FOURNIER interview
Hi! The promo states you’re apathetic toward current stylistic and production trends in death metal. That’s easy to say, but harder to define. What exactly in modern death metal leaves you cold?
Modern death metal often has more in common with dubstep and electronic music than it does with the landmark releases of the genre. I want my death metal to sound real. That means not programming or quantising drum tracks, editing guitar tracks, using digital guitar tones or amp modellers. We’re focused on the making of the music, whereas a lot of modern bands’ main creative output is social media meme posting and “content creation” instead. If your drummer is a real funny guy that’s a bonus, but it’s not going to make a great song.
You cite Morbid Angel, Immolation and Timeghoul, which tells me immediately this isn’t just about heaviness, but atmosphere and disorientation too. Which of those elements mattered most when writing this EP?
For me atmosphere is the single most important element of a recording. It sets the tone and informs the aesthetic.
Timeghoul is a particularly telling reference because so much of their power came from unresolved tension rather than straightforward brutality. Was that sense of “unfinished unease” something you consciously chased?
Absolutely! Daz and I spent a lot of time considering dynamic and how to build tension while still providing enough resolve.
A lot of bands today claim to reject trends, yet still end up sounding shaped by them - cleaner productions, predictable structures, algorithmic heaviness. What did you deliberately avoid while making Fournier?
Overly polished production was the main thing that we tried to avoid. I actually recorded the entire EP using GarageBand and a very simple microphone and interface set up with the intention of chasing a more raw sound that lets the songwriting take centre stage.
The newer bands you cite, Hyperdontia, Phrenelith, Engulfed, all carry an obvious old-school spirit, but none of them are pure imitation. How important is that balance between preservation and mutation?
That balance is key for Fournier and the aforementioned bands here, again it’s about atmosphere and aesthetics both sonically and visually. Artists in all genres who get that balance right make better art in my opinion.
Your music is described as oppressive, but that word gets abused constantly in death metal. In your mind, what makes music genuinely oppressive rather than simply heavy?
It’s about song structure I believe. We prioritised the atmosphere and feeling of the songs rather than going for technical prowess or tonnes of flashy guitar leads, letting some riffs linger slightly longer and trying to build that tension.
The EP was written across two years. That’s a long gestation for four songs. Were these compositions constantly mutating, or was the delay more about refining the exact violence you wanted?
The main reason these songs took as long as they did is that at the beginning of this project I didn’t play guitar at all, I’m a drummer predominantly and spent the last 15 years playing drums in bands and touring internationally with my former band Tuscoma. These songs were really a vehicle for me to learn the instrument and as a result Daz and I worked them for a long time just the two of us and then took them to Jeff when they felt right.
There’s mention of “societal and environmental collapse”, which can easily slide into either vague abstraction or blunt messaging. Where do you position yourselves between those extremes?
Probably more on the blunt messaging end to be honest, the earth is fast becoming less and less inhabitable for humans as a species which only exacerbates the collapse of our social structure. I guess my angle on that is that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we’ll be gone and the universe won’t be any different for it.
The phrase “non-dualistic understanding of existence” stands out because it’s not a typical death metal talking point. Let me push on that: how does that worldview actually shape the songs?
For a genre named after and obviously so preoccupied with death it fascinates me that it isn’t more of a death metal talking point. Non-dualism shapes the songs mostly in lyrical content but also somewhat in the approach we took with crafting the atmosphere and dynamics of the songs.
Death metal often relies on binaries - life/death, order/chaos, sacred/profane. If you reject dualism, does that undermine some of the genre’s very foundation?
I love this question! I believe death metal exists in response to our cultural discomfort with death. In Western culture, death is a taboo subject. People view it as an end, or as a beginning, and not a fact that simply “is”. We aren’t escaping it. Death is the reason our brains perceive time. It is as important as birth, something universally celebrated and ritualised. Death metal is actually the perfect medium to explore those themes as it’s already used to talking about death without discomfort.
Jeff handling bass and drums gives this a strange structural weight - was the rhythm section written as its own force first, or built around the riffs?
The riffs came first by a long way, Daz and I had the songs written and structured on the guitars for at least a year before the rhythm section was added. Jeff was initially just going to record the drums which he had absolute freedom in how he wanted them arranged, this actually leads into the next question really well.
Quintin is credited for “sound design & immoral support”, which sounds half-joke, half-important. What role did that actually play in shaping the atmosphere?
It’s difficult to express just how vital Quintin is to this entire project. Quintin probably has the best taste in death metal of anybody I know and is an amazing multi-disciplinary artist, a musician, a painter, a tattoo artist, an illustrator and a fashion icon. It was always intended that Quintin would handle the logo and the visual design and I wanted him on bass too but he couldn’t commit to learning the songs and Jeff is extremely competent on the instrument so he handled that, while Quintin made the basis of the intro and outro which I added the synth layers and scream samples to. Quintin was the person we could constantly go to for a vibe check and to make sure things were pointing in the right directionю
New Zealand has always had an underground, but it’s never been a dominant death metal territory. Has isolation helped sharpen your sound, or made it harder to exist?
New Zealand is a funny place, it’s like a village at times especially when you’re part of a niche community like the metal scene. Sometimes it seems like we’re decades behind our European and American counterparts and other times we are the trendsetters, just look at how influential Ulcerate have been in the last decade. The isolation can also be a blessing because it means you’ve got to do a lot of things yourself and wear many hats if you want to achieve anything.
The production chain is interesting - recorded in New Zealand, mixed in Boston, mastered at GodCity Studio. That’s a long path for such a raw-sounding record. Did distance improve objectivity?
As this was my first time handling the recording I wanted to make sure some hands more experienced than my own had their way with it. I’ve worked in the studio and toured with Chris a few times in the past so he was the obvious choice to be that person.
Name one obscure death metal demo or EP that influenced FOURNIER more than people would expect.
Outer Reaches by Rude. I adore that EP which was also released by Caligari so when Caligari said they were keen to release our EP I was stunned.
There’s a growing trend of bands worshipping Incantation-style murk or Morbid Angel complexity without understanding why those records worked. Do you think death metal is currently in danger of becoming too self-referential?
Honestly if people are referencing Incantation and Morbid Angel then they’re on to the right stuff, I do agree however that it’s about so much more than just the murk or complexity. There’s a reason those two bands are still so widely referenced and it’s because they have back catalogues that reward the listener again and again.
At nearly twenty minutes, this EP feels compact but dense. Was that intentional - to leave listeners disoriented rather than fully satisfied?
Absolutely! Do you remember the first time you listened to Despise The Sun by Suffocation? It felt so compact yet so cut throat that the only choice was to listen to it on repeat.
When someone finishes Fournier, what should remain - the riffs, the atmosphere, the ideas... or simply the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong beneath everything?
I hope when someone finished Fournier their instinct is to listen to it again. Something is fundamentally wrong beneath everything, but the trick is acceptance.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me and showing some interest in Fournier.
Cheers,
Joe.
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