DEVILDRIVER Guitarist Discusses Upcoming 'Beast' Album In New Interview

Ashley Curtis of the Less Bright Eyes More Deicide music blog recently conducted an interview with guitarist Jeff Kendrick of Santa Barbara, California's DEVILDRIVER. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Less Bright Eyes More Deicide: You've released four albums so far, so was it difficult, musically and lyrically, not to retread old ground writing for the fifth album?

Jeff: That's a good question. I think yes because we've always been one of those bands who are very conscious of the material that's out there, we're very conscious of our own material and we don't want it to repeat itself — we're very conscious of that. That can happen to bands, I don't think it happens to us.

Less Bright Eyes More Deicide: How do you continue to make your material fresh?

Jeff: Just play all the time. You become a better musician and then your song writing becomes better. That's part of the process. You spend time working on it, practicing and honing your craft, you're going to get better.

Less Bright Eyes More Deicide: Is this what makes "Beast" fresh? How did you avoid making a "Pray For Villains Mk II"?

Jeff: I think "Pray For Villains", as far as song writing goes, is one of the most experimental things we've done, especially with the vocals. I think it turned out great, it's a heavy-as-hell record but it's a record that some people are unsure of their opinions on. It got great reviews — it got a 9 on Blabbermouth. Everyone has improved dramatically in all aspects. We write better songs, the solos are better, the drumming is superior. I think it's a heavier album than "Pray For Villains" and not quite as experimental. There are parts of the record that are experimental like "Pray For Villains" was but it's more of a balls-out, heavy record.

Less Bright Eyes More Deicide: Dez [Fafara, vocals] has gone on record to say it's more in the vein of "Last Kind Words". Would you agree with that?

Jeff: Yeah, I think so. We don't really end up repeating ourselves but we always take influence from those previous records. You listen to a band because they have a definitive style. Once they put out a certain amount of records, they have all these albums and you're like, "I know who that band is." Without repeating yourself, every record you do stays with you and influences you on your further material. There's stuff, like on the first record, that someone will end up writing and is influenced by that. We just generally write what comes to us and we obsess over it forever and we're always recording and always writing. We put as much effort into it as we possibly can. The new record is basically done today — it's completely mastered, mixed, everything, DONE — so we're gonna be delivering that and we'll go on from there.

Less Bright Eyes More Deicide: How much input did your producer, Mark Lewis, have on "Beast"?

Jeff: A lot. A lot of good input. Great guitar player, great engineer, he's just great at his job. He knows metal really well and he knows songs and he definitely helped. A lot of our material, when we write and when we go and record, it is as we demoed. We demo everything before we go into a recording studio and a lot of times we basically don't want to replicate it. We record demos that are full length, like an album. They get about as far as they can go and then we go into the studio and do it all over again.

Read the entire interview from Less Bright Eyes More Deicide.