When talking with Khemmis guitarist Ben Hutcherson, it’s immediately evident how exuberant and excited he is about the Denver doom metal band’s self-titled fifth studio album.

Since their bombastic debut Absolution in 2015, Khemmis has been one of the modern torchbearers of modern heavy metal. Their classic influences merge with dour, epic doom in a conjuration of ear-catching harmonies and guitar heroics, all wrapped in dark fantasy trims.

Khemmis marks a bit of a departure for the band, evident by the complete visual change in the album’s art. But it’s also a record that came together from a desire of gratitude and to celebrate heavy metal, rather than mine their own suffering for the sake of art.

Hutcherson talks to Knofest about turning the page from Deceiver to Khemmis, why the wanted to go in a different visual direction, and how much he’s grateful for the communal love his bandmates – vocalist guitarist Phil Pendergast, drummer Zach Coleman, and bassist David Small – share for each other, and the life heavy metal allows him to lead.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

KNOTFEST: Throughout Khemmis, it sounds like the band’s confidence is sky high. Everything seems even more bombastic and epic. How did you approach creating the album?

Ben Hutcherson: So far the response has been truly humbling, and it seems like lots of people are finding lots of things that resonate with them with this record.

We set out not just to write another album, but to write the kind of record that represents what we find ourselves seeking when we're searching for music to listen to. If someone else had written and recorded this album and we heard it, would we be stoked? And if the answer is yes, that's all we can ever do.

It seems like the horrors of existence are heightened to such an absurd extent that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and defeated. If I want to fight back against that, I want to find art that gives me a sense of joy, a sense of hope and energizes me.

 

That's not just a me thing, that's an all of us thing. We talked about that even before we had the first song together: to celebrate heavy metal, because it feels like there are so few things in this world worth celebrating.

Because of heavy metal, I have my best friends in the whole world. I've gotten to travel this world and do all these cool things. It would be so disingenuous of me to then put out music that didn't seem rife with gratitude for that.

Knowing that sense of joy and unabashed love of heavy metal has come through to the listeners… We want it to be palpable on every level. It has to be immediate and it has to be visceral and it has to be compelling. I feel that, right? If 10% of this comes across to other people then we've done something that we should be insanely proud of.

At that point, we just have to have the confidence in ourselves and the faith in our fans, new and old, that they'll find something to hold on to.

You mentioned joy several times. This album in a lot of ways feels like the opposite of ‘Deceiver’, which the band nearly didn’t survive to make. Why does this record fill you with such happiness and joy?

BH: I think there are so many things that we as metal fans are hesitant to talk about. Joy is certainly one. Gratitude is one. Fun is one. It's like we only let people in the Party Thrash sub-genre use the word fun and the rest of us are allergic to it.

Fun doesn't mean not taking it seriously. It doesn't mean not showing reverence for what we do, but it means naming it for what it is. No one's going to accuse Judas Priest for not taking what they do seriously, but they don't take themselves so seriously that they fail to acknowledge what they are. That can be a difficult balance.

Deceiver in many ways was the apex of us mining our own suffering and trauma for creative inspiration. I don't say that with any amount of regret or anything. I don't have any complicated feelings around that. That's what we've always done: find catharsis through our own lyrics and our music. The lead up certainly connected to lockdown and being isolated from one another, but also having to step back from a lot of facets of our lives and ask ourselves, ‘Do these things that we do in our lives serve an actual purpose?’

Recording it felt cathartic and felt very much like exercising a whole bunch of demons. The first time I held the physical copy of it in my hands felt like triumph enough. If everybody hated the album, if it sold zero copies, I didn't give a shit because by holding that album in my hands, it was a manifestation of our individual and collective decision to remain in this world; to continue to do the things that fill us with light.

 

We knew there wasn't a step beyond that for exploring that facet of our lives. It would just be being miserable for the sake of being miserable, which is very much antithetical to how I think about art and its relationship to our lives. 

That's the other aspect that dovetails into the creation of Khemmis, is that we find ourselves with this newfound gratitude that we are able to do this stuff together. We love each other. We love spending time together. These guys are my brothers. I can take that and use that to bolster myself against the encroaching darkness. It doesn't stop everything else from being awful. It doesn't change the nature of existence. The same way that putting this album out doesn't solve global hunger or eliminate racial inequality.

But rather than singing about our own struggles with depression and anxiety or fantasizing about death and substance abuse disorder, now it's all that stuff but in a fictional setting. It's somebody else's concern. This other guy, he made a bargain with a demonic force to harness the harmony of the spheres and to channel into his artistic output. Maybe it's a metaphor for what we do, but it's not initially intended as such. It is purely fictive songwriting.

And my God, if you can't find joy in hearing someone singing about Faustian bargains and the horrors that that engenders in one's heart and soul. What are you doing with your life?

A big change in this album is the move from Sam Turner’s album art to Christopher Remmers’ ‘mythical realism’ style. What was behind that decision?

BH: Change really is at the heart of it. We knew that we would be doing the music a disservice if we didn't holistically embrace our belief that this album is a statement. It’s a statement about being a four piece again and it’s a statement about our love of heavy metal.

It's certainly not a reflection of Sam. In fact, Sam still works for us. He just did a new T-shirt design and a new stage banner design for us. Sam’s amazing. His art style is undeniably connected to us, and it just is singular. We knew we couldn't just have someone who did art like Sam.

We really fell ass backwards into working with Christopher Remmers. Phil was in Bellingham, just walking down the street, saw this small art gallery and was just blown away. Phil, being Phil, just walked in and introduced himself to this guy.

He's never done an album cover and he was so on board, and for it to be collaborative. He and Phil wound up going into the woods and collecting old dead pieces of wood and weird mushrooms and lots of dirt and rocks and shit to create the setup for the reference photos that he took to then use to paint the cover. In fact, his wife modeled the Warrior Queen.

The finished product is so satisfying because it is visually distinct, but we're not trying to disconnect ourselves from our entire body of work. In fact, I think a fun thing for fans is to see how many of these little Easter eggs you can find. That bird might look familiar if you look closely enough. Lots of little things to really let the album cover signal that we're not getting so far away from what we've done before.

It’s also us owning who we are in a way that is complete, unabashed, and feels like a reconnection to the feelings that we had when we started this band. Does it still feel powerful, the way we think heavy metal should? And the answer is yes.

For the same reason that we wound up with a self-titled album – because once we realized that was an option, we realized it was the only option – the same is true of the album art. It had to be something that was both grander, but not disconnected from the world that we've been building.

That said, what do you think were the biggest differences in writing, recording, and fleshing this album out? What did you try and do on this album that wasn’t done on Deceiver?

BH: We set out with a couple of parameters with the acknowledgement that if we started working within these guidelines and it felt contrived, we’d throw it away and we do something else.

I think it was Zach that said we wanted an album full of bangers. We wanted to write relatively shorter songs, more than six songs on an album and to have all of the songs feel like they could translate live. If you know our stuff or you don't know our stuff, it lands.

That means prioritizing an immediacy to it. Not being precious about subtle, clever songwriting. At the end of the day, we want big choruses, killer drum fills, and guitar and bass lines that people air along to.

 

If we're going to celebrate the capital H, capital M Heavy Metal that fills our hearts, then we’ve got to do it unabashedly. It's going to be riff-forward, but not at the sake of undermining the power of songs as compositions. Every part needs to contribute to the whole of the song. Every part needs to be something that someone can hold on to and say, ‘that's my favorite part of the song.’ Nothing should feel like filler.

I think this is maybe the best entry point for people. Especially for people who maybe aren't as into the more demanding slow and low. Do you have 14 minutes for the song Hunted? Not everybody does. But you'll get a little glimpse into what we've always been about. Especially for younger people who maybe don't have the patience for slower stuff yet. Or maybe haven't been broken by life as much to really have an appreciation for Doom.

The other big difference for us is, I mean, this is our speed metal opus, baby! We’re cracking 140 bpms on some of these songs!

What did David Small bring to this record as the “newest” member.

BH: So many things! I've been fortunate to play music with Dave for quite some time now. He and I also play in a death metal band called Glacial Tomb together, so I already knew he was a ripper.

Dave comes in with some riffs and, although I already expected them to be rad, I was still pleasantly surprised at how much he understood the heart of the band. That's a very tricky thing to navigate – to even understand on a surface level –  what the emotional and technical vocabulary is of a band. From that first batch of riffs, 50 to 80 percent of the song “Tomb of Roses” was there.

No matter who brings in ideas, it's still got to go through the Khemmis machine. It's put through our collective filters and it comes out as something different and grander than however it was originally envisioned. But it was so easy to look at those riffs and be like, this is it, he's speaking the right language.

Then the bass playing on the album! I played bass on the last album out of necessity. To have someone that is a musician in the fullest sense, is a true master at his craft, find these really creative ways to shift between very rhythmic playing but also filling out the melodies.

Dave's phrasing is so interesting. It fills in cracks that we didn't even know were there and adds this extra dimension to the storytelling. Whether it's the bass solo over the clean section in “Beneath the Scythe” or that little lead break towards the beginning of Invocation of the Dreamer. It’s a really satisfying way to subvert listener expectations.

In metal, the bass always gets overlooked. Either the cat is just totally locked in on what they're doing with the drums, or it takes someone being Steve DiGorgio levels of fretless-bass wizardry for people to notice. The bass can occupy both of those worlds on the same record.

 

Dave Otero has produced every album for you. Why keep going back to him?

BH: Much like how bass players tend to get sort of overlooked, I think producers get overlooked because a lot of people don't understand that producing bands is not the same thing as engineering bands. Dave is great at all of those things, but producing bands necessitates understanding what the heart of the band is, in some cases even if the band themselves don't.

When we started our mission statement was to write songs that we can play live. That was it. There was no thought beyond that. The first time Dave heard “The Bereaved” he saw something in the heart of the band. Maybe we were aware of it, but we didn't know that's where we were going in terms of emotional vulnerability and this particular melodic language on the guitar.

Over the years his ability has pushed us to think about things in ways that we hadn't before. You can't overstate the value of a fresh set of ears on something you've been working on for months or years. No matter how much you try to stay zoomed out, you're going to miss something.

Since you’ve been playing guitar most of your life now, how do you measure progress? Your last 10 years of playing are probably way different than your first 10 years. What are things you feel you’ve gotten better at?

BH: Big picture, understanding my body and understanding how to just approach the instrument in a more sustainable way. I didn't practice regularly with a metronome until I was in my mid 30s. I didn't warm up regularly before shows until my mid-30s. Now I have a very strict warm up routine vocally and on the guitar, because I want to take care of myself. I want this to last.

I injured both of my wrists five years ago picking up an amp in a really stupid way. I had dozens of microfractures in the tendons running down my forearms, up along the backside of both my hands. The doctor said you just have to wait. There's no fast track. We don't want to do surgery, because you won't do anything for a year. It took about six months for the healing to really get underway.

The specialist I saw said, ‘Think about every bit of movement that you do. Is there a safer, better way to do this?’ I even relearned how to hold a pick. I started checking out a bunch of resources, videos, books, everything that I could. Shout out to Ben Eller, who had a lot of good videos on the ergonomics of guitar playing. Relearning how to position my fret hand and being cognizant of how things feel in my body.

 

There were many months where I was demonstrably the worst guitar player I'd been since I was a kid. All the things that I could do I couldn't do anymore, because I was having to relearn the basics. But what I found was that the ceiling for my speed, my precision, and in turn my creativity was so much higher when my body wasn't getting in the way.

I don't want to romanticize hurting myself through a really dumb thing, but it was fortuitous that that happened because now I'm so much more in touch with how every aspect of the instrument feels. All of those things contribute to me having a better ability to take the abstract ideas in my brain and in my heart and channel them through my fingertips in ways that feel like they represent what I'm trying to get across.

Also, the older I get, the better I am about being patient with things, like learning a new lick, developing a new technique, or writing a new song. Being willing to give it time, whether it's five minutes or an hour or a week, is something that has taken a lot of work to incorporate into my practice as a musician. It pays dividends to not feel like it's got to be now or never.

What do you want people to take away from this record?

BH: If anything that we've ever done resonates with people, that's freaking amazing.

If I could go back and tell the Ben that picked up the guitar in a trailer in Mississippi that one day he would get to have all these experiences, it would just blow my brain completely out of my skull. I just wouldn't have been able to process it.

It's a thing that I – and we collectively – have never taken for granted and will never take for granted. That the stuff that we do means stuff to other people. What a true blessing. How fortunate are we to get to do that. And to get to do that without any sleeves! I'm not wearing sleeves right now, unshackle your shoulders!

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Khemmis is available now via Nuclear Records. Don’t miss them on tour with Monolord starting August, 27 in Chicago.See a confirmed list of dates and cities below. Get the album - HERE