Wielding a mix of ‘art rock’ and crushingly heavy doom metal, Pallbearer are pushing for one of the most ambitious metal albums of 2024 with Mind Burns Alive. Over the last decade the Little Rock, Arkansas outfit have garnered critical praise not only from within the doom metal and ambient music scenes, but from notable figures within the wider metal community such as Metallica’s own James Hetfeild.
While the band’s earlier work established them as a hit makers in the doom metal genre, specifically for their now classic debut, Sorrow and Extinction, Pallbearer have since shown their eclectic metal and rock influences which range from progressive metal, stoner rock, grunge, and even hints of death metal. Despite the band not receiving the widespread attention like other more mainstream metal outfits, Pallbearer’s consistency in releasing intricate and high quality LP’s is a bar that only a minority of metal band’s have met within the last decade.
Mind Burns Alive not only continues this trend for the band but it fully elevates and embraces the new sonic ideas and dynamics Pallbearer have experimented with throughout their discography. For long time fans Mind Burns Alive might be Pallbearer’s opus, as it’s an encapsulation of all the exceptional elements from each of their previous records, but delivered with dynamics and ease not heard from the band yet. However, for new comers to Pallbearer, Mind Burns Alive could not be a better place to dive in.
Pallbearer vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell spoke with Forbes to discuss all things Mind Burns Alive, and why the band doesn’t consider themselves to be just another ‘crushing doom metal band.’
“Where The Light Fades” is such a somber and tender song to open an album with. However, it’s such a great song in that it also establishes many of the new sonic changes the band has ventured to on this record. What was the thinking behind putting this track as the opener and as the lead single for the new record?
Brett Campbell: Basically we just felt like we might as well put the listener into the deep end right off the bat. We could have started with “Endless Place” or “With Disease” or something that is more expected from Pallbearer, but there are so many lighter and negative space moments on this album. And actually I hesitate to say lighter because it’s really not so much about being soft per say, it’s just a different use of texture if anything. There’s still a lot of stuff going on and it’s still lush for the most part. I think we still treated the quieter moments with the same kind of compositional view point we would with our heavier moments, it’s just a different side of the same coin. We felt like why not take the listener and establish immediately what this album is about.
MORE FOR YOU
Were the specific soundscapes from other bands, records, or mediums that inspired you and the band when it came to writing and producing Mind Burns Alive?
BC: Really it’s just we’re always trying to sound better. We spent basically from 2020 on to amassing a pretty decent amount of recording gear, microphones, preamps, etc. and I also went down a rabbit hole of finding the perfect speakers and cab combination. Every single element of the chain in my guitar sound has been excessively mauled over to the point where when it actually got time to record we basically had a blueprint of how to sound really good. We didn’t have a lot going on for a few years thanks to the pandemic, so we had plenty of time to obsess over that stuff which honestly was a blast as a music gear enthusiast. You want your stuff to sound as good as possible, and being able to pinpoint that stuff ahead of time before going into the studio was time well spent.
The album has very present themes of Isolation and loneliness, and supposedly this record was going to be recorded in 2020? Were some of the lyrical ideas and themes inspired from the pandemic era or isolation period?
BC: Some of it was, half of the songs were mostly written by Joe [Rowland] and we collaborated on some of them. Lyrically at least they’re Joe tunes. I think some of those were developed during the pandemic but I don’t know how much of an impact the actual life situation had on the lyrics, but the songs that I wrote were pre-pandemic actually and then “With Disease,” I started before the pandemic and then I just kept revising lyrics up to recording them. I never felt like I was quite hitting the mark of what I was wanting to say with the songs so I just kept hacking away at them.
Both the album title and title track come across very striking grammatically and conceptually. Where did the idea for the album’s title come from and why did the band ultimately choose it?
BC: That was a song that Joe had written and it had a different title at some point, it was like ’Night Burns Alive’ or something like that, which I thought was a cool title too but then he eventually changed it to Mind Burns Alive. It sounds weird when you hear it but the song is essentially written from the perspective of a person who is extremely manic and they’ve kind of disassociated. It’s this weird perverse heroic tale in the narrators mind, so there’s a lot of fire imagery as a metaphor for this person’s mental breakdown and that kind of extreme mania where their mind is just aflame in this hyper manic state. When we were discussing what we wanted to call the album that song just made sense, because the album is concerned with these negative mental states, mental illness or post-trauma and the way that people feel with trauma some times in negative ways or predatory ideas. Mind Burns Alive, it sounds like a newspaper headline or something it’s got that all caps bold sound to it, and it kind seems like it doesn’t make sense at first glance — it’s not typical grammar.
Mind Burns Alive certainly doesn’t lack any heavy moments, but much of the heaviness on the album shines from the dynamic song structures and the lyrical themes within them. Was this a conscious decision in terms of how the band wanted to showcase the heavy elements on this record?
BC: Absolutely, I think we’ve been exploring dynamics since the very beginning but it’s mostly heavy with some exceptions, like we’ll have stretches of quiet parts sprinkled throughout our discography but there has never been a record where we just treated that as the main compositional crux of the entire album. Some of these songs for the most part arose at the same time as the Forgotten Days material which was super dense, very riffy, not a lot of dynamics other then a few moments but for the most part it’s a very pedal to the metal album as far as Pallbearer goes.
At the same time we were writing these much more delicate and nuanced songs and I don’t know how much one is a reflection of the other. When these songs emerged there wasn’t a whole lot of intent behind it, I was just writing and some of that material was Forgotten Days and some of it was this, but once I stated realizing what I was doing I more intentionally separated the songs and pushed each group of the songs further in that direction, and in their respective directions. One being heavy, dense, straight forward, and the other being more nuanced.
In my opinion this album has all the best sonic elements from Pallbearer while further expanding the band’s sound. How do you and the rest of the band view this album as far as how it stands to the rest of the records in Pallbearer’s discography?
BC: It’s hard to say. To me they’re all pretty different from one another. We just explore different sides of the band with each album and I am very fond of this one. I feel it’s our most realized album because we had the time to do it right and actually execute our ideas pretty damn close to how we envisioned them. Thanks to the pandemic we had more time than we would’ve had otherwise to hone in and reflect on the songs and make subtle revisions and make the songs as good as they could be. We had the opportunity to produce the album like we wanted it and I think it’s our best sounding album for this material especially. I like different elements of each of our albums for different reasons but I think this is the most idealized production we’ve had as far as what we’ve been trying to go for as a band. So yeah I mean it is probably a good entry point especially if you’re fond of stuff outside of just crushing doom metal, and you want something more than just that.
Has the band felt at all too cemented within the doom metal sub-genre over the years? This album in many ways feels like its an evolution of that sub-genre in addition to the band’s sound.
BC: I mean genres are useful in describing something to someone or getting someone interested in it. Like if you tell me ‘check out this new death metal band,’ I have an immediate set of expectations for better or worse, and it comes with all of this baggage which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you tell me to check out this death metal band and it sounds like New Found Glory or something I’m probably going to be like ‘what the f**k?’ I think it’s useful well enough and I don’t mind it but I don’t think that if somebody comes to Pallbearer expecting Candlemass or something, I mean it’s in there we love Candlemass and there’s definitely some of it in our music but it’s not the main thing. It’s part of an overall stew of influences.
It was easier to call us ‘doom’ 15 years ago when we started as a band because that’s closer to the main thing that we were operating in, but even back then we were trying to introduce other influences. From day one we never intended to be like a puritanical by the book doom metal band. Some people think that’s all we were and that we’ve changed but really just time has gone on and we’ve made more albums, but our plan was always to do this kind of stuff, we always planned to evolve and we’ll continue to I’m sure.
