Interview by Kris Peters
Knoxville deathcore outfit Whitechapel have spent too long locked down allowing the creative juices to flow and are set to explode with the release of their ninth studio album Hymns In Dissonance via Metal Blade on March 7.
While Hymns In Dissonance follows 2021’s Kin chronologically, the new album is somewhat of a sequel to This Is Exile thematically, the three-word title Hymns In Dissonance representing that correlation. The band started composing the new album at guitarist Zach Householder’s studio in June of 2023, following their headlining tour for The Valley. The collective stuck to a strict weekday schedule, the structure allowing for maximum creativity and minimum burnout. Householder also produced Hymns In Dissonance, which allowed the musicians to seamlessly switch gears from preproduction to recording the full album without skipping a beat.
While it seems like a long wait for fans of the band, Hymns Of Dissonance is an ode to the past while taking strides into the future, promising to more than satisfy the musical hunger of long-term fans without alienating those picked up along the way.
Vocalist Phil Bozeman joined HEAVY to fill us in.
"For fans that discovered us within the past couple of years, it will probably be a bit of a newer sound for them," he measured when asked about the sonic intensity of Hymns In Dissonance. "But for people who have followed us for longer than that - from the early days - it's gonna be… it's gonna be familiar territory for sure."
We press Bozeman on that notion and ask if the album's musical direction is something the band sits and discusses in the creative process.
"Being in a band it's very…" he paused, searching for the right way to express himself. "Things come in waves. We're very inspired by a lot of different types of music, a lot of it being hard, death metal and stuff like that, but I think that we were all just having that itch to write something really heavy and extreme again. This is the 40-year-old version of us coming up with that instead of the young kid version, the 21-year-old version of it."
In the full interview Phil further discusses the musical nature of Hymns In Dissonance, the writing process which involved working to a schedule, how he personally defines heaviness in music in the modern age, the decreasing universal focus on having to get a flow to your albums due to streaming and the current trend of singles over albums, the lyrical thread of the album and the central characters, road testing the music live and more.
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