these players. The drumming and the keyboards really laid the groundwork for my songwriting, so I’d have that in mind when writing songs. I thought, “I can do this now, and it can work as a live thing.” Whereas before, we didn’t really have that luxury.
There’s a dreaminess to some of the tracks, and whenever I encounter that kind of ethereal sound, it doesn’t usually have the Rock ‘n Roll bones behind it. So this makes for an interesting combination. Did you and Mario McNulty talk about that as a direction to expand in?
Yes, I actually still have the text messages on my phone, saying, “Make it more psychedelic, make it dreamier, make it shimmer!” [Laughs] He will probably laugh to see us talking about this, but we pushed him to do that. But Mario was really great at creating this solid, rhythmic foundation, and being really aware of where we wanted to go, and what the songs needed in order to accomplish that. He was great at piecing together these insane, ethereal, psychedelic bits of music, but he was also cognizant of the backbone that needed to be there, as well. He was great at performing both of those tasks.
We recorded most of these at a studio called Clive Davis Studios in Brooklyn. It’s sort of like a museum, where everything in there is vintage. It was the first time that we were really able to record with all of the guys in the same room together, so this is the most live album we’ve ever done, so that was exciting, too.
That is really cool. Do you think being live together impacted your performance on the record and how the songs came out?
Yes, I think it informed the way that we played, since we feed off each other’s energy. I think there were spur-of-the-moment decisions that happened in the live setting that weren’t premeditated or planned. I think that’s cool. There was spontaneity in the playing that you wouldn’t have gotten if we were tracking on our own, and being allowed to do 1001 takes on everything.
How did you pick these songs to record?
CD: Mario was involved in that process, and our manager, and set up a dropbox with songs available, demoed out. Everyone had ideas, and we came to a consensus on things.
I think the songs represent a broad range of sounds and ideas, but there’s a certain vantage point, I think, that’s coming out in them. It’s a kind of a challenge to banal daily life. “The Wake” kind of gets into that, but there’s a little bit of a “fighting back” kind of feeling to some of the themes. I don’t want to over-simplify it, since each song is pretty different.
Do you mean that you think there’s a common thread throughout the album of fighting something?
It’s more like an attitude, a certain awareness of conflict.
I think that’s accurate. You bring up something that no one else has, really. I think that much of my writing is a response to what I would call struggle. Struggle is definitely a driving force for my lyrical content in my songs. You’ve caught onto something. When I think about the songs and the lyrical content, most of them deal with some type of struggle.
Which feels relevant. Surviving is very hard, generally, but the past few years have been absurd. It feels like people have had their back against the wall to an unusual degree, whether it’s economic, or some other concern. It seems like conflict takes up so much attention right now that you start ignoring it.
It’s always there in the back of your mind, even if you don’t realize it, in your subconscious.
Absolutely. What about this extremely ornate song, “The Wake”, which gets this amazing video. Did this happen because you were working with Mario and thought, “Let’s go big! Let’s be maximalist!”?
It’s funny because that was the last song that we recorded for this album. It wasn’t even really going to be on the album. It was finished, basically, a month before the song came out. I insisted on its inclusion. I had written the song, and was very confident in the song, and felt very strongly about it. All of the members of the band were not as confident in the song. They thought it might be too poppy. But I asked to test the limits. Once we got going with the song, and everything was arranged, and we started performing it live, we saw the response.
Then I said, “This was the right move.” The vocals on the song were done between one and three takes. It was very quickly put together! I knew that Mario would do a great job with it, since we’d kind of set the table for this kind of thing with songs like “Erotically Erratic” and “You Know Better.” Those were other songs based around a driving bass groove, and this song was going to take it to another level, in my eyes and ears.
The songs “You Know Better” and “The Wake” are both things that make me think of dance music. “You Know Better” is like a dark dance track, whereas “The Wake” has a lighter, more liberated feeling. “The Wake” is more composed, almost like a classical composition. I feel like it’s a development on your music so far. You really take the leash off.
Thank you. I think you’re right that with “You Know Better”, the vocals were sort of ancillary, and the main driving thing was the bass. I told the guys, “We’re going to go dark disco on this.” With “The Wake”, the chorus vocal was written before any music. I had that melody in my head, and all of the parts were built around the vocal. The vocal melody was the driving force in “The Wake.” They both have grooves under them, but the one is vocally driven, and the other one is sort of bass-driven.
