If you are reading this and you are fan of Entombed, crust and hardcore. Trap Them might be your favorite new band! The Seattle/New Hampshire/Massachusetts based band fuses together all of the aforementioned elements and the results are stunning. The proof is found on their Séance Prime EP which the folks at Deathwish Inc. released in late 2007. To keep fans satisfied until the release of their next full-length, the band have just released a split 7” with UK grindcore godfathers, Extreme Noise Terror. SMN News recently spoke with Trap Them vocalist, Ryan McKenney about the band’s history and their love for classic Entombed!

 

When you first truly discovered your love for music as a kid, which bands did you really fall for first?

My early favorites were bands I saw in and around the Boston area. I loved Wrecking Crew, Slapshot, Only Living Witness, etc and then I dove deeper and dirtier and fell for bands like Discharge, Napalm Death, Godflesh. Swans was the band that really changed the way I looked at and felt about music.

So the obvious thing about Trap Them would be the sonic similarities between you and classic Entombed. Was this a conscious thing?

Fuck yeah! The sunlight sound is THE sound. I think it was a conscious decision from the start to wear our influences on our sleeve without making ourselves complete doppelgangers.

The material on Séance Prime is more death metal than anything you’ve done before but it also has an almost rock-n-roll feel to it. Do you see yourselves exploring these aspects even further on the next full-length?

We enjoy our d-beats more than our blast beats at this point. With the thousands of grind bands out there, the world has enough blast beats. And honestly, after the new Rotten Sound LP, Cycles, it’s almost pointless to make a record at hyperspeed because that band made a masterpiece that is pretty damn close to untouchable. So to directly answer the question, yes, the new LP will bring rock chocked full of dirt.

“Pulse Mavens” is a bastard of a song! Can you talk about the lyrical stuff going on in that particular track?

I can’t really break the pieces down into separate themes or soapbox banners. Each song has no specific subject. They all deal with everyday desperation, depression and sadism. In other words, we are fucked!

The energy on that song and really, the rest of the newer material is really exciting. It’s like the classic Sunlight Studios (Necrophobic, General Surgery) stuff but livelier. How did Kurt (Ballou, producer of Séance Prime) set you up in the studio to help you achieve such a vibrant recording?

Kurt knew exactly what sound we were going for. Brian (Izzi, guitarist and songwriter) and Kurt spent as much time as needed to concrete the exact tone and feel to replicate what Brian felt was the necessary sound for the music we were making. It’s taken him a few years to piece together his distorted puzzle, but I can speak for all of us when I say it was worth the effort.

You have a new split with Extreme Noise Terror out now and you are going out with Disfear. Do you feel like you have more in common, stylistically, with bands like that than with some of the more straight-up hardcore bands you often share bills with?

We absolutely feel closer to bands such as Disfear and ENT than to most hardcore bands. It has nothing to do with a dislike of hardcore. Most of us, in the band, grew up listening to the genre, but I personally always leaned towards the heavier, dirtier side of music and a lot of the bands didn’t make me feel the same as when I dropped a needle on a crust or punk record. Brian grew up on lots and lots of metal. He was tape trading black metal demos and going to see Entombed back in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. This was what heavy music was to him. I loved punk. I loved crust. So between the two separate paths of music we traveled, we found a common ground, dove into our respective pasts and created the band we’ve always wanted to create.

Who do you consider your contemporaries in terms of sound and vision?

I can tell you bands we collectively enjoy, respect and love working with Rotten Sound, Disfear, Victims, Converge, ENT, Coliseum, and Cursed. There are a lot more. We love what we do and appreciate any bands that feel the same about what they do.

How do you maintain a touring lifestyle financially? How hard is it on you, emotionally speaking? Does the strain wear on you?

You end up selling off alot of your shit to pay rent, bills, etc. Sometimes you luck out and come home with enough to pay for a few things. We’ve all downsized our lives in order to be ready and willing to tour at any moment and there’s nothing that will get in our way. Of course, there are moments when shit gets heavy, but if everything in your life is gravy, you shouldn’t be playing this type of music to begin with.

What kinds of things are you going to get into thematically on the next album?

A little town called Barren Praise….and dead men walking.

Left Hand Path or Clandestine?

Clandestine. This opinion may not reflect the opinion of the rest of the band, but I’m the one doing the interview, so it looks like I get to call this shot.

By Carlos Ramirez

Rate this interview: (5 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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