Inter Arma’s Dark Portal to "New Heaven" or Hell (Interview)

Putting on an Inter Arma album has always felt like stepping into an extreme music Big Top Circus; above your head a spiraling blackened odyssey balances on the high wire, in the globe of death a prog metal mystery revs its engine, and sitting in the sawdust some vintage blues fretwork crawls to life. Knowing the band’s propensity to tackle such a wide variety of styles, each album becomes a document of the circumstances and time in which it was made, and their upcoming release New Heaven is no different.

We spoke at length with drummer and songwriter T.J. Childers about the challenges of creating New Heaven, Inter Arma’s surprising collaboration with a Canadian military photographer, and which Nine Inch Nails samples hit the hardest.

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It seems as though the band went through real adversity in the making of New Heaven. As a result, people might expect it to point inwards, and see you focus on yourselves and focus on that period. But the lyrics are much more outward looking, there's this real focus on empathy and understanding, how did that come to be?

The more personal underlyings of the meaning of the lyrics is going to be for Mike to answer but on the broader scale of things, our records always tend to be pretty pretty dark and pretty bleak. I mean it's just how it comes out you know, we're not trying to write the heaviest music of all time, I think Nile cornered the market on that a long time ago, or Six Feet Under probably actually is a more appropriate band for that. But it is heavy and dark and bleak and oppressive as it may be and even the lyrics deal with, you know, loss and depression and just kind of all the blanket shit that human beings deal with on a regular basis. We always try to - whether it's lyrically or musically, even though it is bleak and oppressive, it's nice to have tangents of hope in there, so even when you are looking inward and thinking about the complex range of emotions that human beings are.. there's anger, there's joy, all the emotions. We always try to convey even though things are shit, things will work out, hopefully!

That touches on something that aggressive music doesn't get enough credit for; the presumption that it is largely one note, just purely dealing with unpleasantness or hatred or anger, so to touch upon those brighter aspects of the music is cool. I was interested to hear a little bit about having your passports stolen in Europe, what's the background there?

We were supposed to play Russia, back in like…fuck, what was it, like 2018, something like that. In order to get a visa to play in Russia, you have to mail your physical passports to Russia. And then they actually glue the visa in on the page and your passports and then send them back to you. So in the process of them being sent back, I don't know how in the fuck this happened, but FedEx sent them to our buddy's house, the guy who put out the first Inter Arma record before we were even on fucking Relapse, they sent them to his old house that he'd not been living in for two or three years at that point. So Steven, the guitar player was able to some way or another figure out that they had been sent there, so I went over there on two or three occasions, and basically the people that were renting the house at that point were fucking crackheads. I mean, full blown crackheads. I didn't see the inside of their house. But judging by everything that was going on, on the outside of the house, I could tell that it was just it was fucking dark. I went over there on a couple separate occasions. And finally, the last time I went over there, I knocked on the door, and I actually started rummaging through their trash to see if they had, like, thrown our passports away or something. And as I'm getting ready to leave, this woman opens the door and goes 'hey, what are you doing going through our trash?' And I'm like, I'm looking for our passports, that I know were sent to this address. Do you have them? Have you seen them? And she said something to the effect of 'we told so and so that we didn't have them'. And, you know, me looking the way I look, walking up the sidewalk through their front door, saying please, if you have them if you know where they are.. and she just slammed the door. I knocked again, and she never came back out. And it was just it was like, a fucking episode of Breaking Bad or something.

Ugh, passports are the highest stakes of mail.

Yeah, and at this point, it's two weeks before the tour was supposed to start and we'd already bought plane tickets. You know, we've we've spent thousands of dollars on tickets and merch, and in the United States, even if you expedite it, it takes two or three weeks to get your passport so there's no fucking way that we're going to be able to get them in time and we just had to eat the cost and and call up the other bands and the tour manager and be like, hey, this happened and we can't fucking make it.

On a more positive note, how good did it feel when you finally landed Joe's position in the band? There was a heavy churn of bass players in the run up to recording the new album: how did it feel accelerating through all that change without an album or a tour to show for it? And then how did it feel to find Joel?

Think for example of the song "New Heaven," this is a great starting point, I  had the first handful of riffs for that song kicking around for a couple of years. And the previous bass player I mean, even him joining the band is a whole other story, but I knew that he wasn't going to be able to play those riffs. I just knew they're going to be beyond his skill set, and so that was discouraging. And then as I'm coming up with other riffs and thinking I don't know if he's going to be able to play this, that was discouraging also. And it just came to a point over time, then he left the band, and we were in limbo for six months, or however long it was. And at that point, everybody in Inter Arma lives in Richmond so we practice two or three times a week, but we're missing the fifth limb, so to speak, it's and we're in this fucking purgatory of what the fuck are we going to do? It's not conducive to trying to be creative and write songs without a full band. And so it was a fucking bummer to say the least there for a little while. And then.. I knew that Joel was a guitar player, so I never even considered asking him to play bass because most guitar players don't want to fucking play bass in a band because their egos are so goddamn big (laughs) you know, that sort of thing wont allow them. But Joel hadn't been in a band in like five years or something like that, and Steven asked him and he was like, fuck yeah. And immediately it was like the fucking the skies parted for us and the sun beams shone down right away, because I already knew Joel, I knew he's a great engineer, I knew he's a fucking killer guitar player, I knew he's a killer songwriter. He's an incredibly intelligent dude. He understands music on a more theoretical level, I can speak the language to him much more clearly. Whereas before, I'd have to say okay, so now put your finger on the first fret. Now I can just say the song's in C, you can probably figure it out from there. So just being able to communicate with him in that way - the whole fucking experience was like night and day.

Three practices a week is good going!

I mean Nirvana used to practice like five days a week for six hours a day. Lynyrd Skynyrd used to practice for eight hours a day, five days a week.

You touched on the process of writing riffs and taking them to the other band members. With your chosen discipline within the band being the drums, where do you tend to begin with your writing? Does it depend on the needs of the song?

It's different from song to song. One example is "The Children The Bombs Overlooked". The drum patterns came first, I was just practising by myself one day, fucking around, and I started playing those patterns. I was like, Okay, this is cool. It's kind of a polyrhythmic shift, but it's just keeping steady time through all of it. So I think this could be something and then the riffs came afterwards. But then something like "New Heaven" the song, I'd worked on those riffs like I said, they'd been kicking around since 2020 or something like that. "Gardens In The Dark" started with the drum pattern, and then I was like okay, this sounds like a weird industrial Nine Inch Nails sort of thing, what would Trent Reznor do? So I came up with a chord progression that I thought sounded kind of fucked up and outside the box and just went from there.

I would buy a shirt that said 'What would Trent Reznor do?' on it for sure. So you're going to be playing New Heaven in full at Roadburn festival,  how are rehearsals going? When you commit to a full album set like this are there any songs that might not have made it into a typical set because they're tricky to arrange for live performance?

Well, rehearsals have been going great. When I'm done here, I'm going to go straight over to where we practice about 10 minutes away, and we're going to run through everything. Most of the songs on New Heaven would probably make it into a live set, maybe not "Endless Gray" because it's an instrumental, although it's not off the table. But generally, especially if it's like a support slot, we've only got 40 minutes, and you kind of just want to put banger banger banger in there. Then there's "Forest Service Road Blues" because it's a quiet acoustic thing, maybe if we were playing a headlining set, we might do that, but most of the time I'd say no, we probably wouldn't play that one. That one's cool, because I'm actually going to be playing keys on that one. I'm doing a full Tommy Lee at Roadburn, where I have the keyboard set up right next to me behind the kit. And I've never played piano or keyboards in front of a large audience, so I'm gonna have to make sure I've got that one well rehearsed before we go play in front of people (laughs).

The ongoing genre classification of Inter Arma is one of everyone's favorite discussions, and in 2024 it's a real pleasure to hear how at ease and unapologetic you seem with the range that the band is capable of. On New Heaven I hear black and death metal, I hear country, I hear prog. Does the fact that most of the band members only play in Inter Arma mean we're getting everyone's creative impulses in one vessel?

I guess maybe nowadays that has a little bit to do with it. Because in the past, that wasn't true. I used to be a total band whore, I used to be in like, four or five, six bands at a time, which I'm fucking glad I don't do anymore. And then Mike, Steven and Trey used to be in Bastard Sapling, the black metal band. But even since the beginning of the band, it's always been like that, and maybe it seems like we can't decide what we want to do, but that's not really true. I like listening to bands and records that are kind of all over the place. Like don't get me wrong, AC/DC is like one of my top five favourite bands of all time, and I fucking love Nile and I love tons of bands like Cannibal Corpse - you buy a Cannibal Corpse record and you know exactly what the fuck you're getting, and I don't mean that as a knock at all, last record fucking rips. But that said, the records that I tend to gravitate to the most are records that are pretty varied, whether it's Neil Young, or The Beatles, or Queens of the Stone Age, or Zeppelin, or any of the upper echelon. Not that Six Feet Under isn't upper echelon, but you know what I mean? I just love the classic fucking records that everybody goes back to. And even like Death's Symbolic has "Crystal Mountain" and there's acoustic guitars, it's not just as fast as they can go, blast beat double bass the entire fucking time, there's still a lot of variation. Even Morbid Angel records have the weird instrumental songs on them and shit like that. So to me, those are always the most fascinating and interesting records to listen to.

It's wild to hear that Mike's joining Artificial Brain.

Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting that (laughs)

Is it going to be a big pull on his time?

Um, no, they don't really take too much of his time. And I mean, obviously, if he has a string of, like, you know, two or three shows with with Arty-B, and then we get offered some crazy fucking tour, h's gonna have to tell those guys - and he's already said to them, that Inter Arma is still my priority. But the likelihood of that happening isn't super high, either. We're definitely more selective nowadays about what we do. I mean, I'm not leaving the house unless I can make at least like $10,000 so... I'm just kidding (laughs).

(laughs) I was doing some quick tour arithmetic

I should have put a much higher number in there. $100,000!

You're getting those keyboard performance royalties now! So you've mentioned Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young and famously you're a big ZZ Top fan as well; you guys are from Virginia, which has some cowboy history, and you've worked with Garrett from Windhand in the past as well. Just wondering what kind of role Richmond and its history plays in Inter Arma and how you get inspired by it?

Well, we're all from Virginia, but we're all from different parts. Except for Joel, Joel is from South Carolina, which is even more southern than Virginia. And it's funny, it plays a part, I would say in a more subconscious kind of way. And definitely for me, because I fucking love country music, an old old blues, like Sun House, and old Albert King and shit like that. So that kind of southern redneck thing I can't really escape is no matter how hard I try, it's just fucking in me. But that said I've lived in Richmond for almost 20 years now, Richmond is a very eclectic little city. The music scene is great, there's tons of great bands here, which definitely plays a bit of the role, just as much as the whole rural side of things. When you listen to the records you can kind of hear it, it is kind of rural, but then there is a more harsher city element to it as well. So it's kind of a combination of those things and, you know, drugs and other things thrown in there as well.

So is Richmond kind of the contemporary face of Virginia, the urban place people gravitate towards?

Absolutely. The fact that in the past few elections Virginia went Democrat, except for this past one, is pretty much because of Richmond and the Richmond metro area. Because outside of here there's a couple of other colleges and if you see it on a map, that's where all the liberal minded types are, but pretty much the rest of Virginia is very old school, redneck conservative Donald Trump loving motherfuckers.

Good luck with that news cycle this year.

Dude, it's a fucking nightmare.

Inter Arma's music deals with a bunch of conceptual ideas from the past, like atavists, and Sky Burial rites, it seems like there's an interest in things that are lost to time, or traditional ways of being.

It's kind of saying that, maybe the good old days weren't so good. But also, it's good to reflect on the past to learn from your mistakes. Even the way our records sound, and even the way our music is, it's not like old old timey but it's not like cutting edge tech death modern sounding either, there's definitely still a bit of a vintage rock and roll swing in there which again, I think that just sort of goes back to my redneck roots, and everybody in the band's redneck roots. It just I guess it's fucking inescapable. Yeah, definitely it's just like a lot of facets of our music: it's not really there by design, but because of who we are.

The album cover for New Heaven feels really candid and cold. It's a simple photo, there's no illustration draped over it, it's quite different from some of your previous albums. What's the concept? Is there more in the gatefold that tells a story?

We've definitely leaned more towards photography for the last couple of records. Just because.. talking about well tread territory, how many more fucking skulls and occult shit can you put on a fucking record? So tired of that, so yeah, photography is what we've been leaning towards. And it just so happened that a fan of ours came to our show in DC last year. And goes hey, I love you guys. I'm a photographer and your music has really got me through some tough times. CWe come to find out he is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and is part of the Guggenheim Association. He's shot in Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq and all over Antarctica, like every crazy ass exotic location in the universe, you can think about this motherfucker's been there. His name is Louie Palu, and he is a photographer for the Canadian Army, I can never fucking remember what the actual that branch is called for Canada but he's, like super, super top secret clearance, he knows things, and has been to places, it's pretty wild. So he says look through my portfolio, and Mike was looking through it and found that picture, right after we were done recording, and we were still mixing and figuring out sequencing and all that shit and Mike texted to say check this out, I think this could be potentially the album cover and I saw it and was like, God damn, that's pretty fucking cool. If you don't know what's going on in the photo, to me, it looked like this guy was in a snowy abyss in darkness, lost, meandering, doing who the fuck knows what. And then he stumbles upon this blue portal into another dimension or into Hell or into New Heaven? Who the fuck knows where it goes to. So after showing it to everybody and discussing it and then I think right around that time, we decided the album was going to be called New Heaven, so it all seemed to be working out very smoothly, which never happens (laughs,) but the actual photograph is of a Canadian Ranger who's up in the Arctic Circle, and he's ice fishing at night for food, not just to for leisure but to survive. He's wearing a headlamp so that's what the blue light is. And then the kind of backlighting is a truck's headlights. There's snow on the ground and there's a little bit of snow coming down, that's what it is. It looks like it could be on the moon or something.

That's a very powerful friend you have there, I've no idea what the acoustics would be like in the Guggenheim but that would be a sick show. I wanted to shout out a couple of the songs on the album specifically. First off "Concrete Cliffs" because it sounds like it must be incredibly fun to play, and the range that Mike has on that song is wild.

It's funny you bring up Mike on that song, because I knew he was going to do something melodic, especially for the chorus sections. But I didn't know what he was going to do because that chord progression is slightly unusual. It's not like a normal one four five, where it's super easy to sing over like - it could be tough to sing over, but he knocked it out of the park. I mean the first time we heard him singing it was the first time he started singing it in the studio. But yeah, Trey wrote the main chord progression in that song, and the chorus chord progression, even though when he brought it in, it was faster, and I suggested slowing it down. And then there's like a part where it goes from seven four to seven eight, I suggested that and a couple other little things. And then I wrote the verse riff and bridge lead section riffs. Immediately, as soon as we slowed it down, it kind of clicked and it created a vibe. And I thought, because the the main chorus sounds so like, airy and liquid to me kinda, we said okay, what if we juxtaposition that with like, just a fucking knuckle dragger? And as soon as we did that, we're like, okay, that's where that needs to go. So, yeah, that song's a lot of fun to play.

The second song I wanted to mention was "Forest Service Road Blues". It's not new for Inter Arma to include acoustic guitars, but in the past they've felt very large and looming, whereas this song feels like it's really zooming in on something smaller and specific, and the title is part of that as well. So I'd love to know more about it.

Well, it's like you said, it's similar to things we've done in the past, but it's not really specifically something that we'd done before where it's pretty much a singer songwriter setup. So the genesis of that was, I had that chord progression for like 10 years, it was 2010 or 11 or something when I wrote that. And I planned on it being this other bigger thing where it got faster, and it was more black metal and whatever. And like a year ago, I was just playing that on my acoustic and thought, this works well by itself, and I think this could be a thing and did some demos. And immediately, we all kind of got the Neil Young vibe, and I actually was the one that said let's not have any electricity on this song, so it's all acoustic piano, violin, upright bass. Which I thought was a cool thing that we'd never really done before, where there's no electricity at all. It's another example where I didn't really know what Mike was going to do with it melodically until we got to the studio. And again, if what you hear on the record isn't the first take, it's like the second take, like maybe he flubbed a word or something. And everybody was just like yeah, that's it, it's fucking great. That song lyrically really hits home because we could hear everything he was saying and the song is so quiet. All of us were in the control room and he walked in after and we were all like, god damn.

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Quickfire question: say the second Inter Arma covers album launches tomorrow, what are the first three songs that you're putting on there?

Oh my god, first three songs on the next cover record Jesus Christ. There's so many. I want to say some things but I don't want to give some stuff away. We've covered "Creeping Death” by Metallica, and when we did it, we just played it pretty much like the record, it was for a benefit so.. but I would love to figure out a way to do that in our own way. I don't know if that would be possible at all because that song is so fucking iconic. At least in my mind. I've always wanted to do "Happiness is a Warm Gun" by The Beatles, that would be sick and another Nine Inch Nails song like "Reptile"... I've always thought that we could do "Reptile" off of The Downward Spiral and really fuck it up and make it our own.

"Reptile" is such a good song. What the hell is that sample like a camera or something?

It's a fucking Polaroid which is sick! I bought The Downward Spiral when it was new on tape when I was 11 years old. But yeah Mike told me recently that's what that sound is and it fucking blew my mind for multiple reasons. One of which being as soon as he said it I went oh my god, that's exactly what that is. We heard that a million fucking times. Number two: who in the fuck would think to hear that sound and go that sounds sick, I'm gonna put it on a fucking record and use it in a song. Yeah, that's how you know Trent Reznor is a fucking genius.

That adds a further layer of sinister dirt to it as well, given the content of that song. The fact that it's a Polaroid makes it even more Nine Inch Nails to me.

Yeah, and I mean, it totally sounds sinister. I remember listening to that with on a Walkman when I was a kid and thinking it sounds like a cyborg and it's getting ready to fucking kill you or something. There's a bunch of sounds on that record that I very specifically remember hearing when I was a kid and thinking what in the fuck is that? And to know that now 20 plus? Goddamn.. 25? Whatever, a billion years later it still blows my mind and also just like the work he had to go through to put that on a sampler, like it wasn't on a fucking desktop or a laptop sitting right next to him, that motherfucker had to work to get that sound. He's a madman. He's a fucking genius.

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New Heaven is available to pre order digitally before it releases on April 26th and can be purchased here.