Blood Incantation's continued ambition and belief in extreme metal as an artform still capable of tearing up musical boundaries has made them one of the primary protagonists of the last decade's underground death metal boom. Their evolution in that decade, from their early demos and Interdimensional Extinction EP to beloved albums Starspawn and Hidden History of the Human Race, has always threatened to take them beyond the usual parameters of the cosmic death metal style they've helped repopularise.

When they released Timewave Zero in 2022, their first full synth kosmiche-styled record, some more conservative fans met it with confusion that will be familiar to any metal band to have tried their hand at anything non-brutal, but Blood Incantation always made clear how it was part of a more holistic vision of the wings of progressive music that make up their spiritual approach, something not confined to a certain set of underground metal tenets but also never at risk of throwing those traits out of the window.

Absolute Elsewhere, their third full-length metal album, is the clear result of that decade of experiments going off like gangbusters. Recorded in Berlin's Hansa Studios where classic works from the likes of David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and Tangerine Dream (whose current bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning also guests on the record) were made and consisting solely of two juggernaut twenty minute plus songs (divided on your streaming platforms into movements titled Tablets), it makes clear how integral metallic riffing remains to this often mightily heavy band, but is now equal parts playing with the tools of progressive rock and seeking to align the ethos of these musical traditions together to broach some broader horizon neither could arrive at on their own. It is the work of a band who could not have made it without those ten plus years of finding their way there, and as such one of the most nuanced and expressive works of progressive metal released this side of the 2000s.

Drummer Isaac Faulk, though no one member of Blood Incantation is really confined to one instrumental discipline, details the creation of this album, their work at Hansa, and the process of taking this mammoth undertaking to the live arena.

Back when Timewave Zero was released and you were releasing a full synth recording, you spoke a lot about how that was a necessary move to unlock more capabilities in your metal recordings going forward. Is Absolute Elsewhere the album you envisioned having in your back pocket when you were making those moves?

Faulk - Absolutely, when we were doing Timewave that was something that we always planned to do, and the whole process of coming up with new ways to express what Blood Incantation is was what Timewave Zero was all about. Coming out of that gave us that feeling of the groundwork being solidified and now we have a lot more tools to work with. When we went into the writing process of Absolute Elsewhere it felt a lot more free and a lot more organically large for us, as far as different influences we felt like we could bring in, different instrumentation, and also just the way we write together as Timewave Zero was completely collaborative with all four of us all the time.

That experience coloured how we went into Absolute Elsewhere. We’re still these guys and we want to do a metal record, but instead of one person coming in and writing every riff of a song, we’d present each other ideas and jam on them together in the rehearsal space. That really did come from Timewave Zero and that broadening of our collective creativity, I would say.

This album comes quite neatly at around the decade mark of the band overall, and through that first decade of output you could really see how you were amassing these different wings of what made up Blood Incantation’s sound, but this album is certainly the most it has been formulated together. Do you feel like this album is a bit of an era stamp on all that groundwork laid?

Faulk - It’s a great point and it does feel very much like that. A lot of what we’ve done up to this point, not just in Blood Incantation but also our other bands, we feel coalesces in this record in a lot of ways. I write a lot of the stuff and so does Paul [Riedl] but we all are participating in it, and we’ve all been playing in various things for over a decade and working towards broadening the horizons of the band. What I would say is that for us this album felt like the beginning of the rest of the story. At least in my mind it felt very much like us finding our footing. On the Hidden History record for example we were really putting as much as we could into that and I felt it was a stepping stone for what we could do, but that being said what comes next is even more exciting for us because all these steps we’ve taken on this record, such as bringing in Nicklas [Malmqvist] from Hällas doing synths and he’s now on tour with us as well, it really spices up the brew of what the band is about. Every band especially in the beginning exists as carrying their influences very tightly or having set out to be a certain sort of thing, and going forward for us it’s like Blood Incantation can be Blood Incantation and what it wants to be. My favourite bands are always those bands that take that chance and are vulnerable with themselves, and you can say that parts sound like this or that but it has a unique identity.

On this record you are exclusively writing over twenty minute, multi-movement songs that veer away from pure death metal a lot more, and one of the key elements must be the transitions and allowing the structures of the songs blending these different styles to make sense together. What’s your perspective on that and how you approached that connective tissue?

Faulk - Going into the writing process is a very intense experience for this band because of that very reason. We try to hone in and spend a lot of time, maybe more time than even our other bands would do, and for this band it’s very important to us that every piece feels like it works and that it serves the whole. It’s not about individual parts being flashy and cool but every moment being important. It does mean the writing sessions and the demoing is extremely intensive. When we went into this record the first pieces that came together were The Stargate which I wrote a lot of the stuff for, and the third movement were the first riffs that were written for it that set the vibe of what we were going to be going for. I was then working on part one, and organically I started to feel these themes coming into each part that made it feel like to me to be one thing. It needs to feel like a story where you are going from point A to point B, where even though it’s not written like a verse-chorus pop song it still has these ideas of themes and textures that carry through.

Those transitions are the moments where we meticulously look at them and they have changed over time even from my first drafts and demos, where with the four of us we hammered it out organically in the practice space to make it feel that way. As the drummer, I always see the rhythm section and a lot of the synths as being the stepping stones to make that work. There are bands who move all over the place and that’s the point, but for us it’s very important to have the storyline to carry the listener across that twenty minutes.

I think a great example of this is in Edge of Sanity’s record Crimson, which is a huge influence on me since the beginnings of the band, a forty-minute record which is one song and it goes through all these moods but it doesn’t feel like it’s all slapped together.

You tracked this once again with Arthur Rizk who is such a prolific producer, but the amount of progressive elements and different textures on this might go beyond what kind of records people would associate with him. How key a collaborater was he in helping you wrangle all this together?

Faulk - Extremely important, and one thing I will say about Arthur is he has such a vast knowledge and appreciation for different styles outside of heavy music, which allows for him to have that nuanced view and that soft touch for stuff like that. Obviously the writing process is a huge part but definitely that production and his attention to detail to use of mics and of room mics specifically, for example when it goes softer using more room mics while when it goes heavy using more close mics on the drums, and utilising every part of Hansa Studios. We really used every room, all the board gear they have, the reverbs and space echoes. I often think of those prog records of the 70s where you have all these elements going on and half of the job is in the mixing.

We originally thought we’d be done mixing by November of last year but he was still working on the mix into the beginning of this year pretty much, which is a testament to him really spending the time and all the tracks that he had to work through and make them actually sound pleasant. If you’re a metalhead there’s those parts and if you’re a prog/psych fan there’s those parts, but what I appreciate about what Arthur did is that he doesn’t make the heavy parts actually harsh to the ears but instead it’s presented in the same way as the progressive parts are so it doesn’t actually feel like it’s switching between two things. He did a great job of making it feel of one totality which is a daunting task, for sure.

With working at Hansa Studios in Berlin which has produced works from bands such as Tangerine Dream and Depeche Mode who are in some way integral to the lineage your band sits in, what were the actual concrete differences of things you were able to access there you may not have closer to home?

Faulk - There is the metaphysical idea of the energy but just the physical rooms we recorded the drums or the marble room where we recorded the acoustic guitars add a physical nature to the sound you wouldn’t get in any other place. Then there’s the board gear, the access to the instruments they had like the piano that David Bowie played on the Berlin trilogy, and the mics too like we used an actual mic that was used on Tangerine Dream’s Force Majeure. It’s not just because they were used on that record but also because they had that tone and that sound that a lot of our favourite records have. I can think of Fenriz [of Darkthrone] actually talking about this that when you listen to 70s drum sound it just has a different timbre to it, and it is hard to capture that. For us, it wasn’t necessarily about being retro but mixing that with that metallic knowledge that Arthur has, and blending these worlds in a way that maybe we haven’t heard yet.

For example, we did the drums onto tape first, and then Arthur came up with this idea to utilise the tape and the digital DAW at the same time so that he was able to record the drums onto tape with me being able to play with the other guys in the room live, as for example I really do think that cymbals specifically on tape just sound better because they don’t have that harshness in the higher frequency, and then he was able to get that onto the Pro Tools DAW and record everything on top of it. There are triggered kick drums on there and sampled stuff but it’s blended with this organic tape saturated drum sound, and that gives it a warmness and also that upfront heaviness we were really looking for.

Right now you’re on the tour bus and are playing this record every night, and it’s a record with a lot of different elements to replicate live. How are you finding that the material is shaping up and changing for you now you’re past the stage of assembling it and at the stage of performing it?

Faulk - I will tell you we thought the exact same thing after we finished the record, asking how were we going to do that, but that’s always been an exciting thing for Blood Incantation. We always go into the studio trying to make the best record we can, and then figure out how to play it the best live, but the difference being that on both Starspawn and Hidden History a couple of those songs we had performed live before we ever went into the studio so we already had a good idea of that, and the other difference being on this record at Hansa we really said that nothing was off the table, so we did a lot of overdubs and other things that we weren’t even thinking of how we’d do it live.

Going into the live setting, bringing in a keyboardist specifically to play the synth parts was imperative. I do a lot of the synth stuff on the Wayfarer records and we use backing tracks for that, so no shade to that at all, but for this record specifically there are synth solos that are so prominent that it would be a disservice to the material to do that. Having Nicklas even come to the studio was a big ask and he obliged and seems to have enjoyed it, and so going forward we really thought he would add a lot to the tour and we’re really hoping to continue with him because he’s a great human and an incredible player. Bringing that into the live setting was very, very important to realising the album, and every time we’ve played the album it’s gotten better.

Tablet II of The Message features a full blown melodic progressive rock song in there at the heart of this wider extreme metal composition, and that is really unlike anything on prior Blood Incantation albums. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of that section?

Faulk - Absolutely, so Paul does all of the vocals on the record and he really stepped up to take on this role. He’d done backing vocal type stuff on our previous records but this is the first time we really committed all out. That’s one of the parts that really was the four of us working on it because when it moves into Tablet II we call it a kind of Gentle Giant/King Crimson part, and then it goes heavy before moving to that open, big, Floydian space rock moment on the record, and that riff was originally a little faster but we felt it was too similar to other things we do and so we worked it out together.

When we got to the studio and we got Nicklas in there, he put all of that organ there on the spot and the psychedelic build-up part where he does the Fender Rhodes was a very organic jam that came together in the studio. It has chords we wouldn’t normally use, and of course the singing, and so now talking about presenting it live Nicklas and Paul are doing those parts together with the harmonies. That moment is a crucial thing we knew we had to step up to present that live.

There’s a new sense of climactic emotional transcendence on the record, with sections like the ending of The Message, and it’s actually euphoric in a way Blood Incantation hasn’t normally been associated with. What brought you to bringing that sense of positivity through the extremity?

Faulk - All four of us have been in black metal bands at one point or another, Stormkeep, Velnias, Natürgeist, etcetera, so to us it’s hard for me to even call it a death metal record because on this record the presence of that epic, black metal, maybe even just calling it progressive extreme metal feeling in that later Emperor-sense of building these extreme genres together to create something.

When you put what maybe what is a death metal riff and then add mellotron keyboards to it that’s exciting to us how it changes the feeling. I think back to even on Altars of Madness [by Morbid Angel] there are moments of that melodic extremity that I think can carry forward to bands like Opeth and Emperor, and carrying that grandeur of it all. Actually playing that last riff on The Message live just feels like a moment to us, where I can see it in the crowd people getting excited and feeling that euphoria and catharsis. That’s why I got into extreme metal in the first place, that it holds that unique emotional, spiritual, or metaphysical, whatever you wanna call it experience of transcending being just a person and becoming part of the bigger picture.

To totally switch gears, the sample in The Stargate is from the Italian horror movie Contamination, right?

Faulk - Yes! A deep cut. There’s a funny story there because we’ve used samples from films and interviews before, and this was one that Paul discovered because of a bootlegged press for the Goblin soundtrack for the movie. This section from the movie was there and the part really worked because it combines this moment which is the Thorsten [Quaeschning] from Tangerine Dream moment on the record, with what we’ve done in the past with sampling, but interestingly we did actually try to get fair licensing for the sample and legally use it on our record, and there’s actually nobody who owns the rights to this anymore and there was no one to find. It’s such a deep cut kinda in limbo out there, but we were very excited to have it.

What I love about this band is that we have a fun relationship back and forth with our fans because they go searching for this stuff, and these parts lend themselves to people trying to dig in and an immersive experience that maybe a lot of people don’t get from media these days because a lot of stuff is thought out as consumerist content. For us, the audience deserves to have an intricate experience with their art and discovery.

It’s been an insane year not just for Blood Incantation but you all collectively with your different projects, going back just over twelve months to the Wayfarer album, then the Spectral Voice album and the Black Curse album in 2024, so this little collective for want of a better words of bands and artists that exists in Denver has really gone into overdrive. Do you guys ever sleep?

Faulk - I ask myself that frequently! Imposter syndrome comes along every once in a while and you ask if we’re actually doing something good, but it’s very exciting now. I think to back when I was in high school getting into bands and reading about Emperor or Opeth or Dimmu Borgir and seeing that they were all in other bands and were around my age at the time they were starting out. I feel very fortunate and lucky that I’ve been able to find the people to do that with, and also have people in my corner that support me, so we have this foundation of people and all the people I’m in bands with share that.

We’ve been doing it for so many years that now we have created a situation where every member of our bands has a creative outlet in some way. Maybe one band is more writing-heavy from one member than another band, and so we have this ability to switch gears around who has the thing to express at the time. It’s very democratic and it’s very fulfilling. Being now in this position where in Blood Incantation we’ve really only been doing music since COVID, we put all our chips in one corner and said that music is what we want to do, we really hope that with this new record we can go to places we’ve never been.

The other part of it is that we are terminally bored with things so we always have something else new to work on. I’m almost done writing a new Stormkeep record already, and we’re keeping ourselves busy so we don’t go insane.

See the remaining dates of the Absolute ElseTour below. The latest album from Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere, is currently available via Century Media Records - HERE