South African outfit Ruff Majik are currently unknown here in Australia – but that is definitely more to do with geographical location than talent.


Delivering a quirky and upbeat sound that could be loosely pigeonholed as stoner rock but with far more complex layers, Ruff Majik are the type of band that you get the feeling would leave no stone unturned in their quest to diversify their music.





With a handful of albums already stamping their mark in and around their home country, Ruff Majik are set to take on an international market with their upcoming release The Devils Cattle, a collection of 13 songs that showcase not only the band's eclectic nature but also their refreshingly flippant attitude that lifts their music above the accepted parameters of most bands in this genre.
HEAVY caught up with Johni Holiday for an entertaining chat about the album and more.


"It's definitely all over the place musically,” he laughed. “We cover... we cover a lot of different genres but I think it all stems from an idea back in the day that I had. I get really bored listening to something if it's the same old, same old all the time. When you're listening to an album usually you're gonna skip to something else eventually because you need a different vibe so I decided no, I'm just gonna make an album where you don't have to skip. You can literally listen to it and it would be like you're listening to 13 different bands. I think we pulled that off.”


With an already foreboding title, the obvious parallels between the October 30 release date and Halloween are too dominant for me not to mention.


"No, it's never a coincidence,” he continued, smiling “I have fiendish plans (laughs). The Devils Cattle actually didn’t have anything to do with Halloween when I found the album title first. It's actually a German folk tale that was told to us when we were touring in Europe and had a couple of days off in Germany and this guy explained the aura around the area and the story goes that there's a big river called the SSpree in Germany, close to the Berlin side, and its got a forested area with a bunch of different branches of this river breaking up and its a really cool place with small little island chain things and people move around between them on Gondolas, it's really cool. The story behind it was way, way, way back - before the Earth even started - the Devil was ploughing the fields with his cattle and then they stopped to have a rest and he got annoyed so he threw his hat at them and they got spooked and ran in all different directions dragging the plough with them and that’s what created the rivers. I thought that was a fantastic name for an album and we kept it.”


Listen to the full audio to go on a journey of zombies and chaos, occult metal, South African music and more.