EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH KYLESA’S LAURA PLEASANTS AND ERIC HERNANDEZ
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:00pm by Sammy O'Hagar
Kylesa’s not new to the millennial metal underground, but one would not be surprised if their fanbase grows exponentially in the wake of their fucking fantastic new album, Static Tensions. Tighter and more coherent than its predecessors, it shows the band flexing a muscle they’d been alluding to throughout their career. This is not to dismiss their previous successes; the band have been an intense and wonderful blend of sludge, crust punk, doom, trad metal, and otherwise from the beginning.
A big part of the band’s artistic success is Laura Pleasants, the group’s acid-throated vocalist/guitarist. Her sinewy leads provide a metal ying to guitarist/vocalist Philip Cope’s punk rock yang, a thorough stirring of the band’s hybrid stew. During a recent show on Mastodon’s Crack the Skye tour (where, if they didn’t blow the headliners off the stage, they certainly equalled them), she and drummer Eric Hernandez (who also deserves credit for keeping Kylesa’s two drummers from devolving into a masturbatory percussion fiasco) discussed the composition of Static Tensions, Kylesa’s place in the metal world, their penchant for playing cross-genre shows, and why Laura being a woman in metal isn’t really as big a deal as it may seem.
