Baring Teeth

Andrew Hawkins: For this record, specifically, I’d say Swans and Scott Walker were really big influences as far as my approach to writing guitar riffs and structuring the songs. The main thing we wanted to do differently on this record was to make it more expansive. Not necessarily in the length of the songs, or anything like that. More like, let the frequencies take over the songs and guide them to where they want to go. We let the riffs breathe a little more and we focused the songwriting around repetition more on this record than we did on the previous one. One song that sticks out in particular is “Mountain.” There’s a part in the middle that’s really hypnotic and simple, one-two chord progression – that was really influenced by Swans. I’d say as for the band as a whole, we always get Gorguts for a comparison – and they are an influence. But there’s a lot of different things that come into play when we talk about influences. We’re all really into jazz, like Ornette Coleman. We also like Cannibal Corpse, Cattle Decapitation, and Behemoth.

Well, no, because I definitely am a metalhead as far as what I predominantly listen to. But I have influences outside of that. I think a lot of what appeals to me about metal is the extremity of it. It’s hard to get that from a lot of different genres. Even with something like Scott Walker, it’s heavy – it has a lot of parallels with metal, but it doesn’t go as far as a metal band would. If I were to listen to the new Aborted record, I would get a different kind of enjoyment out of that.

Difficult. It’s not easy at all. That’s one of the things that can be frustrating when we talk about our band. People think we take a bunch of ideas and throw them against the wall. But in reality, it’s really difficult to come up with new material. We’re very discriminating in what we write. We became a little quicker with our songwriting process. There’s one song on the new album, I think it took a year to finish it. We concentrate really hard on what we’re doing, and when we do write, we have to be focused solely on songwriting. When we do reach that endpoint of a completed song, it’s a lot more rewarding.