KARL SANDERS Talks NILE's Longevity And Breaking Through In Early 2000s: 'We Were Doing What Made Us Happy'

By David E. Gehlke

NILE had a radically different recipe for death metal success when they fully arrived on the scene in 1998 with their "Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka" debut. To start, the band formed in 1993, just as death metal started its steady decline. Secondly, they were South Carolina, a few States removed from the death metal hotbed of Tampa, Florida. And third, NILE played Egyptian-themed death metal, not exactly the kind of topical matter the scene was accustomed to hearing. Yet "Catacombs" quickly resonated for its ravaging brutality and exotic sounds, which, compounded with a heavy touring workload, helped NILE become one of the few death metal bands to be on the upswing at the dawn of the century.

Circa 2024, NILE is on its tenth studio album, "The Underworld Awaits Us All", and is still providing high-quality, technical and brutal death metal with all of the expected thematic trimmings. Founding member, guitarist and vocalist Karl Sanders and drummer George Kollias may have some new faces around them, but the results are impressively the same, prompting BLABBERMOUTH.NET to get Sanders on the horn for a chat.

Blabbermouth: Do you mind if we started with the song title — and I'll try to get it right — of "Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes"? How much fun are you having with it right now?

Karl: "It's been so much fun because the people that I talk to take up the baton and say that title always have a blast with it. [Laughs] It's the best part of my day when people say that title. [Laughs]"

Blabbermouth: Is it one of those things, like, "This is our tenth album. We can call our songs whatever we want?"

Karl: "That's in there somewhere. There is that element; it's in there. [Laughs] But it really came from when I picked up the 'Book Of The Dead', which is my go-to songwriting method. I pick up one of my Egypt books and open it to a random page. And whatever I find there, that's going to be a song, but it doesn't always work like that. Most of the time, I open a page and there's nothing there to work with. So, 'Okay, fail. Try again tomorrow.' After ten or eleven times, there's something I can work with. This one was chapter 181, 'Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes' that had that title. How is that not a song title? [Laughs] It's a metal song waiting to be written. If anyone is going to write that song, we're going to do it."

Blabbermouth: Did you imagine NILE would make it to a tenth album? Has the process gotten harder or easier over the years?

Karl: "No, we never thought we'd make any more than the first one [1998's 'Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka']. We were happy. We were thankful to the metal gods when we had the chance to make the first record. At that point, everything we had strived to do for years as a struggling band was realized. We got to make a metal album. Okay! Life mission accomplished! Everything after that is a bonus gift from the metal gods and metal fans because unless there are people who like whatever music it is you're making, then you have nothing, right? I think it's not so much our tenth album, although it is, but it's also NILE fans' tenth album."

Blabbermouth: Can we talk about George and what he brings to the band? At this point, his drumming is so integral to NILE that it's hard to separate the two. Does he have the green light to play whatever he wants?

Karl: "It's more like we say, 'Okay, George. Here's the demo we've carefully constructed.' Then he does what he wants. We don't ask him to do whatever he wants—he just does it and that's okay. [Laughs] As long as he's making contributions…he plays from the heart. He plays from the soul. As long as he's putting himself in there, that's what I think makes it real."

Blabbermouth: Does he ever come up with something to where you ask, "George, can you pull it back a bit?"

Karl: [Laughs] "Wow, I'm struggling to find a tactful answer to that. Of course, it happens, but it also happens the other way. There are times when George will say, 'What the fuck is this thing? You guys are lunatics. No.' [Laughs] It goes both ways in a band. There's give and take. I think one of the things that we really like about working with George is he's not afraid of give-and-take. There's got to be some back and forth. There's got to be a few, 'I see it this way.' 'I see it that way.' Somehow, we put our heads together and make a piece of music for the sake of the music, not necessarily for, 'It has to be this way.' Or, 'It has to be that way.' It can be however we say it is. If you're working together and on the same page and have respect for each other, it can work. People can do things together."

Blabbermouth: It sounds like there's an immense amount of trust between you and George at this stage.

Karl: "It will be 20 years since he joined the band this October. That was something he and I talked about the other day: The level of trust that has been built. Trust is not an easy thing. There are all kinds of reasons to distrust people in the music business. 'Trust' is a precious thing that doesn't just fall out of the sky. People build it together. It's a thing that takes time and it's a thing of value, a thing to be cherished. I'm really thankful to be working with George. He's a great guy. He's a great player. I can't imagine doing NILE without George. If that day ever comes, do I want to find another drummer? No. If that day ever comes, then I know it's time to do something else."

Blabbermouth: That's a bold statement, Karl.

Karl: "I think for quite a long time, what we're presenting with our music is the cooperation between George and Karl. That's the backbone of these songs. When you listen to them, it's the guitar player and the drummer and the vocalists all working together. Do I really want to take George Kollias out of the equation? That's no fun. Why would I want to do that? I like working with George. [Laughs]"

Blabbermouth: If we think about the new album, the title track is the song that immediately comes to mind. Can you go into its mid-section where you have the chanting?

Karl: "That part is a lot of fun. It started with the riff—like a lot of things do. As we were playing that, there was a break in between the guitar solos. We knew this was going to be a circle pit section of the song. So we went, 'Okay, well, we should put some vocals here. What should go here?' It should be a part that's fun for the audience and gives them a break from the shreddy guitar solos. It's hard to audience-participate in a shredding guitar solo. We wanted to make sure that we included the fans and the listeners in the fun because, to me, part of the metal spirit is the feeling between the audience and the band when everybody's on the same page together. This would be a part that brings people together and on point."

Blabbermouth: How are you dividing vocals these days? It's one of the key elements of your sound — the "three-headed" vocal monster.

Karl: "I like it. I think it breaks up the listener's perspective, causing it to be not always the same thing all the time. You get a little variety going on. I think it's also when band members have to contribute to vocals; they're more aware of what's going on in the song because they're singing, too. Everybody is involved, so everybody has to go to that next level of care and involvement. I think it really helps the—I don't want to use the word 'democracy' of the band—but commitment. If everybody in the band has to sing, like, whatever it is you can do, we're going to find a way to put it in there because you should be participating. If you can do something and you're not doing it? Wait a minute. [Laughs] Everybody who can sing has to sing. That's the way I see it. I still do my vocal parts. I have a voice that is identifiable. I'm the one who does the low stuff. Zach [Jeter, guitar] has a pretty nice range where he can do the mids and highs and even some lows as well. He takes that register. Now that we've got Dan Vadim Von [bass], he has a similar range. It lets us cover a lot of different elements of NILE. We have three guys now who can carry the ball. We're going to make use of it."

Blabbermouth: If we go way back, was that originally a Chief [Spires, bass], Dallas [Toler-Wade, guitar] and Karl thing? Was it something born out of necessity, or did it happen organically?

Karl: "It was fairly organic. When we first started and were just a three-piece, it was me, Chief and Pete Hammoura [drums]. No one was doing any low, death metal vocals. I was a fan of early Chris Barnes [CANNIBAL CORPSE], the guy from INCANTATION [Craig Pillard], who was super-low, but there was no one in my band doing it. I wasn't a vocalist. I looked around the room. There was Chief and there was Pete. I was like, 'Motherfucker. If I'm going to hear these in our music, I guess I have to learn how to do them.' I learned how to do them and for those early years, like from '93 to about '96 or '97 or whenever before Dallas joined, it was the two of us — Chief and I. Then, when Dallas joined, it was three guys. All of a sudden, 'Whoa. Now we have even more possibilities.' Making records was fun because we'd have the lyric sheet and we'd go, 'Okay. Who wants to do what?' It was a fun process. Now, it's a little more studied. We plan that quite a bit more than what we used to. We leave less to chance these days."

Blabbermouth: Do you enjoy singing?

Karl: "I enjoy it. It's fun. I've learned how to do it. At first, I learned a lot about breath control because the low-octave voice takes twice as much air for the exact same thing. Breath control really freakin' matters, especially when you're doing it live. In the studio, you can catch a breath in between every take, but when you have to do the whole thing live, you have to factor, 'Okay. Where am I going to breathe?' It matters. In martial arts, they say, 'If you can't breathe, you can't fight.' It's kind of like, 'If you can't breathe, you can't make it to the end of a death metal song.'"

Blabbermouth: And it's not like you're playing simple music. You have to left-brain/right-brain the whole thing.

Karl: "The only way to conquer that is with old-fashioned rehearsal. Get in a rehearsal room and do it enough times to where it's muscle memory. Some of the older NILE songs that we've been playing for years on tour are so deep in muscle memory that I don't even think about them anymore. My hands will automatically do what they're supposed to do and if I can't remember the words, as soon as I'm close to the mic, I know when my mouth is supposed to open and do whatever it is it needs to do. I won't be consciously thinking about it. I just do it."

Blabbermouth: We talked about 30 years of NILE, but if we rewind a little over 20 years, this was when NILE broke through at a time when not many death metal bands were breaking through. What usually comes to mind when thinking about that era?

Karl: "I remember it was on the downswing, but we didn't care. We were doing what made us happy. Whether it was fashionable or not was irrelevant. We were some guys from South Carolina, which is a nowhere place in the middle of the Bible Belt, who cares what happens there? If we never achieved wide recognition, so fucking what? It doesn't matter to us. What matters is that we get the choice of what we want to do. That's what matters. The fact that somehow history collided, and we came at just the right time as things were dipping out and they swung back up on the pendulum was fortuitous timing, but it didn't matter to us. We just wanted to play our music. We were thrilled. 'Okay, we get to go on tour.' [NILE's first label] Relapse did work hard. I can say that about the Relapse years. Those guys, as crazy as they were, they were willing to work hard."

Blabbermouth: How tied in were you to the Tampa scene? Or, did you feel disconnected because you were from South Carolina?

Karl: "We corresponded in the early years. The underground was basically dudes writing letters to each other and you put whatever cassette tapes in or stuffed it with flyers with whatever band was trying to promote themselves. We made a lot of friends that way. We weren't a Tampa band. We only got down there to go play. [Laughs] We played at the Brass Mug. Every band had to play at the Brass Mug. We were thrilled when we got our chance to play at the Brass Mug. That was quite something. It's mind-blowing. If you're an underground death metal band playing at the Brass Mug, if you look across the room, you recognize all those dudes because they're in all the bands you listen to! Or, staying at the bar drinking and not giving a fuck. We had a lot of that in the early years, but people did not realize it. Somewhere around 'Neprhen-Ka', in the middle of the tour, things started changing. I remember playing at the Brass Mug and looking up and three or four rows back was Chuck Schuldiner [DEATH] standing there, listening. I was like, 'How about that? Wow.'"

Blabbermouth: Not a bad guy to have to watch your set.

Karl: "It was a profound moment. Chuck was a pioneer. Some dudes are pioneers then some dudes are capitalizers. He's a pioneer."