Photo: Jehn W.A.
Matt Harvey is a legend of the extreme metal scene. Between his time with gore metal institution Exhumed, Death worshippers Gruesome and Left to Die, heavy metal flag bearers Pounder and his time with Repulsion and Noothgrush, the guitarist and singer has covered every corner of the metal world. Not content to stop there, he began experimenting with synthesizers, keyboards and other electronic instruments in 2021, releasing a sci-fi themed album called Last Son Of Krypton.
Harvey’s experiments in less-extreme styles of music continued last month, when he released Toward the Cold Light, a new collection of quiet, ambient tracks. It’s by far the most reflective and calm music Harvey has ever made, as far a cry from Exhumed as one could possibly get. Decibel spoke with Harvey to get the details about the making of Toward the Cold Light and what inspired him to explore new genres.
You’ve been exploring non-metal music for a while now, including a comic-themed synth album. Why did you decide to branch out in recent years?
I’ve always been interested in a lot of different kinds of music (basically everything that’s not ska, nü metal or opera), so that itch has always been bubbling beneath the surface. The main things that have changed are that one, I feel like I’m finally pretty free to make metal music at my own pace and with a degree of competency that I’m comfortable with, and two, I now have a lot of the music theory and audio production knowhow to start translating my ideas into something presentable. The time between concept to finished thing has been shrinking and shrinking and now it’s not such a daunting task to try and express myself musically, in or out of metal.
What did writing and recording look like for Toward the Cold Light? Is there a lot of writing in advance or is it mostly improvised?
I did most of the writing and recording early last year, and then did little production tweaks and revisions as I sat with the songs. Often I’d just be out walking my dogs in the early mornings and there’s a fair amount of coastal fog where I live, so I spent a lot of quiet, misty mornings just walking and thinking. I would get a melody in my head and then once I got home, I’d sit down on my laptop and start arranging and building around it, doing a lot of deconstructing and focusing just on the tones. I would start each piece with one melodic idea and build out from there. I had a great time and learned a ton working on Last Son of Krypton, but I felt like I needed to simplify my musical ideas and develop them more, rather than working through really elaborate themes and trying to compose on a huge scale. That fit with the introspective vibes I was feeling outside in the chilly mornings, so I ran with that.
Compositions like the ones found on Toward the Cold Light require a lot more restraint than your other bands like Exhumed, Gruesome, etc. Do you find it difficult to adapt your writing style?
On one hand, it’s completely different stylistically, but on the other hand, I still use the same approach of just listening to an idea and thinking “Where does this naturally lead? What do I hear in my head and how do I get that out of the speakers?” So technically it’s a completely-separate and equally-rewarding process, but instinctively and creatively, it’s kind of the same.
When I write metal, it’s usually a very specific thing that I’m trying to put out there—and always very focused on specific emotions—whether it’s aggression or revulsion, or anything from just wanting to party or a kind of teenage-level sadism. There’s not a particularly wide range there. The stuff on this EP is much more open emotionally—whether it’s reacting to a dream about my dead great-grandmother or lamenting the loss of the person you might have been or just good-old fashioned loneliness, it’s very much leaning into the opposite kinds of emotions and vibes than I do with metal. I don’t really care much for introspective or emotional metal, as I think the genre is best suited to deal with more negative, violent feelings—it’s cathartic and exhausting and fun and a good avenue to let out all the anger, frustration and other negative stuff. But I also (hopefully) have experiences with the full range of human emotion: joy, loss, nostalgia, all that stuff, and I feel that this kind of music is a much better way to explore and express that. There’s a lot of bittersweet kind of vibes going on in the music, like the realization that getting what you want rarely works out the way that you thought it would and things like that. It’s refreshing to use music to express other kinds of things. I mean, there’s more to me than pounding beers and sick riffs. Not that much more, but still! [laughs]
You did all the engineering and producing alongside former Exhumed member Leon del Muerte. Do you find yourself using similar techniques as when you record heavy music?
This is the part of the process that really is completely different. There are actually no live instruments whatsoever on this EP—everything is done through virtual midi instruments. It’s a painstaking process manipulating the sounds to be expressive and emotive, which is the main technical advancement I’ve been working on since my first solo record. It’s a massive rabbit hole that has been both agonizing and rewarding to explore. I never thought I could sit and listen to the subtle differences in the timbre of a virtual oboe for 40 minutes, but hey, life is full of surprises.
When you put out releases like Toward the Cold Light, do you find that people are interested despite your reputation being in a different area?
I think there are some folks from the metal scene that might be curious, and of course, a large swath that won’t be into it at all (which is completely understandable), but people that are a bit more open-minded can hopefully find something here that resonates. Ideally, I’d love to cultivate an entirely separate audience for this kind of stuff, but I’m so entrenched in the metal scene, I don’t really know much about how that would work. My buddy Ross (not [Exhumed bassist] Mr. Sewage) that lives down the street is heavily involved with the dungeon synth scene via his project Malfet, and we’ve talked a lot about wishing we could get the attention of people that listen to things like A Winged Victory For the Sullen or Library Tapes and stuff like that, but it’s quite a leap out of the subgenre world we’ve come up in.
What kinds of things inspire you to write this music?
It’s a combo of a lot of stuff. I’m a very nostalgic person by nature and I’m also kind of solitary – I grew up an only child – and of course, as I get older there are a lot of feels that kinda sneak up on me. So all of that’s a big part of it, but it’s also just coming from a love of music in general and the firm belief that music is able to express things much more powerfully than words. I listen to a lot of stuff ranging from the obvious heavy stuff to post-rock to classic R&B to soundtracks to garage rock and ambient stuff and I’m the kind of person who can’t stop his own mental wheels from spinning, so there’s inspiration everywhere all the time. I suppose this EP is also an attempt to balance contradictory impulses, because it’s the most introspective thing I’ve done, but at the same time, it’s heavily inspired by the natural world. I’m fortunate to live in a place where you want to be outside a lot – there’s mountains, coastline, and farmland all very nearby, and that definitely played a big role in these songs as well.