Vince, you ignorant slut.

There are tons of bands that get tons of hype that is somewhat-to-completely unwarranted, especially now, considering that the dreaded Hipster Community seems to think metal is cool (do they still, or are they back to ironically appreciating Jefferson Starship or something?). On a list of said bands, I would put Kylesa so far down near the bottom that it would be impossible to tell if they actually appeared on the list or not to anyone except the person who put them there at all. To cut to the chase, I think the band are deserving of every bit of salivating praise thrown their way by the metal community (like, um, this writer did for their last album) as well as the crossover coverage they receive. Bands not pouring themselves into a template is something to behold nowadays, and Kylesa manage to take a filthy IPA-stained piss all over genre lines while simultaneously sounding exactly like they always do, even when they’re at their most experimental. They’re the sound of a band listening to a library’s worth of albums while at the same time just making music reflexively as to what’s playing in their heads. It’s both extremely calculated and extremely human and personal, as good metal — from Sabbath to Priest to Maiden to Mayhem to Nevermore to Portal to Neurosis to Enslaved ad infinitum — should be.

But, haters gon’ hate, I suppose. And haters, subsequently, gon’ hate Kylesa’s new album, the predictably magnificent Spiral Shadow, another choice slab of massive, sludgy riffs, punk/metal and male/female interplay, and brilliantly employed non-metal elements. You’re gonna hear a lot of verbose writers once again, for lack of a more eloquent term, be all on this band’s dick, but Kylesa manage to effectively play to both a metalhead’s primal instincts — the one that clamors for heaviness and horn-raising riff violence — and the more astute listener’s sense of compositional brilliance. Most great bands don’t make new albums solely to try and amass new fans, and Kylesa are certainly no exception. If you didn’t like them before, this certainly won’t change your mind. But if you’re a Kylesa fan and/or obsessive- – hey, guess which one I am! — Spiral Shadow is yet more ammunition to shrug your shoulders at detractors and insist that the band’s encyclopedic knowledge of the past gives us great hope for metal’s future. There’s a reason guys like me are so slavishly devoted to them.

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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.

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