Arkansas four-piece Pallbearer are coming Down Under, and bassist Joseph D. Rowland is looking forward to it – even if it’s hard to hear the animation in his voice.
“End of June, first week of July, we’re gonna be down there,” he says simply.
As well as hitting venues across Australia, Pallbearer will be presenting their serpentine brand of doom metal to fans in New Zealand for the very first time. When the announcement landed, it was met with a tsunami of positive support from fans in that country.
“It seems like people are excited about it,” says Rowland. “I know in the past … a few years ago on tour in Europe, we played with a band who said that a lot of people, they definitely want us to come play there, so it’s gonna be a good time. I’m definitely really excited about it.”
Pallbearer’s impending visit to southern shores follows the release of their third studio album Heartless, a monstrosity of metal that’s ridden a wave of positive feedback right across the community. One can only expect that positivity to rub off on Rowland and company in their shows, especially as Pallbearer intend on touring for the remainder of the year.
“We’re thrilled about [Heartless],” Rowland says. “It’s sort of the album that we always wanted to make. It’s the culmination of years of honing our skills and kind of working together on our art.
“It’s exciting that we’ve been playing it across the world so far – we just got back from a European tour, and then we’re headed out in a few days for a full US run. So we’re definitely amped up about getting to play this material live. It’s [some] of the most fun to play music that we’ve written – I dunno, we also enjoy touring quite a bit; it’s exciting.”
This might be the album Pallbearer always wanted to make, but it’s also a culmination of their career thus far – which might be why their signature release has taken almost ten years to come together.
“I don’t think we were good enough yet, previously, to write an album like this,” says Rowland with a dry chuckle. “All of our ideas over the years have sort of… I mean, this is like stuff we’ve basically been talking about for all of eight years.
“We’ve been – quite a bit for the last six years now – touring constantly. It’s really supplanted that. We all really have that musical language amongst ourselves – I mean, we play music together 280 days a year. We’ve developed this rapport amongst ourselves, about how we want to write music together, and even though the past few years have integrated how we wanted to do all these things, it’s sort of typical, modern metal, I guess.
“I don’t know if we would have been able to execute any of those ideas the way we’ve been [able] to now, just because of the amount of time we’ve been spending perfecting the playing together.”
But if Heartless is the definitive Pallbearer album – written not just to inform their live performance but designed around it – then where can they go on their next studio release?
“It’s definitely exciting,” says Rowland thoughtfully. “I don’t know – we aren’t really putting that together yet. We’ve already been pushing for one of the directions we have been lamenting on. We always want to continue to challenge ourselves, kind of expand what we sort of feel like. I suppose that’s the definition of what Pallbearer is. I know that we’re gonna be trying to build on some of the ideas we tried to quantify at the beginning.”
One word that often gets tossed around when it comes to critical discussion of Pallbearer is ‘colossal’. It’s true their music is a heavy beast, but it’s still got a finesse to it – and Rowland thrives in such creative freedom.
“We’ve always, I think, over the years… we’ve had our share of heavy music, but also music that’s very expansive. [It] doesn’t necessarily mean that just because something’s heavy or huge-sounding, it may not be metal at all. There’s a lot of different ways that can be processed. Experience, a visual thing, sonically – we are emotionally heavy. That’s sort of the franchising we’ve always had.
“We always wanted to have these expansive compositions, and if people say it’s ‘colossal’, well I guess that’s good.”
Photo: Diana Lee Zadlo
Heartless is out now through Nuclear Blast. Pallbearer play Manning Bar on Tuesday July 4.
