Bands from the Western side of Australia are generally up against it a touch more just because of their relative isolation to the rest of the country.
One way to make sure people take notice is to make a hell of a lot of noise, which is something Perth thrash/death metal outfit Remission have figured out all for themselves.
Following the success of their debut album The Tether’s End, which led to several tours of Australia and Asia, Remission pulled back just a touch and in the blink of an eye a couple of years had passed with no new material.
That has changed with the recent release of the brutally aggressive track Hellfire, which shows the boys from the West have lost not one smidgen of their passion and zest for music.
HEAVY caught up with Remission’s Jacson Robb to get the lowdown.
"At the time I started writing Hellfire I was listening to a lot of hardcore and old school death metal,” he recalled, “which is a little more straight forward and I remember I was driving to work one day and I had the idea for the main riff come into my head and thought it would be sick to do heaps of chuggs and make it sound really tough. I got home from work that day, wrote the first riff, and then the rest of the song kind of developed into this really straight up hard, death metal, thrashy kind of thing. I thought it sounded sick, so I took it to the guys, we hashed it out a bit more and added a few bits here and there - so you hear a little bit of black metal influences there as well. With the last album as well, we had a minute and a half song that was fury all out, so we wanted to have one on this album as well and this song cut the cake pretty well. We decided to go with that, and it shows a bit of our harder influences, our hardcore influences, but it's gonna be an absolute cracker to play live."
In the full interview, Jacson talks about Remission’s blending of thrash and death, how they find the balance, what they were going for musically with Hellfire, more new music in the works, signing to Extreme Management Group, upcoming gigs and more.