Getting High On Fire

One of America's heaviest bands returns, reinvigorated

High On Fire (L-R: Jeff Matz, Matt Pike, Coady Willis)

Before we begin: My latest jazz column for Stereogum is up. It includes a profile of saxophonist Kenny Garrett (you can hear our full interview on the latest BA podcast) and reviews of albums by Melissa Aldana, Matthew Shipp, Isaiah Collier, Dave Douglas, Jeremy Pelt and more. Here’s the link.

I also recently wrote an extensive guide to the work of English garage-rock maniac Billy Childish for the Shfl, and it’s just been published. Reviewing 20 of his literally scores of albums gave me a real appreciation for the shocking breadth of his catalog. Here’s that link.

Also: Nate Patrin, a friend both on the Internet and in real life (we saw an amazing Kvelertak show together once upon a time, and hung out in Minneapolis once when I was considering moving there), has started his own newsletter. His latest entry is a long essay about taste and the rhetoric surrounding it, and all the problems it causes. Go read it, and subscribe (and maybe buy his books).

I’m not someone who goes to see a band over and over on purpose. Most of the time, for me, once or maybe twice is enough. But I saw Motörhead and Iron Maiden five times each, Megadeth four times, Opeth four times, and Amon Amarth at least four times (I might be forgetting one). And I realized the other day that I’ve seen High On Fire five times, too. That surprised me, because I wouldn’t necessarily call them one of my favorite metal bands. I don’t even listen to them that often. But, to paraphrase Ash from Alien, I admire their purity.

High On Fire are about as pure a metal band as it’s possible to be. They’ve been at it for over a quarter of a century, and within the scene, they’re extremely well regarded, and/but nobody who doesn’t live and breathe metal has any idea they exist at all.

High On Fire is guitarist Matt Pike’s band, formed after the breakup of the extremely Black Sabbath-indebted stoner doom trio Sleep. Sleep almost made it; their second album, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, released on Earache, was enough of a cult success to get them signed to London Records, but they followed it up by spending literal years writing and recording a one-hour song about weed, “Dopesmoker,” which the label promptly shelved. It was eventually released, and some people like it a lot. Sleep reunited in 2009 or so, played some shows, and made a third album, The Sciences, in 2018. They still perform from time to time, but High On Fire is Pike’s main project.

Their debut album, The Art of Self Defense, was released on the late Frank Kozik’s Man’s Ruin label in 2000. (It’s subsequently been reissued, first on Tee Pee and then on Southern Lord.) It established them instantly as very different from Sleep. Supported by bassist George Rice and drummer Des Kensel, Pike’s songs were still slow and doomy, but they roiled with aggression. The music came at you like a mudslide, the riffs hypnotic and sinuous and the drums like an unceasing roll of thunder. His vocals were a hoarse croak, clearly in the tradition of Motörhead’s Lemmy but with a kind of incantatory desperation.

They made three albums for Relapse between 2002 and 2007, evolving slowly but perceptibly each time. Surrounded By Thieves was produced by Billy Anderson, who’d also worked on all of Sleep’s albums and The Art of Self Defense. The songs were often faster than their early material; “Hung, Drawn and Quartered” flew by at Motörhead speed, and “Speedwolf” showcased cleaner guitars, suggesting that Pike had been listening to Mastodon.

The follow-up, 2005’s Blessed Black Wings, was stunningly heavy. Original bassist George Rice had left, and Joe Preston, who’d also worked with Earth, Sunn O))) and the Melvins, was on bass. The album was recorded at Chicago’s Electrical Audio, with Steve Albini engineering, and his legendary drum sound was in full effect. This is a thunderous record. The guitars roared, too, but in a surprising development, Pike’s vocals were substantially improved; on anthems like “Brother in the Wind” and “Anointing of Seer,” he wrote actual melodies and sung them.

Their next album, 2007’s Death is This Communion, can be recognized now as the beginning of High On Fire’s bid for the big leagues. It was produced by Jack Endino, who’d spearheaded many crucial recordings of the grunge era, and it had a cleaner, more propulsive sound than Blessed Black Wings. The music was more high-energy than ever, due in part to new bassist Jeff Matz, formerly of punk band Zeke and something of a multi-instrumentalist; on the instrumental “Khanrad’s Wall,” he added 12-string guitar and lute(!).

In 2010, the band left Relapse and signed with eOne, a decidedly more corporate label (they started out as the indie Koch, and are currently known as MNRK, pronounced “monarch”; at the time High On Fire joined the roster, the company’s full name was literally Entertainment One). Their eOne debut, Snakes for the Divine, was produced by Greg Fidelman, who’d worked on Metallica’s Death Magnetic and Slayer’s World Painted Blood, and of those three albums, it could be argued that Snakes sounds the best. Its opening title track features a thrilling Pike guitar figure that sounds like his tribute to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” and Matz’s bass is absolutely huge. The album’s next two songs, “Frost Hammer” and “Bastard Samurai,” complete a one-two-three punch that will leave you panting on the floor. The rest of the album’s eight tracks are standard HoF fare, but Fidelman’s cleaned-up production almost makes them into music you could play for people who don’t have any tattoos at all.

High On Fire have been with eOne/MNRK ever since, and have made four more studio albums (and a pretty good live set, Spitting Fire Live, unfortunately split into Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 for fan-milking reasons). All of the studio recordings — 2012’s De Vermis Mysteriis, 2015’s Luminiferous, 2018’s Electric Messiah, and the brand-new Cometh the Storm — have been produced by Kurt Ballou. The guitarist for arty hardcore band Converge, Ballou’s production work is mostly in the realms of hardcore, punk, and noisy rock; High On Fire are one of the most straightforwardly metallic bands he works with. And the first three albums they did together all kind of blur together, frankly. There were no membership changes, they used the same studio every time, and Ballou applied his trademark sound to the music.

Like Albini, he’s got a real way with drums, giving them a ferocious wallop and seeming to build the mix around them. But unlike Greg Fidelman, Kurt Ballou doesn’t seem to care whether the records he works on are “hits” in the conventional sense. As a result, while there are some great riffs on these albums, and the music is as dense and crushing as a rockslide, there aren’t many memorable songs. Which makes it frankly fucking astonishing that Electric Messiah, specifically its title track, won High On Fire a goddamn Grammy award for Best Metal Performance in 2019.

How does a song like that win a Grammy? It’s unfathomable. But it happened. That was pretty much the sole highlight of a rough stretch for the band, too. Just as they were about to hit the road in support of the album in November 2018, Pike developed a serious problem with one of his toes, which eventually had to be amputated. Tour dates were cancelled, and he showed up at the Grammy ceremony walking with a cane. Then, in June 2019, founding drummer Des Kensel left the band, replaced for live dates by Nick Parks of the band Gaytheist. Things seemed to be at least somewhat back on track, and Pike’s personal life was on the upswing (he got married in August of that year)…but then the pandemic hit.

Unable to tour or do much of anything else, Pike came up with the solo project Pike vs the Automaton, released in 2022. There were a few High On Fire-esque rant-and-roar tracks, but there were also psychedelic tinges and even some acoustic numbers, and guest appearances from Jeff Matz, Brent Hinds of Mastodon, former Lord Dying drummer Jon Reid, and guitarist Todd Burdette of crust/sludge band Tragedy, among others. It would have been an interesting footnote in his career, but likely not much more.

Unfortunately for him, when giving interviews in support of the record, Pike swerved way off the road and went deep into the weeds of conspiracy theory. He told the Quietus’ writer, “You know what — you know what’s true? It’s when they call it ‘misinformation,’ then you know it’s true, because that's what they’re scared of anybody knowing. Or ‘debunked’: ‘That’s been debunked.’ Anything that’s like that: you’re being lied to.” He also spoke of his longtime interest in the writings of David Icke.

Icke, for those who don’t know, is a former British soccer player and sports journalist who went insane sometime in the late 1980s. He’s written and self-published a shelf full of books in which he claims that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings known as the Archons (aka the Anunnaki) have taken over Earth, and that a race of human-Archon hybrids — reptilian shape-shifters — are the Illuminati who rule modern civilization in secret. Icke believes the British royal family and all US presidents are reptilians, as are several celebrities. This would all be funny, but a lot of Icke’s writing has strong anti-Semitic under- and overtones, which has led to its/his embrace by right-wing goons and maniacs, and worldwide condemnation by just about everyone else.

(To be scrupulously fair, some people who’ve spent significant time reading and investigating Icke defend him against this charge, claiming that he’s not saying “alien lizards” as code for Jews; when he says “alien lizards,” he means fucking alien lizards. Because he’s insane.)

Pike has included imagery drawn straight from Icke’s writings in his lyrics going back to Death Is This Communion, if not earlier. He said in an interview with Ultimate Guitar that the song “Snakes for the Divine,” from that 2010 album, “is based on the premise that Adam and Eve weren’t the first people on Earth, and Adam having a wife that was a Reptilian named Lilith. They were the first two people to take the reptilian DNA, and make shape-shifting human beings that go between the fourth-dimensional, the Anunnaki, and human beings. Eventually, from ancient Mesopotamia, this spawned a thing called the Illuminati — the enlightened ones — coming up through the centuries, and choosing the kings, controlling your media, controlling your banking, blah blah blah.”

Pike isn’t the only metal musician to find lyrical inspiration in Icke’s writings. Scott “Wino” Weinrich of the Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, the Hidden Hand and other bands has talked about Icke to me, and there are numerous other bands who have written songs, even whole albums, about reptilian control of humanity, blah blah blah. But some are obviously joking, and few have been as voluble on the subject as Pike.

In another 2022 interview, he told an NPR writer, “I am not an antisemite…I’m not a racist. I’m not anything. I’m Matt Pike. I’m trying to make the world a better place through my music.” But he continued to talk about “Zionist bankers” as part of the gigantic web of crazy bullshit he either believes, or finds entertaining to discuss, or both. The writer described a man who “didn’t seem to know what he actually believed, as if he were just offering up provocations without considering the way they interacted with one another or, frankly, reality.”

That assessment makes sense to me. I’ve met and spoken to Matt Pike, and have read multiple interviews with him. I’ve even overcome my general apathy/hostility toward lyrics, and read some of High On Fire’s. And my impression is that, not unlike former (no, the “reunion” doesn’t count) Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo, who’s also gotten himself in trouble more than a few times over the years by saying really dumb shit, Matt Pike’s just… not that smart. How much of what he’s read he “really believes” and how much he just thinks is awesome to contemplate, and makes good lyrical subject matter, is kind of beside the point, because if/when you ask him about it, you’re going to get a response that’s half-articulate at best. And what Matt Pike is really good at is writing and playing monster guitar riffs and face-flaying solos.

But perhaps he’s learned a lesson from the controversies of 2022. Because High On Fire put out a new album last week, and not only is it their best work in nearly 15 years, it also seems to be 100% Icke-free. I’ve read the lyrics to every song on Cometh the Storm, and there are no references to Anunnaki, reptilians, bankers, or any type of conspiracy at all, frankly. There are songs about smoking weed, driving muscle cars, riding motorcycles, beating people up, battlefield carnage, and Egyptian mythology. Which makes me happy, because those are all things I can ignore and focus on the music.

Touring drummer Nick Parks is no longer a member of High On Fire. He’s been replaced by Coady Willis of Big Business and formerly of the dual-drummer lineup (the best lineup) of the Melvins. And Willis’s drumming is one of several factors that makes Cometh the Storm the best High On Fire album since Snakes for the Divine, and in some ways a near-direct sequel to The Art of Self Defense.

As mentioned above, the band worked with Kurt Ballou again, but the addition of Willis has changed the chemistry in a big way. In the press materials, the producer says, “It’s interesting, whenever there’s a lineup change in a band. It can take a little while to rebuild. But it’s also an opportunity to reinvigorate the band and I think that’s what’s happened here.”

When he was with the Melvins, Willis and Dale Crover set up their kits so that they shared one giant floor tom, and during live performances, they sounded like a whole drum corps, pounding out tumbling, martial beats. All on his own, Willis adds that same whomp to Cometh the Storm, letting air into the rhythms and giving the music a kind of heavy swing that will remind listeners of John Bonham and Bill Ward. Pike and Matz have responded by writing more slow, chugging songs than on any High On Fire album in two decades. Although there are fast songs here, the best ones, like the title track and “Burning Down” and “Sol’s Golden Curse,” have the throbbing pulse and wandering spirit of The Art of Self Defense.

Even the faster tracks benefit from Willis’s approach to rhythm and time, though. The album opener, “Lambsbread,” might be the most aggro song about smoking pot I’ve ever heard, and “The Beating” and “Lightning Beard” are clearly drawing their energy from punk, not thrash.

There are some real sonic surprises on Cometh the Storm. “Hunting Shadows” has one of the most melodic, anthemic melodies Pike’s ever written, never mind sung; the main riff sounds like something Tony Iommi would have written for Black Sabbath circa Sabbath Bloody Sabbath or Sabotage, and the vocals are almost Ozzy-esque. And there’s an instrumental, “Karanlık Yol,” that’s a showcase for Jeff Matz’s mastery of the Turkish bağlama and Middle Eastern folk music in general. Matz has really stepped up on this record, contributing bass, fretless bass, and on several tracks, rhythm guitar, giving the music a real fullness and depth.

Cometh the Storm ends with “Darker Fleece,” one of the most atmospheric — and, at 9:59, longest; only “Sanctioned Annihilation,” from Electric Messiah, and “Master of Fists,” from the debut, are longer — tracks in the band’s discography. It starts off with nearly two full minutes of sculpted feedback and distant howls, then moves into a glacially paced throb as Pike roars about… whatever. At the five-minute mark, though, the guitar solo comes in, and it’s the climax of the entire album. Hideously distorted (it sounds like something Kawabata Makoto might play on a Mainliner album), it vaults the song into the stratosphere and reminds the listener that Pike is one of the great jamming soloists in metal. His solos rarely have the classical precision that’s so much a part of the genre’s mythology; instead, they feel like a guy who’s genuinely one with his instrument just letting it flow through him.

Like I said, I feel like I admire High On Fire more than I love them. Too often in the past, their music has seemed meant to roll over the listener like a speeding bulldozer, and it’s just not the kind of thing I’m in the mood for every day. To make the obvious comparison, Matt Pike writes riffs where Lemmy wrote songs. But on Cometh the Storm, they’ve been rejuvenated, and a bunch of these songs are ones I can foresee myself listening to as often as my favorites from their back catalog, like “10,000 Years” and “Snakes for the Divine” and “Devilution.” Almost six years between albums is a long time, even if that was mostly due to issues out of the band’s control. But it’s good to have High On Fire back. And if you’ve never listened to them at all before, Cometh the Storm is actually a great place to start.

That’s it for now. See you next week!