Interview with Matt Moss from Slugdge

The genre of metal contains a great variety of lyrical topics. Black metal tends to focus on darker stuff, such as death, Satan, winter, Satan, human sacrifice, and Satan. Death metal has lots of focus on gore, ripping people asunder, using their opened torsos as latrines and so on. But what do you do when you when you don’t want to write about any of that? What if every damn topic has been done before? Well, then you write about... slugs.  

At first look, you may think this is some sort of a fucking joke. “How the hell can anyone write music about slugs? This is going to be shit.” I know, because I was saying the same thing when I was first introduced to Slugdge, a blackened sludge metal band from Lancashire, England. But, Slugdge is anything but a gimmick. Conceived in 2012, Slugdge is the work of two guys, Kev Pearson (guitars) & Matt Moss (Vocals), who worked together in Tower of Wankers & Call to Arms prior to create the maniacal story of cosmic slugs invading the Earth and making all of mankind their collective bitches.

Yes, Slugdge makes it clear from the first notes of their debut album, ‘Born of Slime’, that these gastropods mean business. With a refreshing, thick and aggressive style of extreme metal, the invasion and twisted lore of Mollusca’s following slithers in your mind with the intention to linger. Characterized by complex riffs and pounding, poly rhythmic drumming, the band immediately showcase their own unique brand of extreme metal. Violent and ominous guitars impose with a wall of sonorous force, backed by heavy torrents of blast beats. They provide the perfect backdrop for the-Lovecraftian lyrics about slugs, conducted through Matt’s foreboding growls, screams and clean singing. Yes, the slugs are here, and here to stay.

Matt Moss of Slugdge agreed to speak with Roderick and Jesse about the band and their upcoming album via Skype.

GPN: Hello, Matt. Thanks for sitting down and speaking with us.

Matt Moss: No problem. Let me just get off Facebook! People are bleeping in my ear. (We all collectively closed out our Web Browsers at this point. That damned Facebook.)

GPN: First off, I’d like to say that we here at The Grim Pacific North are huge fans of your band. We honestly weren’t sure what to expect from a band whose lyrical themes involved slugs obliterating mankind. Has that reaction been common as you’ve spoken to fans of your music?

MM: Yeah, neither was I (laughs). Yeah, the, I think the general consensus is that people think we’re a bit of a joke and that’s kind of partly how we started, as well. So, I tend to get a lot of people sort of saying “Oh, you know, I thought this band was going to be completely awful.” I had this one guy in particular, I think he was from Invisible Oranges, he said “I hated the logo. I hated the album art. I hate the stupid lyrical theme. I hate this, that, and the other. But, the music is really good.” But, it had put quite a few people off wanting to listen to it. I don’t know, in a way, that’s not what we wanted. But, we found it quite funny because we just didn’t take it very seriously in the beginning. So, we just thought “let’s just make this the most ridiculous thing possible.” And, it’s not the most ridiculous thing possible, I’m sure. But, it’s pretty weird. So, yeah, we do get that reaction a lot.

GPN: What were the events leading up to the formation of the band? Where did you get the idea?

MM: It’s not really an interesting story, to be honest (laughs). We were sitting around one night and, I think we were listening to The Abominable Iron Sloth and Iron Monkey and other things like that. Y’know, sludge metal bands. And, mostly involving the names of animals. So, we were like “Why has no one made sludge band named ‘Slugdge?’ So, we thought “Alright, let’s make a sludge band called Slugdge.” Anyway, it stayed Sludge Metal for at least… five seconds before we started making Death Metal because that’s all we can do. I mean, you might listen to Sludge Metal or Grindcore, y’know, I’ve been in lots of Grindcore bands and crust punk bands. I mean, I’m a big fan of grindcore and I still find Sludge [Metal] and such, you see, I’ve listen to more Old School Death Metal, do you know what I mean? And, we’ve written more OSDM, and newer stuff, y’know? But, we sort of dabbled in other genres. So, we kind of immediately gravitate towards something and if we’re not comfortable… I wouldn’t be comfortable writing something that was too outside of our zone. Having said that, we always try to work in the other things, as well. So, yeah. That’s how we ended up with the name. It was just a silly suggestion. It is really weird. I still can’t really get over why. When I was younger, we were in bands, and you’re sort of desperate to be like recognized and all that. You get kind of lost in the kind of thing where you think “oh, we have to do this and that. We have to make it like it’s a business.” And, none of that worked. So, we were just like “Ahh, forget it.” You know what I mean? “We’ll just write… anything. We’ll just enjoy ourselves.” And, low and behold, when you do that, that’s what works… Apparently. But, I still can’t believe it. It’s really odd.

GPN: What influenced the story you write about in your albums? What were you guys thinking as you contemplated the idea of Outer Space Slugs enslaving our species?

MM: It’s a combination of our general interests. It’s kind of related to what I was saying about grindcore and crust punk, and a lot of the other bands I’ve been in, as well. It’s all really political. It’s almost like.. A bit preachy? And, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more moderate. Which is not good if you’re in an anarcho-punk band. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about back then. I’m sure some people do. I was just kinda like “Yeah, man. Smash the state.” And, all that other kind of nonsense. And, I just want to try and keep politics out of the music. So, that’s one of the reasons why I descended into almost pure fantasy. And, I say “almost,” because, there’s still a bit of that environmental thing that does go into it. That’s something I’m really avid about. I love animals. I used to breed frogs and snakes.. Never slugs. But, it’s the same thing… sort of. It’s a bit more sort of weird.. And darker. But, it’s relevant, I think. I had completely lost my mind a few years ago… more than a few years ago, it’s been about a decade ago. And, I got put into a loony bin? I don’t really like that term. But, some of the thing I’ve experienced then have definitely, definitely affected the way we write music. I was in there for about three years. And, I got out. And, also, a lot of time from doing band stuff was taken away by that. There’s some degree of bitterness about it. But, not too much.

GPN: Has being in that sort of environment influenced the way you write the songs?

MM: I don’t really know. Aside from it, maybe being a little stranger, I don’t think it particularly enhanced… I wouldn’t say that. There’s plenty of people who write really strange and messed up stuff that are perfectly well balanced and adjusted. I think I was always quite a creative person. I never viewed myself as the… artistic type, really. But, I was always quite creative. And, I think part of that and… something that went wrong in my brain chemistry interacted. And, I think it gave me some very strange hallucinations and dreams and I was behaving in quite a frightening way towards the people who were around me. Obviously, if I was in there for that long, it was quite a serious bout of psychosis. I think the creativity had a part in it happening. And, I think if it hadn’t of happened, I might still be the same. But, there are definitely parts of it because, y’know, I don’t believe in necessary suffering. But, I think when people suffer in some way it can make you stronger in other way. Like the old Nietzsche thing “what doesn’t kill you makes your stronger.” So, I think it gave me a lot of time to work… and think about weird stuff. I watched a lot of documentaries on space and animals and I combined those two things. So, it does in some ways and not really in others.

GPN:Who… or should I say… What is Mollusca? Praise be...

MM: Obviously, there’s a lot of Lovecraftian… stuff in our lyrics. And, one of my favorite characters from that is Azathoth… the blind idiot god. The other ones I know are Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu, obviously. Particularly, with the Azathoth thing, it’s sort of the “Demon Sultan,” the chaos and the void and all that other kind of stuff. It sleeps at the center of reality and they bang drums and blow on flutes to keep it in slumber otherwise if it were to come alive, it would destroy all of the universe. So, it’s kinda based on that. But, also, sort of based on my own weird ideas about maybe the universe is like… The way it started is I thought of the multiverse and how it’s all sort of broken up into little bubbles in my mind anyway. This is partly the insanity speaking. I thought well, why would anyone create a universe? You know, how people always say about God and such, like “where does he come from?” Well, I think “Why would anyone create a universe?” If it’s not for vanity then what is it for? If I was going to do it, it would be so that I could see lots of things. You know, sort of milling around so I can think “Oh, I’ve done that. Aren’t I great?” So, that can’t be it. So, what’s the other thing? I thought, “Well, it needs it to survive somehow.” It’s a life support system. Similar to how we grow food in a field. 

Mollusca is like a giant harvester of the cosmos. And, each universe is like a head of corn or lettuce. Whatever you’re growing. And, it waits until they’re ripe enough and it mulls over them and destroys them. It exists so that he can carry on. There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve written into it. Like, he sung the universe into existence, the vibrating strings, the vibrating waves of reality. To be honest, a lot of it is an ode to Lovecraft. It’s quite vague. There’s a lot of characters thrown in here and there. And, there’s a higher, mysterious orange and blue type morality. Obviously, if you’ve listened to us long enough, there’s a lot of tropes. A lot of tropes about the music. Death Metal particularly, with the lame pun titles. A lot of the riffs we come up with are usually based on something someone else has done. I think that’s how we got to where we’ve gotten to. Humanity has sort of kept building on top of the shoulders of other people. Same with the music and with the ideas of the lyrics, as well. There’s a certain bombastic kind of grandiloquent way of speaking Death Metal English. I think it was Invisible Oranges that did an article on that. The whole “cyclopean, batrachian” you know using words like that. Which is sort of in my vocabulary now. But, I perhaps wouldn’t go around saying something is “brobdingnagian” or anything. It’s just not how people speak. In Death Metal, I think it’s one of the things I love about that kind of music. It’s sort of a lot of these really extreme bands that tend to be really heavy on the objectives and stuff. 

I’m sorry, I go on tangents. What was the question again? 

...MOLLUSCA, that’s right. Sorry, I ramble a lot. So, Mollusca is a plot device… that’s what I’m trying to say. When Mollusca has become in mine and Kev’s life, it seems that, for me, because I was raised as a Catholic, I’m not now, but it’s kind of like that there were a lot of failing of Catholicism for me. I’m not an Atheist Atheist. I’m more Agnostic because , no one can really know. I like to try and put my own philosophy on things. And, a lot of the philosophy is mostly about a sort of stoicism. How we just suffer tremendously in the universe. And, it’s like making a joke about it as well. Because, for example, when we were doing Gastronomicon, I got very seriously ill with some kind of virus. At one point they thought I might have cancer. I was really, violently ill. But, all the time that it was happening, it was sort of cheering me up a lot because me and Kev would talk. And, I’ll say “Ugh, I wonder why Mollusca is doing this to me. He must be trying to tell me something. I must have… we must be doing something wrong with the music.” And, Kev just sort of looked at me with an eyebrow raised. It was a way of saying “this is really horrible.” But it really doesn’t matter. All that really mattered to me at that time was finishing that album. 

Then when that came out, not really many people have heard of us. But, it was a very personal thing. I just wanted to finish it. At one point, I thought I wasn’t going to survive. I told Kev “We’ll do one more album and then we’ll finish.” So, Dim and Slimeridden Kingdoms was supposed to be the last album. Mollusca was a device in my own life, as well. It’s not real, but I’m going to keep talking about him like he’s real, anyway. And, we just drive people absolutely mad with that. Honestly, it helps. He’s not a very nice god. But, he move in mysterious ways. It like, if L. Ron Hubbard could make a religion off of something that’s clearly science fiction, why not Mollusca? I follow him. And, he’s entirely made up. Who knows, if you pray enough, he might come into being. We don’t know how anything works. It’s Mollusca’s will.

GPN: Is the outlook bleak for mankind as Slugdge’s albums continue to be released? Do we have any sort of defense against the slugs ravishing our planet?

MM: Uhhhh…. Yeah. I don’t know whether I should go into it… I really upset somebody with this. My friend from Bulgaria, he’s a true Black Metal fan, you know second-wave. And, he was like “I really like the lyrics off the first album. But, these new lyrics… the ones you do now. There’s too much hope.” I tend to focus on collectivism, and I always have. I don’t want to say socialism, because I’m not. But, it’s kind of the idea being that… I’m really into the Fermi Paradox kind of stuff and why are there are no other aliens. And, all the other sort of explanations as to why that might happen. And, obviously, the most common ones are, the civilizations on Earth or on any planet very, very rarely unite. Very rarely get to the stars or, they make machines that wipe them out because they run before they can crawl, so to speak, the berserker hypothesis. So, I tend to focus a lot about collectivism. Slugs are collectivists. This kind of idea that we need to unite as a planet, like you look at Star Wars or Star Trek, you never get these planets full of fragmented nations. And, if you do, they’re primitive. So, that’s the idea. Encourage, underneath it, a sort of message of unity. You have to unify if you want to get anywhere. You have to set aside your differences. But, that’s not entirely it, obviously, because there’s still a lot of misanthropy. There’s still a lot of the old primitivist in me that says, “What about runoff? What about climate change? You’re going to destroy the planet. And, when you do, there’s only going to be slugs left.” I read that somewhere, apparently, that during the end of days, all there’s going to be is just little, horrible, slimy… well, I suppose in a way, we all started as slime. And, so we’re all probably going to end as slime, as well. Hopefully not from nuclear bombs, or anything like that. Hopefully, from a slug based armageddon.

GPN: Listening to some of the lyrics you have written, I feel there is a deeper meaning than what appears on the surface. Do the lyrics for your songs have some sort of relevance to social issues affecting the world today? (He was given an example from the song “Eyehatesalt” off of Born of Slime that I felt touched upon Nuclear War.)

MM: It is a bit. To be fair, if you’re in a crust punk or anarcho-punk band, it’s like “Do you want to talk about conventional war or nuclear war?” Those are your options. There is a bit of it in that. There are really songs, like “Lettuce Pray” and “Slime Wave Zero” off Gastronomicon in particular that are really, intensely from an anarcho-primitivist perspective. And, I’m not an anarcho-primitivist. But, I have been in the past, in a way. I mean how can you really be that much? Otherwise, I wouldn’t be using any technology. But, with “Slime Wave Zero” I read a book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death and it was the basis that all human civilization is essentially an escape from death. From the pyramids, to the pharaohs and their symbolic immortality and that’s what humanity is sort of hurtling towards where we actually end death. And, that comes up again and again, for instance in “Spore Ensemble.” Death is vital and essential to the cycle. So it’s kind of about human civilization and how it’s zero sum game. Not necessarily with each other between classes. But, with those in the natural world. If you plant a farm somewhere, you have to kill everything that was there before, do you see what I mean? And, so, all of that stuff, that’s the most pervasive thing in our lyrics. “Pellet in the Head”

off of Dim and Slimeridden Kingdoms was also about nuclear weapons and it’s got really deep singing in it. But, that’s also about our own self-destructive habits. There’s a lot of things that go into it. And, I don’t want to sound like it’s overly-intellectual or anything, because it’s really not. It’s kind of just me rambling. But, a lot of it is a philosophical thing. Like, existentialism, which everyone likes when they’re young. The whole “man over common man” or we were a beast, but we have to use our sober logic to rethink our morality. But, yeah, the short answer is yes. There’s some ones about nuclear war and some ones about other stuff. And, they’re more than just that, as well.

GPN: Do you like the way the band’s sound has transformed from Born of Slime to Dim and Slimeridden Kingdoms? Should we expect any other changes with Slugdge’s upcoming album?

MM: Uhh.. yeah. There’s one major change. And, depending on how much you like Swedish Death Metal, it probably won’t bother people if they don’t. But, it might bother those that do. And, there is a reason for it, the Boss HM-2, you know the sound we have, that… buzz saw, sludgy sound, that’s the Boss HM-2. Dismember and Rotten Sound use it. But, we scrapboxed it. And, the reason we did is because we’ve gone to a more, sort-of slightly sharper sound. It’s a one-trick pony. It doesn’t work very well with more complicated stuff. We’ve got solos in there that are far more complex than we’ve ever done before. We’ve got riffs which are a lot more intricate in the way that they’re played. And, while I do like the Born of Slime approach, the whole “let’s just play some really fat riffs that are thought up within thirty seconds.” Literally, that album took us about three weeks to write. It was very, very quick for an album. And, we put it out the day after we finished it. We’ve gone that with all of them. We put Gastronomicon and Dim and Slimeridden out about ten minutes after we finished writing the album. I had already mixed them and we were recording them on template tracks and I had pre-mixed the entire thing. So, there are problems with them. There was, in particular, with Born of Slime, there was this chain compression issue I had to fix. But, we liked the spontaneity. I don’t really record vocal tracks very much. I’ll do them a couple of times max and leave it the way it is. We don’t auto-tune vocals or anything like that. I’m not a brilliant singer, or anything like that, I just go for it. 

As time’s gone on, we’ve started putting more and more thought into what we’re doing in terms of riff and song structure. It’s not Illud Divinum Insanus. It’s not a complete departure from what were are. It’s more or less exactly the same. Because, I absolutely hate it when bands that I like complete deviate from what they were doing before, I like it to be equal parts of old and new with each development. I think if you try and drastically change the sound of what you are, you’re just going to alienate people and, you’re probably going to upset yourself when you go to listen to it.

The new album isn’t that different. The hardcore Swedish Death Metal people are probably going to be like ‘UGH. The HM-2 is gone.” But, yeah, that might happen. I’m fully expecting anger.

GPN: What can you tell us about the new record?

MM: Because it’s kind of ongoing, I literally worked on it today. I think we’ve got the best song we’ve ever written on there… like ever, I think. But, that’s not up to me to decide. Some people think “Eyehatesalt” is the best some. Someone actually said that to me and it made me just frown because, it’s like “No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the best song.” We’ve made loads of effort since then. You have to not say that. But, it’s entirely subjective. I don’t know how long you’ve followed us. But, we used to just release songs every time we wrote one. With Dim and Slimeridden, we released 75% of songs off of that album and out on Facebook and YouTube for people to listen to before we even released the album. But, because of the record deal, we’re not allowed to do that. Because, we don’t own the songs, Willowtip Records owns the songs. And, that’s fine, because they’ve helped us loads. They paid for stuff and the guy that helps me do it is literally the singer of one of my favorite bands. He’s like “how can I help you?” on Facebook and it’s like, I’m not starstruck. He’s helping us with PR and sorting artists out. One of the guys that does work for Agoraphobic Nosebleed, who are my favorite band, said “Right, I’m going to do you an album cover for your re-release” because we have to do the full package thing. I was like “Wow.” He asked me what I want and I said… “I don’t know.” 

I can’t say what it is, but I gave him a suggestion and he said “Right. I’ll sort it out.” And, the bassist who used to be in Beyond Creation, he contacted me and was like “I want to be in your band.” And, then drummer from The Black Dahlia Murder, as well was like “Can I be in your band?” And, I was just like “Oh my god, what is even happening here?” And, I’m telling these guys.. “Uh.. no?” Which is just insane. The way we work, I would love that, but, he’s in America and we both live in this little backwater village in England. And, it’s just a huge job, And, the way we record is so random, as well. It’s not like we just get all the stuff and just send it away from drum tracking. That was really hard to say no to. It means so much to hear that, though. You’re fans of these guy’s music. And, they’re enthusiastic of your music.

Aside from the developments with Willowtip, not much has changed with the way we’re doing the new album. It’s all exactly the same in terms of the way we write it. Apart from things getting a bit more technical, we’re still in my front room, chilling out, writing music. Which is brilliant. It’s exactly what I wanted. I would love to do shows and stuff. But, for reasons I’ve stated before, about my health, that’s not really in the foreseeable future, unfortunately. But, maybe one day. Sorry, I’m being really vague about the new album. In a way I kind of have to.

GPN: So, you guys have released all three albums independently. And recently you signed with Willowtip Records. Has being signed changed the dynamic of the band at all? Do you feel that working with a label will make things easier for you guys as your progress?

MM: Yeah, it’s made it easier. Jason (Tipton), the guy who runs the label, I was a real pain when he contacted me. I was like “I need to know everything. I need to know what’s going to change, what you’re going to own, everything.” I was quite distrustful with the music industry. But, they’ve been really, really good to us. They said that there is no time obligation. They signed us for a two album deal. They don’t pressure us, there’s no deadline. We just make it the best we can possibly make it. They told us we can make it the way we’ve made the previous ones, if we wanted to. That’s all great. They’ve given me people that will help me with whatever I need… They’ve given me money (laughs) which is nice. I’m quite a poor person, well, not in terms of world standards. But, I’m not well off. I couldn’t afford certain things. But, now I’ve been able to get certain things. It’s been a great help.

But, in terms of it changing things, no, I don’t think it will change the way we do it. I’d love to have that experience of, I’ve been in a recording studio before, but a proper recording studio where everyone is waiting on us hand and foot. That would be brilliant. It’s death metal. So, I don’t really expect something like that. And, I certainly don’t expect to make any money, realistically, from it. I’m keeping it quite grounded in terms of the way I feel about approaching it. So, in short, no, it’s not really changed anything in the way we write.

GPN: How have you and Kev come to collaborate with each other?

MM: Uhhhh, That’s a long story. Okay, I’ll keep it sort of short. It’s weird. We’ve been friends for ages. And, we have sort of been in collectives of bands, like a scene, in our home city. Which is mainly punk, hardcore, and grindcore.And, for a time there was a lot of metalcore. But, I was never really into that. Being into the older kind of metal, like Napalm Death and the sort of really extreme scene in England, I wasn’t really into that kind of stuff. But, he’s quite a bit younger, I think at that time, he was 15, when I first met. He came down from Scotland when he first moved. He contacted me on MSN, if you remember that. He said ‘Can I be in your band?” And, I asked him “Can you do something?” He told me he could drum, which was great, because we needed a drummer. So, he came down, and he playing Nile and Decapitated and Morbid Angel. And, we’d jam some Morbid Angel songs and Nile songs and all that. And, he was really good for a 15 year old. He was seriously good. But, then, he smoked an awful lot of weed and I kicked him out of the band. (laughs) I was like “no, you’re just stoned all the time. You can’t do this.” So, I kicked him out of my first band. And, he went off and did his own thing. And, he was doing really well with that. And, I did my own thing, as well. That went on for years. And, then later, after he wasn’t a kid and he’d grown up, and I’d grown up even older, we started properly talking again. And, he kept saying “you know when we used to jam the old Death Metal in the practice room? I was good. We should do that again.” So, long story short, that’s basically how that happened. We came together over music, we split apart, and then we ended up starting a band again.

GPN: Do you feel it is easier to come up with new material as a two-man band in contrast to writing material for prior projects?

MM: I’ve never been in a band before there where I can absolutely work together with everybody. If one person is bringing the mood down, or if they don’t really work with you, it kind of effects everything else. So, I think the more people you have, you’re just exponentially increasing the chances that the band is not going to work. But, that just might be me. I know that some people can really make those bands work. If it was a band full of people like Kev, I mean, we argue all the time, but when it comes to music, it’s completely different. We work really well with that. And, when he writes a riff, I don’t say “ugh.” I’ll tell him if it doesn’t work or if I think it would work. And, if he’s really adamant about it, he’d say “no, trust me” or vice versa. We both write music for the band. He did songs like “Flying Snails” and others where he’ll just completely write that, apart from the vocals. And, I really liked that song. And, then I did “Slime Wave Zero,” I completely wrote that. And, he was like “I hate this song, man. I hate ‘Slime Wave Zero.’ It’s almost like there’s nu-metal bits in it.” But, I told him to trust me and that it needs to go on the album. So, it went on, and some people like that song.

We shouldn’t always just completely say “no” to certain things. But, we’ve come to an agreement better. And, I suppose, when you have four other people like that, then it could totally work. And, it does, obviously, in life. I think it’s like politics, you know. Too many cooks spoil the broth, in a way. Not that they spoil it, a lot of deliberation is required. We’ve written three albums in three years, because, there’s no deliberation. It’s basically a sort of oligarchy, me and him, where we sort of agree on things. And, if there were other people we would disagree more. And, some songs might get scrapped. And, it might not work out as quickly as it does with me and him. So, it’s definitely efficient. And, I know Kev loves his efficiency.

GPN: Is there anything else you would like to add? Any shameless self-promotion?

MM: No, I’m a terrible self-promoter. Anything else I’d like to add that’s not completely insane? I’ve really said all there is to say. It’s very cliché to say, but when you’re going on about how things progressed and people noticing you and stuff like that. It’s not just like MetalSucks, because they were, by no means, the first people to ask about us. Or, Invisible Oranges, or No Clean Singing, although, I know the people that run those things, well sort of. And, they’re all decent people and they’re all really into the music. But, it’s every single writer, reviewer, blogger, and all of the fans that actively search, particularly through Bandcamp. Because, it’s like the old tape trading days. People suggest things to one another. In another era, it would be completely impossible. We wouldn’t have gotten a second look. But, because of people being so adamant that they have to “Praise Mollusca” and all the rest of it. They literally rammed it down people’s throats. And, we’re very grateful for that. I can’t overstate just how important our fans are. But, not just the fans, people like yourselves that write for webzines. I know there’s certain other bands that say “oh, we never needed any of these people.” But, that is totally not the case. Especially not now. And, I think that’s one of the ways that the industry is changing. 

People are coming up out of nowhere because people get behind them. I wasn’t under any illusion that Willowtip contacted us because so many people had written about us or that we were going to be the next big thing. In the past, people would have gone out scouting for people and looking for the next big thing. The fans, people that use the Internet, know for themselves what they want. They find it first. So, I think the industry, in a way, is in second place. It follows up, it reads these things online. They all sit around reading MetalSucks and Invisible Oranges looking for bands. They’re like the new shows. Not that I would wants live shows to stop, I love live music. But, it definitely had changed. We’re not under any sort of illusions for that. And, we’re eternally grateful for people for really getting behind it. Literally, in a tape trading way, like they used to in the old days. But, it’s catapulted into space, if you’d like, with how fast things can happen. I mean, it took three years and people were like “you must sign this band.” It doesn’t matter. We really enjoyed making those three albums. And, we really enjoy the feedback, even the negative. Which is rare, luckily, but it’s still there.

GPN: Once again, we thank you for speaking with us, Matt. We look forward to hearing more from Slugdge as time goes on.

MM: Sorry for all the rambling! It means a lot to me to be able to do stuff like this. I hope the future stuff doesn’t disappoint you terribly.

Willowtip Records: http://www.willowtip.com/home.aspx

Slugdge Bandcamp: https://slugdge.bandcamp.com/

Slugdge Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Slugdge/