They say that sometimes great adversity leads to something special. That is certainly the case when you consider new Australian blackened death metal outfit Black Lava. While Australia was enduring some of the harshest pandemic lockdowns in the world the inception and birth of Black Lava came to life when ex Ne Obliviscaris drummerDan Presland and Hadal Maw guitarist Ben Boyle decided that they wanted to work together again.
Soon they realised that this was going to be more than just a jam session or a one off project so they recruited Rob Watkins to be vocalist and Blackhelm’s bassist Tim Anderson to join the fold. Soon work began on their debut album, titled Soul Furnace, which is out now.
“I guess you could say that we really started as a bit of a frustration band,” laughs Dan Presland. “With all the lockdowns and stuff Ben and I just got together to do some stuff because we were in this void where it felt like everything was always being postponed or cancelled. We got together to jam but it quickly evolved and soon we found that we had three or four tracks ready to go. We sent them to Rod and within five minutes he was on board and then Tim jumped on board as well. But yeah, it just spawned from having a jam to this full on band.”
Of course putting a band together during Covid lockdowns wasn’t always going to be simple though – especially when it came to trying to work together. “At the start the lockdowns made it tough,” explains Presland. “But towards the end it became easier. We started recording on Boxing Day 2021. Ben and I got together in August and then by September we had a line-up… we were pushing things along pretty quickly. It was easy having my own studio to do it because we didn’t have to rely on whether something was open or whether someone could make it out there and such – it was all at my house and that made it really easy.”
With the recording process put to the side for a moment I start to talk to Dan about the song-writing process because that happened right in the middle of the lockdowns. “Yeah well Ben does a majority of the material,” Presland says. “Then he sends it around and we may jam and tweak how many times we repeat something or we might have some trials and errors but really it was mostly Ben constructing the songs as the lone songwriter and then we all put our own individual parts on top and I found it easy to together because we were all in Melbourne. With my last band we were all international and that was always a nightmare, so this is pretty easy.”
“In the terms of the lyric writing Rob has done a great job visualising a world for this band,” Presland says as we begin to touch on some of the themes of the album. “He has created an image and a vision behind it and I am very excited about that and I am enjoying the stories and the landscapes that he has painted with his lyrics. Rob has a lot of input with the video clips as well and he pretty much came up with a lot of the ideas and the plots that you see in the video clips. He really has done a very great job and like you said it really is a fantasy world that he has created, and it is quite fun to do the video clips. It is a lot of fun to act them out and see how they play out.”
One of the things that is not easy is to describe Black Lava’s sound. Presland laughs when I say that I have struggled to find a description when people have asked me over recent weeks. “I think we all had a pretty good idea what we were going for,” he explains. “The production that we go was very structured and we knew what we were aiming for – and that was more of an organic and honest approach to the music and our mixer does everything analogue so really it has more of an old school vibe. There is no editing on the instruments or any of that stuff – it is very honest when it comes to the performances. I think that really adds to a very unique energy around the album and I think we just really wanted to do something less intense to what we normally do.”
“I think we ended up with a more rock n roll style of things,” he continues. “I know Ben and I are normally known for the more extreme metal kind of stuff, so it was really a refreshing change for us the way that we did this record.”
As our discussion goes on we talk more about how Dan feels with the album out there for the public to hear. “I’ve been really excited,” he says laughing. “When it came out it had been three years for me since I had been able to play live and five years since I had released and album. I’ve been excited to get back into things and see what opens up for us, we really want to push for some tours and the chance to get our music out to as many places as we possibly can.
Soul Furnace is out now.
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