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One of heavy metal’s most defining aspects is it’s never ending list of different sub-genres that seemingly grow by the day. Even when it seems that all the possible directions that musicians can have been covered one can always find a band that scratches a new itch for a certain type of listener. But how do you describe a brand new style of metal that isn’t as easy to categorise as the more obvious sub-genres? IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT with their blend of black metal with stylistic tropes of east coast jazz are one of those bands whose sound is wholly their own making it tricky to describe succinctly.
Fortunately guitarist and vocalist of IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT, Zachary Ezrin has the perfect description off the cuff for his band’s music. “We sound like if you put an entire brass ensemble in an elevator at the top of the Empire State Building and then snip the wires. We thought a lot about how we should describe our art and I wanted to come up with a genre name that was snippy and catchy rather than something like ‘avant garde experimental blackened death’. So I came up with ‘avant death’. I think that name summarises us pretty well.”
While IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT’s uncompromising and unique music is one of the band’s defining aspects, an equally core part is how much their home of New York City bleeds into their art from the themes of the music to even the band’s very name. “I grew up in New York, and I was walking home from school one day trying to think of cool band names by putting words together and I came up with IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT which grammatically doesn’t really work but it sounds cool. In the US every state has a name and New York City is called ‘The Empire’ state so there are a lot of places that use the word ‘Imperial’ even random stuff like an ‘Imperial laundromat’ so it made sense that a band that sings a lot about New York City would have this word in it.”
IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT began life as a IMMORTAL inspired black metal band before deciding to find a new take on black metal when creating 2018’s Vile Luxury. The music since that album has sought to be the musical representation of the chaotic world that is New York City. Ezrin recalls why he decided to depict a more urban setting, rather than looking to the natural world as many other black metal bands do. “If I was going to sing about nature it would probably come off really inauthentic. Whether you are an author or an artist or whatever you have to write about what you know. I know this city so writing about it is easy for me. In our early days, before the New York concept, I was disturbed that I didn’t have an answer for the question ‘what is your band about’. So I was walking through billionaires row and I’m looking up at all these gorgeous buildings and it just hit me that there’s all this art deco that’s so interesting and cool and not utilised in metal. New York is a dark place so I wanted to lean into that in our music. It didn’t happen overnight but the more we added to the idea the more it all fell into place.”
There is no other style of music that is as synonymous with New York than jazz music. IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT bring some of the techniques and traditions of east coast jazz music to give their music its unique flavour. “The rhythm section in my band have between them about forty years of experience playing within the New York jazz scene and are both jazz performance majors and I’ve been playing gypsy jazz for about ten years. We’ve all spent a lot of time improvising in various trios which is where a lot of the jazz in our music comes from. So when we write this music we’ll often ask ‘what if we just fuck around with it?’ What if I’m playing in a different time signature? What if Steve on bass just improvises over this part or walks the bass or plays something different from the root? I did have to open my mind to it a little over time but I just wanted to see what happened. It was uncomfortable but I opened myself up to the music and did something much more interesting than I could have done on my own.”
Ahead of the release of the band’s new album Goldstar fans got treated to two tracks featuring heavy metal royalty. Pleasuredome and Lexington Delirium both feature drums from Dave Lombardo and Tomas Hakke. IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT have a long history with collaborating with other musicians both from heavy metal and beyond.
“We work with other musicians all the time, some of them famous like on our last album we had Kenny G who’s one of the best living jazz musicians, but other times just people who can play really, really well. On the first record we had my old college mentor who played in the Lou Reed metal machine trio. We always try to collaborate and that’s one the many things that makes us very ‘New York’, bringing people together to make art. Regarding Dave and Tomas, no one is on this record just because they are famous, it’s because they understand what we do. We’ve known those guys for years and we were confident they could lift an IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT song higher than it could be without them.”
After proving and perfected their unique sound of avant-death, IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT’s new album Goldstar sees the band experiment even further to keep their art evolving.
“We decided to make all the songs on this album under five minutes which was a big challenge and fuck around with some rock formats. Overall we wanted it to be more streamlined which was a good challenge since we don’t normally write in that style, we even have a forty second grindcore song in there and we’ve never done anything like that before. Any artist when they are creating, if you put restraints on them it makes them have to think harder. If you want to think outside of the box there has to be a box.”
Goldstar is set out now via Century Media Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS119 here:
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