Lost In Metal: Valient Thorr

As the story goes, Valient Thorr crash landed into North Carolina on a space shuttle hurtling through the galaxy from Venus. In the process, their Time Machine was reduced to scrap and the band has been stuck here ever since. Yet sans Time Machine and Space Shuttle, the band still rock like no one else on this side of the Milky Way. Traversing their new planet, Valient Thorr toured with this past summer’s Warped Tour and recently concluded a jaunt with the Aquabats. They managed to expose some different crowds to their patented brand of rocking cosmic metal. Now the question stands. Are they the saviors of fun, old school metal or simply lost space travelers? Vocalist Valient Himself provides some otherworldly insight into the crash, his band’s music, and the future. Let the “Total Universe Man,” speak!

Metal N More: Can you describe the writing and recording processes of your latest album “Total Universe Man?”

Valient Himself: A lot of that actually was a little dated because it was written around the time of the last election of the United States President. So a lot of the songs are about the war that we’re in and electing a new presidential leader. It’s about politics and things that we feel are political disasters. Essentially, things that people are starting to agree with more and more, which makes us happy. It was only until it turned into “Shitsville” that everybody in the world started agreeing. I guess you have to smell the shit before you see it sometimes. Our first record, “Stranded on Earth,” was the origin story of Valient Thorr. That wasn’t mass released like this record was. So a lot of times we end up talking about the origin of how we came to Venus and so forth. This record is about what’s going on in the present and the new record that we’re working on now is about the future of what’s going to happen in this time stream. It’s also about future time streams that we have been to and the way that things could work out if people don’t make wiser decisions about the shit that’s going down on Earth right now.

Metal N More: History repeating itself?

Valient Himself: Absolutely, the whole world is cyclical like that. At one point, Valient Thorr had technology to go and travel different time streams. We could go and make different choices and then go back and change the choices that we made in order to see which one would work out, but we crashed. Now we don’t have that technology anymore; but you make wiser decisions and you learn from your mistakes. It’s a good thing to be an Earth man, if you’re smart about it and do learn from your mistakes.

Metal N More: Tell me about the music a little bit, there’s definitely a lot of jamming going on in there.

Valient Himself: Well we do jam. We had a lot of time to jam, eons and eons. If you look now in this time stream there are bands like Early Man and 3 Inches of Blood that are sort of like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and all of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal Bands. Now in this time stream, there’s a new wave of North American Heavy Metal going down and I’d like to think that we’re a part of that. The only thing that killed heavy metal and rock ‘roll was when the roll lost the soul, man. Pussy Music came about with monster ballads and shit like that. They started selling rock ‘n roll to chicks.

Metal N More: Right, in the 80’s it seems it all went bad.

Valient Himself: It totally killed it. You can’t market music to a certain type of person; you have to market it to everybody. You have to say, “Look this is good for everybody.” This isn’t just chick shit that makes chicks feel good. This is shit that makes everyone feel good. That’s what heavy metal is.

Metal N More: Plus you can cover a wide range of emotions with Metal that you can’t necessarily cover in the same manner with other genres of music.

Valient Himself: That’s right. The English language can only account for 20% of the 1400 emotions that you have, so you have to rely on sonic communication. Not necessarily what kind it is, but Rock ‘N Roll has the vibration that makes you gyrate, that makes you sweat and when you grease those wheels, you’re untangling the web of communication that’s interfered with everyday. Like when a little kid’s up in another little kid’s face screaming, “Fuck you motherfucker, I’ll kill you.” You’ve go to break the two little kids up. Even if in the end if, they still disagree with each other, they can still understand where they’re both coming from and it definitely helps.

Metal N More: Having mentioned the concept a bit, when are you going into the studio for the next record?

Valient Himself: The first week in February, we’re moving our underground headquarters in North Carolina to California for a few months. We’re going to have a remote satellite studio here and work on it. It’s weird because we’re exploring the West as explorers right now. We’ve been all over but primarily since we crashed we’ve been in the East part of the U.S. so we’re excited as new ground is being broken.

Metal N More: It’s a completely different world too. What’s the significance of the resurgence of old school metal?

Valient Himself: There are always going to be circle pits and there’s always going to be aggression in music. However, when you see a crowd of people who are all excited about the music and just headbanging at the same time, it brings them to a place that might not even exist, but they all still believe in it simply for the fact that it feels so good. That is a phenomenon. When you can be taken away from all your problems without some kind of drug, but rather with something that is just a good, amazing escape. To be a part of Rock ‘N Roll and Heavy Metal it just feels, I don’t know. What happened to it? What happened to the bangers? I feel like a pioneer. Yet what we’re doing has always been done on Earth, that’s where we learned it. It’s like the lost colony. We came here and all of the headbangers are gone. Something happened to them. They killed them, they hid them, and buried their bones. We dug ‘em up.

Metal N More: Or they just got too angry and lost that fun, positive sensibility.

Valient Himself: Right, people are never all going to get it. So we’ll always have a mission to keep going, but it’s killer to see people vibing on it. We can walk into a room where maybe 19 people out of 2500 have heard of us and when we split all of them are like, “What the fuck man?” Regardless of whether they’re heavy into it or it just freaked ‘em out. We got them talking and they remember it because they haven’t seen shit like that and they tell us.

Metal N More: So after the next record are you guys going to tour the metal circuit more?

Valient Himself: It would be awesome. It’s weird who we play with now. It’s not a bad thing. I like playing for diverse crowds, but I think it might have been lucky for us to play the type of gigs we have. It would be sicker to play with more metal or not necessarily metal but whatever. There’s a crazy amount of Rock ‘N Roll bands out there too. You see and hear all of this big, huge mainstream music and it’s just fucking garbage compare to all of these bands that are playing their asses off and sweating and really preaching it and giving it to. Not reproducing the shit on the radio because they gave up on the radio. They gave up on this mass produced horseshit and they started speaking like intelligent politicians or preachers or comedians. Not preachers necessarily in a religious sense, but someone who is riling the community to get out there and make a difference. The people who are influenced by comedians and smart individuals are the rock ‘n rollers who are going to take you somewhere. Not the dudes who are doing the same old horsehit. That’s probably where the charisma that people dig comes from.

 

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