Interview

Mental Cruelty Talks Shop With Metalunderground Among Other Things

Mental Cruelty has become standard-bearers for the sound of European extreme metal. Zwielicht, the latest full-length album from blackened deathcore outfit Mental Cruelty, and was released via Century Media Records on June 23. With several positive reviews pouring in, the band was gracious enough to give us more insight on what Mental Cruelty is all about!

Because this may be the first time the reader may have heard of Mental Cruelty, can you provide a short history of the band?

I am still very new to this band but it all started with the 2021 Release of A Hill To Die Upon which is for many people a very important album. For me it was one of the albums amongst few others that defined the genre “Blackened” Deathcore. I was very proud we had a Band from Germany being this heavy and influential. Then I applied for the role as vocalist and the guys reached out to me very soon. We met each other, recorded some music. We became friends and wrote Zwielicht and now we´re going to continue the rise of this beast called Mental Cruelty with more energy and momentum than ever.

After listening to your upcoming release, “Zwielicht,” I can hear many genres that crisscross each other. Was this done on purpose? Are different members of the band bringing their own influences into the writing process? Please feel free to elaborate.

We don't want to be tied to any genres, we just write the music we love and we would like to listen to ourselves. But you can also say now that the album is finished we loved that it sounds very diverse if you compare songs like “Nordlys” and "Symphony Of A Dying Star” but they still make very much sense in the whole picture of the album. How did this happen? It was just natural that the main guys for songwriting Nahuel and Marvin wrote a lot of stuff which was influenced by the music they listened to. For example Black Metal Bands like Behemoth or Gearea or Bands like Children Of Bottom and Wintersun. It was not really that much of a planned process; it's more like part of the natural evolution the music is going through.

How long did it take to write and record “Zwielicht” and where was it recorded?

I can just give the perspective of the vocalist writing lyrics. I started writing the lyrics almost from the beginning of the day we met. I wrote over the period of 6 months and we recorded vocals in 9-10 days or even less I think. Seems a bit of a short amount of time but we really did not take any compromises whatsoever. Even if that meant we had to record vocals 10 hours a day until we were all happy. We recorded the album in the home studio of Nahuel near Karlsruhe. It was exhausting and gnarly and unbelievably fun at the same time.

Why did you name the album “Zwielicht?”

Especially Zwielicht and Symphony of A Dying Star deal with very personal and emotional topics. The songs are about feeling between dead and alive or detached from the here and now.

The term “Zwielicht” which is translated to “Twilight” therefore perfectly describes this album for us. It's about the horrors of the uncertain and intangible. It is about divine figures, as well as their relationship to us humans and vice versa. Twilight is neither light nor dark, is it dawn or dusk? Is the sun just rising or setting? Witnessed in the moment, you could not certainly answer that. We leave this question open for every listener in the stories of this album.

For us personally, this album is a new beginning and we have answered this question for us, which "Zwielicht" inevitably poses.

Being from Germany, I must ask you this. What is your favorite band of the “German Big Four (Kreator/Destruction/Sodom/Tankard)?”

Kreator! Now picture me raising the horns yelling: “Satan Is Real!”

What are your touring plans after the new album is released? Are you playing any festival dates during the summer?

We were so busy producing the album and videos that we could not confirm that many festivals. We play Terminator Festival in Slovenia (25.07) or the Triple6 Festival in Belgium (05.08). BUT we hope it is just a matter of time until we can announce something.

What do you do when you’re not currently doing work within the band? Do any of you have any hobbies that you would like to share?

I love video games like Dark Souls or Zelda but to be very honest I think I have not touched a console for almost a year or even longer. My two bands Mental Cruelty and Sun Eater consume 100% of my free time. It's very time consuming but I really don't want to complain. I still do what I love but If I want to relax a bit I just go for a hike in the pine woods very “Mental Cruelty” style.

Do you think that metal has too many sub genres where the lines have blurred when it relates to placing bands into a specific genre?

I often see people discussing genres in comment sections and I experience it as still mostly very polite. And maybe it is just a symptom of the internet to categorize things in order to make them traceable. But lines definitely get blurry and it's tough to define genres for some bands but I see this development as very positive and invigorating for the music.

What defines success for Mental Cruelty?

I think it's quite easy, success is when we can stand behind the music we make with all our heart and there are people who want to support us and listen to our music live.

I thank you for your time answering the questions of this interview, do you have anything you’d like to say to anyone reading this?

Thank you for supporting us! Thank you for the positive response on Zwielicht, this means the world to us! Love - MC! <3

Check out the latest video from “Zwielicht” and give them a listen if you haven't already!