Since their formation in 2004, British thrash metallers Evile have been turning heads and taking names, delivering four pure thrash offerings blended with an uncompromising death metal assault. Their fifth studio album, titled “Hell Unleashed“, was released on April 30 via Napalm Records, and is the long-awaited successor to 2013’s “Skull”. Featuring the new exciting lineup formation of Ol Drake on vocals/guitars and new member Adam Smith of Riptides rhythm guitarist, “Hell Unleashed” is a raucous and masterful thrash metal attack.
We talk to Ol Drake about the new album, taking on vocals for the first time and having comedian/actor Brian Posehn guest on a track.
Andrew: Thanks for your time, really appreciate it. Hows things on your end at the moment?
Ol: Yeah all good. It’s actually sunny here for once [laughs], the sun is actually out.
Andrew: That’s good, we’re just about to start winter on our end so I guess we’re getting a bit of the UK weather I suppose.
Ol: Yeah we’ll be back to winter tomorrow [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] I’ve been a fan of you guys for quite some time, since the first album many years ago but I guess you guys have had quite a bit of an interesting last few years I guess with change in lineups and things like that. Has that been difficult to deal with at all?
Ol: I wouldn’t say difficult, I’m at a point now where I kind of just roll with it and if something goes wrong I need sorting I just try and get it sorted as soon as possible and then move on [laughs].
Andrew: And the new album that just came out recently, fantastic stuff as always, you guys always seem to hit it out the ballpark so to speak. It was a long time coming as well, it’s been a number of years before the last album came out. At what point did you start writing material for this new album?
Ol: When I rejoined the band in 2018, I think it was about October of that year. Because the band hadn’t done anything 5 years prior, I just said, ‘Look we have to get new music out as soon as possible’. So started writing and I think we finished the music mid-2019 and then it was just a case of waiting for the vocals and the lyrics but therein lied the next problem, Matt [Drake] didn’t have time and we waited about a year and then Matt left and then everything else, you know [laughs].
Andrew: That’s a question that pops up in every conversation I’ve had is the covid stuff, how much of an impact did that have on you guys as far as the recording?
Ol: The recording itself had an impact because we recorded at Andy Sneap’s studio in Derbyshire but it was in the middle of a lockdown so only a few of us could be in there. Me and Ben [Carter, drums] we had to keep our distance and everything. It was really weird, we couldn’t go out anywhere, we couldn’t go out for a drink after recording or anything, it was kind of stay in the studio and watch TV. It is weird and it could of actually helped us in the sense that so obviously we couldn’t do anything so it gave me a chance to re-listen to all the material for like a whole year and usually what we do is we release an album and then 3 months later I will listen to a song and think, ‘Shit I should of changed that’. This time I kind of released it in my head if you know what I mean, because of that I’ll listen to it now that it’s done and it allowed me to change all these small details over the course of the year so it really helped.
Andrew: Yeah obviously sitting with these songs for quite a long time gives you a different perspective as opposed to some of the previous albums you had released in the past.
Ol: Yeah it really did, especially because even in “Incarcerated” the third song, the verses on that song were always I think they were half time so they were kind of slow paced and me and Ben were just talking at the time about why does this song suck and what’s wrong with it? There’s something that sucks and it was the two weeks before going into the studio we decided, let’s change the drums in the verse to a thrash beat and as soon as we did that the entire song made more sense where we were just like, ‘Wow ok’ [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] So sitting with these songs for quite some time, did that make you a little nervous as to how the songs would sort of sit after a while or nervous about the reactions and things like that at all?
Ol: That didn’t really come into our minds because our goal was to release the most aggressive, heavy, fastest album we’ve ever done so the goal was never to try and sit in with the rest of the discography, it was to try and beat the discography and make a statement with the new album and I think we achieved that.
Andrew: Yeah because I gotta say, and I’m quite familiar with the back catalogue stuff, this is definitely the most aggressive and heaviest album you guys have put out. What was the inspiration behind the aggressive feel to it?
Ol: I think it had a lot to do with the fact there had been no music for 5 to 8 years and we were just angry [laughs]. We anted to get out there, we wanted to play again and we thought we don’t want to come back and be all progressive and like clever and intricate, we just thought let’s just punch people in the face with music and just get back out there. So I think it was an amalgamation of being angry about it being so long and also we just wanted to make a bold statement.
Andrew: Yeah you’ve definitely achieved that with this new record. It’s definitely got that real thrashy feel but at the same time I feel like there’s some death metal elements in there a little bit that sort of creeps in there every once in a while.
Ol: Yeah I said in a previous interview just now, it’s not intentional. Because I love thrash and I love death metal, I think I just kind of naturally merge them together with my playing so when I’m writing a riff I don’t think, ‘I’ll make it a bit more death metal’. It’s just I kind of have that crunch feel in my riffs that I just like really putting in there. But I do love death metal.
Andrew: Yeah same here, I love that brutal heavier sort of sound. But there’s a few other interesting aspects on this album as well that I want to touch on. First of all this is the first album that you personally are doing vocals on as well, taking on that spot. What was that like and have you done that kind of stuff before?
Ol: No it was fully in the deep end. I’ve sung before, I can sing. I can sing clean, I can sing heavy but I can’t do it healthily. When I was doing the demo vocals I could taste blood and for 2 days and my voice was like [rough growl noise] and I really did some damage. So it’s been a case of just learning how to do it properly and not damage anything but I didn’t enjoy it at first because I was just like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ But I’ve found my feet now, it’s not as daunting anymore.
Andrew: Did you find there was a new found appreciation for vocalists and things like that?
Ol: Yeah well there’s a new found appreciation for what Matt did. I knew Matt was a great singer but to sing like he sang every night on the number of gigs that we did, I take my hat off to him, it was really, really impressive just knowing what goes into taking care of your voice and singing for an hour and a half every night without doing any damage so you can do it the next night, it’s really complicated.
Andrew: Have you been talking to other vocalists as far as tips and things like that?
Ol: Yes some but mainly Chris Clancy the producer really helped me in the studio and to be frank he saved the album because we were in there for 2 weeks and the first week we did 5 songs worth of vocals and we listened back to it was really bad. We worked together and he found my technique that I should use and as soon as he heard, it was like, ‘We got it, that’s how you do it’, and I was so thankful to him because I don’t think we would of released the album if it sounded like it did [laughs]. And I’ve been getting some lesson from Melissa Cross as well which has really helped.
Andrew: Speaking of vocals, I gotta ask, Brian Posehn does a backing vocal guest spot on the song “Gore”. How did that all come about?
Ol: He did backing vocals on our song “Cult” in 2011 which wasn’t really advertised so not a lot of people know that he did that. Someone sent me a screenshot of the Sarah Silverman show over in America and it was Brian wearing an Evile shirt on TV and we were like, ‘What the hell!’ So I just got speaking to him, he’s a really nice guy and obviously a big fan of metal and he likes Evile and this time around I just sent him an email saying, ‘Do you want to shout the word Gore for 20 times and we’ll put it in the song and he said, ‘Yeah’. It was never meant to be like a headline or a news item but it became one and it was like “featuring Brian Posehn” and everyone think, ‘Well where is he, I can’t hear him?’ Aah it’s on backing vocals!
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah obviously he’s known for his comedic sort of stuff but like you mentioned, known for loving heavy metal as well. Were you looking to have someone do a guest spot in that song anyway or was it a spur of the moment kind of thing?
Ol: I think we were actually in the studio maybe or just before the studio. We were talking about how he did backing vocals on “Cult” and we thought why don’t we just ask him again, I don’t know why but we just don’t overly like having guests on the album, I think we like to keep everything in-house as much as possible. The odd little thing here and there I thnk is cool but I don’t think we’ll do much more than that ever.
Andrew: The other thing I wanted to ask quickly was the cover of Mortician’s “Zombie Apocalypse”. Now you had never recorded a cover song right?
Ol: We hadn’t on an album, we’ve never put one on an album. We did a few for magazines and B-sides, we’ve done Metallica “Through The Never”, we even did a Nirvana song for Kerrang and Entombed, we did “Drowned” by Entombed. But yeah we’ve never done anything exclusively for an album so it’s definitely the first one.
Andrew: What made you decide to not only put a cover song on here but to do this particular one as well?
Ol: Well a lot of the time labels want a B-side or something extra just to put on like a bonus edition or something, so I thought let’s do a cover but we don’t want to do something typical like Metallica or Testament so we thought let’s do something death metal and that song came into mind because the riff is just so good and when we spoke to the label I said, ‘What do you want for the b-side?’, they said, ‘We don’t, just do the album’. We were like, ‘Oh right, erm right let’s just put it on the album [laughs]. So it was as simple as that.
Andrew: Are they a band that has any kind of influence on you at all?
Ol: On me, yeah. I’m a big fan of old death metal, the old Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Obituary and Mortician were a band that I loved as well and a lot of my friends who were into death metal were like, ‘Na don’t listen to Mortician’. I didn’t understand a lot of my friends were like, they didn’t get Mortician but I loved it and “Zombie Apocalypse” is just one of the songs that’s just stuck with me. I always played it at soundcheck or just sat at home, if I pick up a guitar one of the first things I play is “Zombie Apocalypse” so it just makes sense to do it.
Andrew: So how did you actually get into playing music and how did you get into the heavier style of music?
Ol: My Dad played guitar in the 60’s and 70’s, when we were kids he would play the Batman theme tune for us and stuff like that and I think it’s kind of ingrained in us when we were kids but my brother Matt, I think he got some classic lessons as a kid and then he picked up a guitar into his teens and then he was listening to Metallica in his bedroom while I didn’t really understand music, I just listened to whatever was on the radio and I heard Metallica and I just thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ The singer is shouting and the music’s all loud and then as I got a bit older I just started to understand it a bit more. So I’d steal his guitar now and then and try to learn some of the songs and steal his albums and listen to them so it was definitely my brother that got me into heavy music.
Andrew: Who do you consider to be your biggest influence, particularly on your guitar playing?
Ol: I was list two main guitars, no 3 – James and Kirk from Metallica made me want to play guitar but the main guitarist who made me want to get good at guitar is Jeff Waters from Annihilator. When I heard him play I instantly wanted to know how to do that and how to write that and just learn everything about it, so I spent a good 8 years learning Annihilator stuff and I learned pretty much everything I know from Annihilator.
Andrew: I’m a huge fan of Annihilator and Jeff Waters in particular. He is such, in my opinion, an underrated guitar player who doesn’t seem to get enough recognition amongs other guitar players.
Ol: Yeah I don’t get it. Annihilator and he should be way, way bigger than they are. He is in my opinion one of, if not the best metal guitarist there is.
Andrew: Yeah definitely. Have you ever had a chance to meet him or play with Annihilator at all?
Ol: Yeah I met him when I was maybe 18 or 19, he let me on the tour bus. I was just some kid then who was like, ‘Oh my god it’s Jeff’ and I just got to know him through messageboards and Mypace and I met him since, seen him live since. He’s really cool, I talk to him every now and then. It’s bizarre to kind of know the guy who influenced me so heavily.
Andrew: So what now for Evile? Obviously touring is a little risky at the moment but do you have any plans for later in the year?
Ol: Yeah we’ve got some festivals booked – Bloodstok in the UK and some others but I’m just hoping that they happen. We have no concrete plans beyond this year because we still don’t know, we can’t confirm, things might change. We’re looking at a UK tour at the start of next year and beyond that we’re just waiting for our agents to tell us we’re good to go on other things so it’s just a waiting game at the moment, just crossing our fingers.
Andrew: I think once things open up again everyone is going to be completely berserk about it, everyone is going to go nuts for live shows again.
Ol: Yeah definitely but I hope that berserkness doesn’t cause more problems. I just hope it goes away soon or gets managed soon.
Andrew: Well congratulations on the new album, as I said it’s killer stuff and I’ve been a fan of you guys for a long time so I really appreciate your time. Hopefully, maybe one day, we’ll see how we go but we would love to have you down in Australia.
Ol: We’ve tried for years, we’ve tried really hard and hopefully this is the album that can get us down there. So if anyone does like what they hear, please buy a copy of the CD or the vinyl, it really helps in many ways to help us get down there.
