New BEHEMOTH Music Is On The Way, Says NERGAL

In a new interview with the “Everblack” podcast conducted at the December 3 stop of the Good Things festival in Brisbane, Australia, BEHEMOTH frontman Adam “Nergal” Darski spoke about his plans for the coming months. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Well, the plan is to focus on BEHEMOTH mainly next year. I’m doing like a short run with [my folk side project] ME AND THAT MAN late March, early April and that’s it. And all the rest, it’s gonna be dedicated like full-on BEHEMOTH.”

Asked if there is new BEHEMOTH music on the way, Nergal replied: “There’s new music. Next question.”

Nergal went on to say that he is not working on any material for ME AND THAT MAN at the moment and that he is concentrating exclusively on BEHEMOTH.

“I have no ME AND THAT MAN music in me for some reason anymore,” he explained. “Eventually it’s gonna come back. It’s like tides — it’s off and on and off and on, and when it happens, you’ve gotta catch that tide, that wave and just jump on it and surf. But there’s no surfing now for ME AND THAT MAN. There’s surfing for BEHEMOTH for sure.”

BEHEMOTH‘s 12th studio album, “Opvs Contra Natvram”, was released in September 2022. The LP was previously described in a press release as “a stark reminder of the rebellion, individuality, and unflinching self-expression that BEHEMOTH‘s phenomenal work imbues, shaped by a literary worldview.”

“Opvs Contra Natvram” features twin cover art available in both black and white and was released in an array of physical formats designed by Bartek Rogalewicz (Lodge.Black).

Earlier this year, Nergal told Australia’s Heavy that he wanted to make “Opvs Contra Natvram” “sound very organic”, especially when compared to its predecessor, 2018’s “I Loved You At Your Darkest”. He said: “Every band these days, you talk to every band, and every band — literally — heavy metal band, thrash, death, whatever, says, ‘Oh, we managed to get that organic sound.’ And then I go and listen to those records and I’m, like, ‘There’s nothing organic about this record.’ Ninety-nine percent of the records, they sound robotic. Every fucking click, every kick, every snare drum, every part of the record is exactly the same. It’s not organic. ‘Organic’ is when music fluctuates, when there’s dynamics, when it goes up and down. That’s why we tapped Joe Barresi [to mix the LP]. You know him for his work with NINE INCH NAILS, QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, MONSTER MAGNET and a lot of rock bands. SLIPKNOT… Basically, rock bands, mainstream bands. And he does this old-school mixing. He doesn’t use Pro Tools. I mean, he uses Pro Tools, but then, when he’s done with one song, he just pulls all the knobs down and starts from scratch. You go, ‘Hey, but I wanted to do some tweaks in the previous one.’ ‘Sorry, it’s done.’ You’ve got to pay for everything again. So [when] it’s done, it’s done. You don’t endlessly go and correct that, which is beautiful. Twenty, thirty years ago, it was done that way.”

He continued: “These days, you can fucking perfect things to the point that you cannot fucking listen to it, because the perfection makes things boring, imperfect and a whole lot uninteresting. Live, it’s not perfect; that’s why it’s so fucking exciting. So why make things that are just so fucking polished? I don’t get it, especially in extreme metal music. It’s gotta be fucking weird, it’s gotta be dangerous. Where is the danger factor? So I really wanted to bring the danger factor back to our music. It was present, but maybe this is the record [where] it’s the most present ever.”