Aaron Weaver on his heavy metal: ‘It’s incredibly pretentious’
As they head to Scotland for a pair of live gigs, Greg Thomas reflects on the plectrum shredding career and politically progressive influence of elusive black metallers Wolves In The Throne Room
%20HORZ%20WEB.jpg)
It’s hard to nail down an interview with Wolves In The Throne Room. Several months of back-and-forth with their magnificent Scottish promoters Core yields a series of cryptic, second-hand responses. ‘Nothing yet’… ‘keen but busy’… ‘sorry, it’s not going to happen’. Perhaps it was to be expected from a band who pride themselves on glorious isolation in both musical and cultural terms; who held their first practice in a derelict cabin in the evergreen woodlands of the Cascade Mountains; whose debut 2004 demo was released, according to one stockist’s blurb, on a CD-R wrapped in fur with moss inside the lyric sheet.
Since the early noughties, Wolves In The Throne Room have forged a path as one of the most vital forces in international heavy music, spawning, by various and sundry accounts, a number of the new sub genres and sub-sub genres that the scene likes to sputter out: eco black metal, red anarchist black metal, cascadian black metal, post black metal, black gaze and, more disparagingly, hipster black metal. These endless coinages are, of course, unwittingly (or wilfully) silly. But they do provide a kind of topical word cloud to prefix a potted biography.
The Olympia-based brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver started the band in 2002, when both were attached to the crust punk and anarchist squat scenes of the Pacific Northwest. Across the course of seven albums, two EPs and multiple line-up changes (guitarist and vocalist Kody Keyworth has been a regular third member since 2017), they have pioneered a sound that combines the abrasive howls and lo-fi plectrum shredding of black metal with elements of ambient and analogue-synth atmospherics, spoken word and classical vocals, and a kind of enveloping warmth-through-distortion that is redolent of shoegaze.
Meanwhile, through visual imagery, song and album titles, and the semi-mythical anecdotes that circulate about the group’s lifestyle, they have become synonymous with a kind of heavy metal world-building that chucks out the corpse paint, blood and misogyny for communion with the natural world, life-affirming psychedelic experience and New Age spirituality. Track names such as ‘Mountain Magick’, ‘The Old Ones Are With Us’, ‘Fires Roar In The Palace Of The Moon’, ‘Woodland Cathedral’, and ‘Prayer Of Transformation’ pretty much get the idea across. In a 2011 interview, Aaron Weaver spoke about accessing a set of spiritual archetypes that might reconnect people with the non-human world from which civilisation has severed us. ‘It’s incredibly pretentious,’ he acknowledged. ‘That’s something that a lot of people think… but I have no problem indulging those sort of pretensions. I think it’s really good and useful to try to work on a mythic level.’ Thankfully, this awareness of the grounding power of archetypes predates the sub-Jungian tosh that circulates in the manosphere, mostly in Jordan Peterson’s falsetto.
Indeed, the band has become associated with a broadly green-socialist outlook that was something of a forerunner for a wider shift within heavy music over the last ten to 15 years (though Weaver has spoken of his embarrassment at such tags, ‘as if we’re talking about recycling’). A swathe of groups across black metal (a genre previously infamous for male-coded misanthropy and flirtation with far-right politics) have come to embody an outlook that is both philosophically curious and associated with progressive political agendas.
Ahead of their most recent full-length album, 2021’s Primordial Arcana, the band released a statement: ‘We’ve gotten even deeper into the DIY aspect by building our own recording studio from the ground up, and producing and mixing the record ourselves… and now we’re making our own videos within the local wilderness.’ As interviewees, they might just remain hard to pin down.
Wolves In The Throne Room, La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, Monday 3 August; St Luke’s, Glasgow, Tuesday 4 August.