Kill Screen’s fondness for New York death metal maestros Undeath has been established since day one—literally. In 2022, as our misfit column was still very much in alpha, guitarist and World of Warcraft fanatic Kyle Beam kindly offered to be our first player character. And when the co-nerds needed a headliner for their Metal & Beer Pre-Fest 2024 takeover, the band brought their skull-crushing death metal to the Foundry stage, even sharing a few fresh cuts from their as-then upcoming LP More Insane. As Decibel’s gaming feature celebrates two years of extremely extreme nerdery and our halfway checkpoint towards triple-digit cataloging, it’s the band’s high-energy vocalist and anime superfan Alexander Jones who responds, representing the Rochester death squad. “Man, I’ve been an indoor kid my whole life, too,” he proclaims. “This shit is not a game to me. I will sit in front of a computer for days on end. You motherfuckers don’t even know.”
At the time of recording our interview, the band finds themselves in a remote part of California. They are just days into their U.S. tour with Kruelty and Gates to Hell, having just returned stateside from a recent headlining run through Asia and Australia in support of their newest album. While Jones is taking time out of a precious day off on the road to talk games with us, where can the rest of the death-obsessed deviants known for such songs as “Disattachment of a. Prophylactic in the Brain,” “Head Splattered in Seven Ways” and “Kicked in the Protruding Guts” be found? “I think they’re looking for ice cream right now,” he reports. The truth is that despite hitting the road for months on end and belting out blood-soaked songs all about killing people and horrors from beyond the grave, one of metal’s most promising modern acts are some of the sweetest around. That fact is all the more apparent when discussing the frontman’s entertainment of choice, a genre that is admittedly a blindspot for your horror-obsessed columnists. For the 50th mainline installment in our digital domain, we’re both proud and excited to welcome Jones and Undeath back into the Kill Screen arcade.
Looking for more (insane) content from this interview? Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Decibel (dB243/January 2025) for an exclusive excerpt on a potentially fated future grind project only available in print.
What was your first gaming experience?
That was probably when I got Pokémon Red when I was a kid. I couldn’t tell you exactly how old I was. I was probably 9 or 10 years old, and it was the year that it came out in America and I was already a massive Pokémon fan. I had seen the TV show, I was familiar with the card game. My brother, who is a couple of years older than me, kind of put me on to it, so we were obsessives. The games were hot shit and my parents, who were throughout my childhood pretty staunchly against video games, surprised us both on Christmas one year. They got us both Gameboys with copies of Pokémon Red and Blue, respectively. And that was just, like, the greatest possible gift I could have asked for back then. That kind of started a pretty substantial addiction, I would say, [laughs] to the Pokémon series for a good number of years there. I played Red, I played Gold, I played Yellow. I mean, I played a decent amount of them up for four or five years, I would say, until I kind of started to grow out of it a little bit. But that was experience number one for me, and it was a pretty big one.
As a kid, having to trade Pokémon with friends to get those ones that were exclusive to different versions was pretty exciting. The fact that you had both of them in the house, was that a big deal?
Yeah, definitely. My brother and I would play together all the time. We lived downstate about 30, 40 minutes outside of New York City. Back then, near Rockefeller Plaza, there was a store called the Pokémon store, which was an officially sanctioned, all-things-Pokémon brick-and-mortar storefront right in the middle of Manhattan. It’s still there now, but it’s just the Nintendo store. But at the height of Pokémania, it was the Pokémon store and we would go visit my dad at work in the city. If my brother and I were good, my mom would take us to the Pokémon store and they had these kiosks that were set up where if you brought your Game Boy Advance or whatever it was, they could upload a specific Pokémon onto your Game Boy from this kiosk that was only available at the store. When you’re 12, 11 years old, that’s just the coolest possible thing you could think of. It was very cool being into Pokémon at that time, for sure.
Even being almost 40, that’s still the coolest thing in the world to me [Michael]. [Laughs]
[Laughs] If you told me now that I could go to, I don’t know… I was going to make some reference to a video game that I’m equally passionate about these days, but I don’t think that exists. I don’t think I’ve been passionate about anything the same way I was about Pokémon 15 years ago. [Laughs]
What was it about video games that your parents were so staunchly against?
Neither of them grew up with them, obviously, because they didn’t really exist. My dad’s familiarity with video games kind of began and ended with Pong and pinball and stuff like that. And then my mom, it wasn’t a part of her life at all. There were just stand-up games that maybe your local pizza place had and that was it. The concept of at-home gaming, they weren’t familiar with it, so it was just a big question mark for them. They’re intelligent people and they read the news and watch stuff, and they’re seeing all the stuff about violence in video games and Grand Theft Auto and school shootings and X, Y, Z. They’ve got young, impressionable kids at home. I can’t fault them for not wanting to have that stuff in the house. When you’re inundated with all of this information and you don’t really have the context to work it out yourself, I can’t blame them for making the choices that they made. But if I ever wanted to play violent video games growing up, I couldn’t really do it at home, but it wasn’t hard—I could just go to a friend’s house.
According to your interview with Crunchyroll, you already brought up Pokémon as being a big part of your youth, but you mentioned that you grew out of it. Have you ever had an interest in going back at all?
No, I can’t say I have. There’s plenty of stuff from when I was a kid that I have nostalgia for, and I’ll go back and revisit it every once in a while as a lark, like old TV shows or movies and books or whatever that I liked when I was really young but I just feel like revisiting for the fuck of it. But Pokémon is not one of those things. I think I went so hard on it for a pretty legendary stretch of time. It was a good 4 or 5 years where Pokémon just dominated every aspect of my being. One day I woke up and I said, Eh, this has kind of run its course. And that was the end of it.
Was there any particular thing that made you do that?
Puberty was probably a big one. [Laughs] I think I just became much more interested in girls than Pokémon. That’s kind of a callous thing to say, but it’s true. When the possibility of real social interaction becomes something that you can do, it feels more inviting than looking at pictures of Pikachu and Eevee and whatever.
What have you been playing recently and what are the games that you typically prefer to play?
Man, I’m going to take you down a such an introverted, nerdish rabbit hole right now. I’ve been really into visual novels. I cannot get enough of these things. I had no real access to them when I was a kid because I didn’t really have a computer that I could download stuff on until college, and by the time I got to college, it was so busy [that] I didn’t really have a lot of time for PC gaming. But yeah, I’ve just been obsessed with visual novels recently.
It all started with the series called—and make sure you’re writing this down, because this pronunciation is insane—Utawarerumono. It’s an anime visual novel. It is so batshit insane. I couldn’t even begin to stand here and describe the plot of it to you, but I guess I’ll try. [Laughs] It takes place in this quasi-furry adjacent universe, but there’s ancient technology happening and you’re a futuristic being called the Iceman that was in charge of some failsafe project for humanity. You get sent back in time and you’ve got this mask that you can’t take off, and then you kind of become this leader of this village full of desperate vagabonds. Trials and tribulations and romance ensues. It’s just, like, off-the-walls crazy. It was on sale on Steam one day for, like, 99 cents and I bought it on a whim because it looked so wild. I ended up dumping, like, 130 hours into it.
Are you playing primarily on PC or console?
I’m pretty much exclusively PC these days.
Is there any particular reason for the preference?
No, not really. I had a PS4. I was a console gamer forever. We had Nintendo stuff primarily at home because I think my parents viewed that as the more family-friendly video game option out there, which—they were right. But I did Nintendo consoles for a long time, and then once I got to college and I could do my own thing, I had a PS3 and then a PS4. The PS4 is obviously at the end of its life cycle, or it has been for a very long time. When Undeath started 4 or 5 years ago, Kyle and I got all this money from COVID, our lockdown stimulus checks, and we didn’t really feel like doing anything responsible with that money, so we wasted it on frivolous purchases. [Laughs] I remember Kyle bought this ready-made HP gaming PC, and it was at a price point that I thought was very affordable, so I just went out and copied him and I bought the exact same one. [I’ve] pretty much been playing everything on that ever since.
For somebody who hasn’t spent time [with visual novels], what’s the pitch? Why did you like them?
This particular game is fun because it breaks up the visual novel elements with [real-time strategy] stuff. You’ll do all of the standard visual novel stuff where you’re just pressing left click forever, but then eventually you get to a point where you’re in the story and you’re leading these villagers on some kind of quest to go establish irrigation somewhere outside of the village or go fight some neighboring tribe or some invading warlord, and then the visual novel kind of stops and takes a break. It enters this RTS thing where you’ve got, like, 3 or 4 of your characters on the board and you’re clicking around to move them places. It turns into this real-time combat scenario. It’s the best of both worlds when it comes to the storytelling of visual novels and the methodically-paced combat of a JRPG or an RTS game. So, that’s the pitch with that game in particular—and there’s three of them. It’s a whole trilogy, and it just gets weirder and crazier by the hour. It makes no sense and it ends in such an unsatisfying way, [laughs] but I think about it all the time. I played all those games and it just set me on a course for wanting to consume as much visual novel content as possible. Now I just can’t get enough of the whole medium.
When it comes to playing video games, there’s a balance between good gameplay and good writing. Since you have this interest in visual novels, is writing a make-it-or-break-it aspect when it comes to playing games?
Straight up—no, it’s not. I play so many visual novels that have abysmal writing and are just so bad. It feels like I’m actively being poisoned while I’m playing them, but they’re so addictive. I just can’t get enough of the tactile experience of playing this garbage. [Laughs] But that’s not to say when the writing is good, it elevates it so much more, and it is something I really appreciate. But it is definitely not a make-it-or-break-it thing.
The perfect example I can think of for that is there is a series that I’m sure you’re familiar with called Fate. It started as a visual novel series, Fate/stay night, and then the Rin route is called Unlimited Blade Works, and the third and final route is called Heaven’s Feel. It takes you through the three main heroines of the game. The writing in Fate—while spotty frequently, especially in the more intimate sequences—is largely very, very good. I think it tells an extremely interesting story in a very compelling way, and I think that the creators were able to navigate a lot of very heady, very sort of psychosexual subject matter in a way that felt purposeful and deliberate and convincing. Yeah, it’s not the most sophisticated dialogue known to man. Nobody is going to win a Pulitzer off of the Fate script. But the writing is good and it does its job of carrying the weight of a story that would fall in lesser hands. So, that definitely elevates it.
But on the other end of that spectrum, there’s another series I’ve been playing recently called Muv-Luv. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one. [Laughs] There’s three editions of this game, and the first two are kind of tied together. The first one is just called Muv-Luv and the second one… Shit, I’m forgetting the title right now [Muv-Luv Alternative]. You can edit this in post. The first one is just boilerplate, generic high school romance game, and then in the second one, you wake up in an alternate universe and humanity has been invaded by these parasitic aliens called the BETA [The Beings of Extra Terrestrial origin which is Adversary to the human race]. All of your friends that you went to high school with in this new universe are super soldiers, basically training to be Gundam pilots. You go to high school like any normal day, and then it turns out your high school was turned into this top-secret military pilot training base. You have to catch up to all of your friends who have no idea who you are and become a mech pilot. It’s very crazy subject matter and the dialogue in those games—at least the first two—is just dogshit. It’s so bad. But they’re great, and I can’t stop reading them. The third one, actually, which I think is called Muv-Luv Unlimited, I want to say—you can also edit that in post if I’m wrong—that game is actually fantastic. But the first Muv-Luv, it’s so bad, it’s good. That’s definitely a good example of a game having really bad writing and really bad dialogue, but it doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of it at all.
So the first one had no government alien super soldiers, it was literally just romance—and then it just took a hard left turn?
Yeah, it’s crazy. The first one is the most fan-service-y, shallow, lowest common denominator romcom slop. And then the second one, it’s as if the creator just had a Dostoevsky-esque schizophrenic episode and decided that he needed to rewrite the entire premise of this series. So yeah, the turn happens with literally zero warning. But it’s great. I love when people take risks like that, even if it doesn’t necessarily pan out in a meaningful way.
I’m [Michael] getting the sense [that] between Fate, Muv-Luv and Utawarerumono, there’s a lot of rom-com, silly elements to it. I haven’t read your poetry, but obviously you’re the Undeath vocalist. All of your lyrics are about killing people. Do you seek out visual novels or any kind of games with that similar kind of hyper-gory aspect to them, or do you prefer something that’s polar opposite as a break from all of that?
For me, the hyper-violence and the gory stuff… I don’t know. I think about this kind of stuff all the time. It doesn’t compel me as much as I feel like it does a lot of my peers. I don’t look down on anybody for drawing inspiration from that stuff. Obviously gory video games and anime and movies and literature and all that stuff have inspired a lot of really great art over the years and so many of my peers are deeply influenced by that stuff. But for me, it’s never really called to me in the same way. I take a lot more enjoyment out of things that are more… I guess whimsical would be a good way to describe it. I like stuff that’s got kind of irreverence to it. I like stuff that, even when it’s serious and even when it’s very cerebral, has some levity to it. And even if it isn’t immediately obvious, there’s some humor there. It could be the darkest possible humor that you could think of, but I like when stuff has that kind of dynamic and it isn’t just grimdark hyper-violence all the time. I do like stuff like that, but it is not my primary source of influence whatsoever.
So you’re not doing deep dives into Corpse Party or Higurashi or anything like that.
I like Berserk. That’s probably the best example I can think of something that is just oppressively dark all the time. But I also think that Berserk stands on its own as one of the greatest manga ever written. It’s tough. But yeah, for me, I would so much rather be entertained by something that’s over-the-top stupid than over-the-top violent.
Is that a conscious decision, or is it more like, This is just what catches my attention?
I don’t think it’s been obvious to me until very recently. I think throughout my life, I’ve always been drawn toward the stuff that I just described, but it really wasn’t until Undeath started touring all the time and you’re spending a month, two months on the road, screaming lyrics about butchering people and dissolving them in acid to various audiences around the world, and then I get home and I don’t really want to think about killing people anymore. [Laughs]
With video games and anime in particular, I talk to people about them all the time, obviously, because I feel like if you’re a person involved in metal, it generally goes hand-in-hand that you also like other introverted activities like video games and anime. People always assume that I’m into the most violent, gory stuff out there because I’m the singer in this violent, gory death metal band—but really couldn’t be farther from the truth. I love a good, campy, funny romance story. I’m a simple guy and I’m a sensitive man who likes to just get real deep with my own emotions. [Laughs] And I like to laugh!
You’re out on tour now. Is gaming a part of that at all or is that strictly a thing that you do at home?
I’ve tried to game on tour before. I’ve brought my Switch on a couple of runs, but when I’m in the van and I’m not driving, I kind of don’t want to be staring at a screen the whole time. I want to just relax and listen to music and look out the window. So, that has been something that I haven’t really been too interested in these days. But I’ve done a little bit in the past. We did a tour last February and I played through most of Final Fantasy VII on that one. I’ve played some some Puyo Puyo Tetris here and there. But yeah, gaming is just something I pretty much exclusively do at home these days.
When you get back from tour, are you like, I’m going to sink time into the next game that I’m excited about right away?
Yeah, absolutely. I am playing the aforementioned third installment of the Muv-Luv franchise right now. I got probably 10 percent through it before we had to leave for this tour and I am fucking counting the days until I can be back in front of my computer to finish up the greatest story ever told. [Laughs]
You mentioned talking to people about video games and anime a lot. Have you run into people with similar niche interests when it comes to games on the road?
Sort of vaguely similar. I run into people all the time who like video games and anime and want to talk to me about them, and I’m always down to have that conversation with anybody. Those are two of my favorite subjects to talk about. But I gotta give a shout out to my friend Eli really quick, because to this day, Eli from Rochester, New York is one of, I think, the only people that I’ve ever met who pretty much shares my exact taste in games and anime. He’s kind of like my safety blanket in a lot of ways. [Laughs] When a new, very stupid-looking anime romcom gets announced and then Crunchyroll posts that they’re going to be simulcasting it, he’s the person I know I can reach out to and say, “Dude, yes! We’re finally going to get an English sub version of Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings In Russian!” [Laughs] So shout out to Eli.
You just got back from an Asian tour that took you through Japan. Did you pick up any gems while you were over there?
Oh yeah, dude. I mean, I was trying to play it cool, but I was fucking freaking out the whole time we were there. It was sick. I went to Akihabara, got all kinds of nerdy shit. I told myself I wasn’t going to spend that much money. I ended up spending a lot of money that I don’t really have, so I’m going to have to figure that out later—but that’s not really my problem at the moment. Bought some figurines, bought some miscellaneous degenerate accoutrement. It was a great time. It was just so, so cool being there.
What are the figurines of choice? Any particular franchise?
I went I went hard on KonoSuba this time. It’s a another comedy anime series. It’s probably the only good isekai series that has aired in the last five years. I got a figurine of my girl Aqua, got a figurine of my girl Darkness and I got one of Megumin and that was it. I got those three. I got the principal cast of KonoSuba. Everything else was just little chachkies here and there.
Did you pick up any games?
No. I saw some behind glass that looked cool, like old vintage games and stuff. But it was mostly an anime and anime accessories—as Hank Hill would put it—kind of trip.
You’re also a huge sports fan. Do you have any interest in sports video games?
Yeah, fuck yeah. I was a Madden guy growing up. My brother and I played that a lot. The best sports video game was MLB Slugfest. Do you remember that one?
No. What platform?
We had it on GameCube, but I think it was GameCube, PS2, original Xbox. But MLB Slugfest was fucking sick. It was just a baseball game, but you could punch other players. That was kind of the crux of the game. You ground out to second and you’re running to first, and then the second baseman throws it to the first baseman? Even if you don’t make it to first base in time, you can just slug the first baseman and it counts and you made it. So those games were incredible.
Sports games when we were younger, they were still very video game-y and ridiculous, whereas over time, they just became this EA Sports-ified, hyper-realistic simulator bullshit where everything is just meant to be as painfully accurate as possible, whether or not it’s fun. Do you kind of gravitate between one or the other?
I don’t really play a ton of sports video games these days just because, as I’ve said, my time is pretty much exclusively dedicated to Muv-Luv, the greatest story ever told. [Laughs] But I played a lot of arcade-y games back in the day, like Slugfest and NBA Jam and stuff like that. But the hyper-realism management simulator aspect to sports games is just so beyond uninteresting to me.
I remember there was a game that was called BMX XXX. Do you remember that one? My parents unwittingly let us rent that from Blockbuster one time. I think we probably lasted, like, 20 minutes with that going on before they ripped it out of the console and we had to drive right back and return it.
Our first ever interview was with Kyle back in 2022. Is there much gaming overlap interest that you two share?
There is some overlap, for sure. We’re both FromSoft fans, but I’m much, much more casual of a FromSoft fan than Kyle is. Kyle really gets into the lore and plays things day one and delves really heavily into those games. For me, I’ve played all the Dark Souls games, I played Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, all that shit. But those are one-and-done experiences for me. I either beat it within the first month or two of playing it or I give up and never come back to it. I think Elden Ring was probably the one that I spent the most time with, but it wasn’t that long. I didn’t even beat it. I came pretty close, but I just kind of burned myself out on it. Kyle really dedicates himself to those games. That’s really the main crossover. He’s much more of a FromSoft/Soulsborne player than I am. But we still have plenty of mutual appreciation for each other’s kind of sick and twisted interest. [Laughs]
It seems like the video for “Necrobionics” was his idea. If you were to take the lead on a music video with a video game crossover, which song would you cross with which game?
I would do another video for “Disputatious Malignancy,” even though we already just did one, but I would really fuck us over and I would commission a second video and it would be visual novel themed and you would be romancing a bunch of different worms.
Are there any games that you’re looking forward to this year?
Fate/stay night just got a remaster from TYPE-MOON and that just came out on Steam. I downloaded it literally the day before we left for two months of touring, so I haven’t really gotten the chance to play it. But it’s just the same old game, but with revamped textures and a boosted-up soundtrack and all the classic remastering tropes that you come to expect with video games these days. That’s not upcoming, but I am looking forward to playing that. Besides that, man, I know the visual novel series Tsukihime, which is kind of the Fate precursor, that’s gotten some remasters in Japan, but that hasn’t been made available in America yet. I’m looking forward to hopefully someday that becoming available to purchase here. You know, I’m really just looking forward to getting home and finishing up Muv-Luv, dude—the greatest story ever told.
If you were to suggest one visual novel for somebody who is curious about the genre, but hasn’t taken the plunge yet, what’s step one?
I would say Fate. I really do think that Fate is a great entry point. On paper, it’s crazy, right? The subject matter and everything about it, it’s pretty off the walls. [Laughs] But it’s one of those games where you can go into it with all the skepticism in the world and still kind of find yourself being sucked into the story that’s being told. I really do believe [that] even if you’re not an anime person, even if you’re not necessarily a fantasy/sci-fi person, it’s such a well-told narrative that it’s got the ability to get its hooks in you, whether or not you’re already primed for what it’s throwing at you. And there’s so much there. The base game alone, the first route of Fate, you could probably spend, like, 40 or 50 hours playing. And then you’ve still got two routes after that that just get crazier and crazier. So I would say give Fate a shot. Even if you don’t want to spend time clicking through the visual novel, there’s anime adaptations out there that you can watch. There’s all sorts of spin-offs that you can give a shot first before you actually try to play the base game. There’s no shortage of material out there for people to try out.
Would you consider long JRPGs to fall within the visual novel tent?
No, not necessarily. I think a lot of JRPGs contain the visual novel elements to them, for sure, especially the Persona games, which—surprise, surprise—I love. It probably wouldn’t come as a shock to anybody that those are some of my favorite games ever, and they are heavily, heavily visual novel inspired. But something like a Final Fantasy or a Dragon Quest or one of your big titans of JRPG gaming, I don’t think those are necessarily visual novels. Those are definitely way more indebted to a different style of gameplay altogether. The other one I need to get is the remake of Persona 3. I was really excited about that.
It was on sale on Steam for 40 percent off for a while.
I’m waiting for 60 to 70 percent off, at least. [Laughs] I play death metal, I don’t have any money.
More Insane is out now via Prosthetic Records and can be purchased here.
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