WITHERED's MIKE THOMPSON Talks About Upcoming Album

Annie Reuter of Spinner recently conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Mike Thompson of Georgia-based blackened doomsters WITHERED. A excerpt from the chat follows below.

Spinner: What's the craziest thing you've seen on tour?

Mike Thompson: The craziest thing is when we toured with WATAIN in fall of '08. They always performed with animal blood that they'd pour all over them. They had a hard time finding some. In other words, they would party too late and couldn't wake up early enough to go to a butcher shop to get a gallon of pig's blood. When we went to Montreal, we watched them hunt pigeons in a parking lot on our day off. It was pretty awesome watching these super grim black metal guys that wore nothing but leather. They looked like a biker gang walking around. They're running around with garbage bags trying to scoop them up. That didn't work. Then they tried the old Acme box propped up on a stick with a string tied to it and that's how they caught their first pigeon. Then they went down to Chinatown and bought a sling shot and that was a done deal. We watched them catch, decapitate and bleed out three or four pigeons so they would have blood for that evening's performance.

Spinner: Your bio describes your upcoming release as, "how culture and society have greatly compromised humanity's potential to an extent of irreversible demise." What exactly do you mean by that and what can fans expect from your third album?

Mike Thompson: Fans can expect a continuation from our last album. The last album, "Folie Circulaire", the title translates to cycling madness. We used that term and the loose concept for the album to illustrate all the mistakes humanity makes. Culturally, socially, everything that has been inhibiting us as a species. Basically, everything that's wrong with it and how we're continually repeating the same mistakes generation by generation to varying degrees. And, that we're not making any progress or emotional, spiritual growth. People have a lack of personal discovery. All the social conditioning that goes on, especially in America, we're pretty guilty of that. The whole convenience approach: life needs to be easier, simpler, lazier. That's what's been detrimental to our progress. That's where we began with the last record conceptually and we're going to use as basis and continue off of. The new record deals with moral and spiritual dualities. It's more about exploring yourself. Isolating yourself mentally and emotionally and being able to break down barriers you have so you can conceptually understand any possible perspective. It's more about forcing yourself to be honest so you have a healthy spiritual path and you can make more emotional discoveries about yourself.

Spinner: What's your songwriting process?

Mike Thompson: Since me and the other vocalist are guitar players, we have a tendency to put the music first. Priority-wise, it's something that's natural with extreme metal because a lot of the vocals are indiscernible. The lyrics aren't very obvious and become a secondary aspect of the music. You have to leverage the musical mood and then accent it with vocal patterns to break things up. In other words, we usually start with the music. It's usually guitar riffs for general part concepts and then we work them through every possible approach and decide what it's going to achieve with the mood we're going for. We actually start with a mood in mind and try to build off that and find the best way to illustrate it musically and then further emphasize it with the vocals and the lyrics.

Read the entire interview from Spinner.