Last month Eenzy caught up with Atlanta-based chaotic hardcore luminaries Apostle for a heartfelt hobnob after a show. The band gets into how they adapted to losing a member and becoming a trio, how they support each other creatively and emotionally in the band, and they land some solid burns at the expense of jazz and black metal (genres famous for their sense of humor). They're currently supporting their latest release Liminal. Listen to the interview down at the bottom or on our Spoofy channel and read the edited transcription below.
[Fan crashes interview to tell the band how great the show was]
Eenz: Hey guys, Eenzy here outside 529 once again, this time with Apostle. You guys wanna introduce yourselves?
Michael: Hello my name is Michael and I play bass in the band.
Murice: I'm Murice I do guitar and vocals.
Evan: I'm Evan - I play drums.
Eenz: I just sat through a pretty bitchin' show with you guys, Malevich which is another local blackened grind band, Hexis - a great band from Denmark, and.. I forget the last band actually. But I have questions about your band so it doesn't matter. My first question is about the name: where did the name Apostle come from? Is there a story behind it? Did you just pick a word out of the dictionary like Health? What's up?
Evan: It was kinda something I was sitting on in my early 20's, I was going through my kind of angsty, atheist-phase. To be totally honest I was like 'Yeah, it'd be cool to have a band in a chaotic and abrasive style kind of tongue-in-cheek named Apostle'. Honestly, I just thought it sounded kinda cool at the time, and it stuck. When we started playing with Cam when the band actually formed, I had that name in my back pocket from over the years and was like 'what if we just named it Apostle?' and it just kinda stuck.
Eenz: Cool, I like it - the bible's pretty metal in certain parts. Other parts are pretty fucked up, but whatever [editorial note: dude, the metal parts are super fucked up too]
Second question: You guys blend a lot of different metal genres. I hear like grindcore, maybe some crust, definitely blackgaze, maybe some mathy parts. How would you describe your style of music and the bands you're influenced by in this project?
Murice: I always just like put us in the category of like chaotic hardcore, just cause it's an easy catch-all term. I'm sure all of our influences vary, but mine are stuff like Yaujta, Sumac, Infernal Coil, Iron Lung, Coke Bust, The Chariot. Just names like that - listening to them really pushed me to like try to do something more with the music I'm making.
Michael: One of the cool things about this band is that we all have different influences and we listen to a lot of stuff. For me, especially when I started playing bass instead of guitar, a lot of like Glassjaw - the Material Control record especially, and things like Botch and Russian Circles - just Brian Cook's bass tone and how he uses a lot of chords, even like Jawbreaker, how their bass player would use a lot of chords to get a thicker sound. When we went down to a three-piece I just wanted to fill as much sound as possible, so for me it was more of a tonal thing, like this band with just a guitar and bass player were able to bring a thick sound I want to try to bring to this band.
Evan: Not to sound cliché, but it really is just like expression. I myself am a huge jazz nerd to a certain extent, I mean Tony Williams is my favorite drummer and probably my biggest source of inspiration. But like Murice was saying, the more extreme forms of punk - grindcore and powerviolence-type bands. You mentioned blackgaze, like yeah the atmosphere is indicative of a little black metal in there, but I'm really just trying to push myself as a drummer and get faster at playing blast beats cleanly just hoping to support the songs and further create an atmosphere for the melting pot of shit we have, the stew we have going.
Michael: Just to jump in there,
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