Devin Swank doesn’t thoughts when individuals chortle at Sanguisugabogg. The Columbus, Ohio band’s frontman (and occasional standup comedian) leans laborious into the class-clown facet of demise metallic. When Queen Elizabeth II died in September, he devoted fan favourite “Dead As Shit” to her onstage, and he commonly introduces “Dragged By A Truck” as “a song about being dragged by a fuckin’ truck.” He runs Sanguisugabogg’s meme-poisoned, self-deprecating Instagram account, and when social media shit-talkers ragged on the band’s ever-growing inventory of T-shirt designs, he modified their Encylopaedia Metallum style to “merchcore.” Even his gore-obsessed lyrics are extra slapstick than scary.
“I look at it as a funny thing,” Swank says over beers at a Columbus dive bar. “A Chuck Jones or Tex Avery approach, where we rip out entrails and we’re jumping rope with them.”
At the identical time, Swank and his bandmates are devoted to the craft of demise metallic. (“We take our musicianship and what we do and how hard we work very seriously,” he says.) There’s a distinction between being a humorous band and being a joke band, and Sanguisugabogg don’t need to be mistaken for the latter. Homicidal Ecstasy, the band’s ass-stomping sophomore album, crops their flag firmly on the suitable facet of that line. It’s simply the perfect factor they’ve achieved to this point — some extent underlined by right this moment’s new single “Face Ripped Off.”
“We had something to prove,” Swank confirms. “We wanted to put out an album that stands out in our complete discography. We took it a lot more seriously, and on top of that, because we had more time to put something together, we put a lot more heart into it.”
Sanguisugabogg first exploded onto the scene with 2019’s Pornographic Seizures, a four-song blitz of primitive demise metallic depravity that was recorded, tracked, and combined in a day. As anybody who trawls the style tags on Bandcamp is aware of, there’s a dozen releases matching that description popping out any given week. But Pornographic Seizures managed to rise to the highest of the heap.
“I thought that maybe in the underground circuits, it would be talked about,” Swank remembers. “I didn’t think it would be put up on any scale of what it actually was. But we did have in the back of our minds, this could be a cool thing that people talk about, and maybe when we play shows it’ll be cool as well. We played a garage show before the EP came out, and the moment it was released, we’re on NPR. Some musicians I looked up to as a kid are talking about it. I was like, ‘Okay, this is way bigger than I ever imagined it was gonna be.’ We were very grateful and humbled from the very beginning.”
Shortly after Seizures broke on-line, Sanguisugabogg hit the highway. On their first tour, an worker from metallic heavyweights Century Media reached out to say he was passing the EP alongside to the label’s A&R rep. It didn’t go nicely, a minimum of not at first.
“Their A&R came back, and didn’t really talk shit, but had some comments about it, and was kind of making fun of it and wasn’t interested at first,” Swank says. “So out of a kind of ignorant, screw-you type thing, when we put out the vinyl of the EP, we slapped a sticker on it talking shit about Century Media. We put in quotations what they said in their email, and we said, ‘From The Posers That Brought You Deez Nuts.’ We were selling it, and people were cracking up about it, and before you know it, their A&R found out about that and said, ‘You know what, I was wrong about you guys.’”
Before the ink had even dried on their file contract, storm clouds began to collect over the band. First, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the dwell music trade, scuttling deliberate excursions with the Black Dahlia Murder, Cattle Decapitation, and Knocked Loose. Soon thereafter, a distance started to develop between founding guitarist Cameron Boggs and the remainder of the band. Boggs, who makes use of they/them pronouns, performed on the band’s Century Media debut, Tortured Whole, however that was successfully their remaining contribution to Sanguisugabogg.
“They didn’t practice with us for about seven months,” Swank says. “It wasn’t until we were about to confirm our first tour back after COVID that they texted us and said that they were officially stepping down. When we were doing the rollout, they ended up getting the album name tattooed on their forehead, but then from there, we didn’t see them anymore.”
Boggs’ exit difficult issues within the quick run, however it additionally cleared the best way for a brand new and improved Sanguisugabogg. Ced Davis, who had not too long ago joined the band to play bass, slid over to guitar. Mutilatred’s Drew Arnold stepped in on bass. The lineup was rounded out by drummer Cody Davidson, a cofounder of the band and the songwriter behind most of Tortured Whole. The touring that ensued cemented the band’s fame as highway canines. (Swank estimates that Sanguisugabogg performed 125 dwell reveals in 2022.) All that gigging additionally helped them determine what sort of band they wished to be, post-Boggs. That began with a daring new configuration.
“We were just like, let’s do something stupid,” Swank laughs. “One of my favorite bands of all time is Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and they never had a bass player. They did this thing where they would run the guitar through a bass cab. Pig Destroyer did it, too. So we were like, ‘Let’s do it with two guitar players, and just have this really muddy tone that the kind of death metal bands that we listen to are known for.’ And we decided to try it out on the Nile and Incantation tour [in early 2022], and from there we were like, let’s just stick with it.”
The stomach-churning bass tone the band captured on Homicidal Ecstasy bears out the success of that experiment. “We wanted to emulate the live sound as much as we can,” Swank says. “It’s still got the subs, it’s still got the low-end underneath it, so it still has the sound of a bass. But it’s a guitar. And there’s bass solos on it too, which is sweet.”
The sonic illness of Homicidal Ecstasy goes far past its bass sound. Swank boasts that it’s the band’s most collaborative effort to this point, with each member getting riffs on the file. Unlike its extra clearly studio-bound precursors, Ecstasy sounds just like the work of an amazing dwell band — which Sanguisugabogg now most actually are. They spent the previous yr and a half sharing payments with demise metallic royalty, hardcore legends, and fellow hungry younger upstarts. That all appears to have rubbed off on Homicidal Ecstasy. It’s single-minded in its bludgeoning impact, however it achieves it in quite a lot of methods — with groove, with pace, even with melody.
Homicidal Ecstasy can also be main step up within the lyrics division, a growth Swank credit to lastly having enough time to write down them. Starting with an concept that was impressed by the serial-killer drama Dexter, Swank depicts demise metallic’s pet obsession with homicide as a sort of drug: “Something you can get hooked on. Something that’s euphoric and puts you at ease, something you need and crave, something that can hurt you in the long run.”
“The way I look at it is, I wish Tipper Gore was after me in the ’80s, because I would have been right there with Frank Zappa and Dee Snider about how not-serious these themes are,” Swank says of his lyrics. Indeed, songs like “Black Market Vasectomy” and “Necrosexual Deviant” are provocative however essentially flippant, however that characterization nonetheless sells Swank somewhat bit quick. Homicidal Ecstasy additionally discovered him writing essentially the most private music he’s ever penned.
“I included a song about my grandmother, and how when I got the news that she was passing away and I didn’t have much time with her, I went through all different kinds of things in my mind,” Swank says. “These are the last moments I have with her. Am I gonna let it tear me down? Or am I gonna live for her? I made a song called ‘Mortal Admonishment’ that was about going through that. It’s like, ‘This hurts me, but at the same time, I’ve gotta choose something.’”
“Mortal Admonishment” is an album spotlight, however it’s additionally an outlier. This continues to be Sanguisugabogg we’re speaking about, and their Looney Tunes-by-way-of-Terrifier aesthetic continues to be the dominant one. If Homicidal Ecstasy wins over new followers – and it ought to – it is going to be as a result of the band got here collectively to tighten the screws on their formulation, not as a result of they ripped it up and began over.
“We’re a band where there’s so much polarity,” Swank acknowledges. “We’re a band with a funny logo and funny name, so it’s like, people don’t know what to think about us sometimes. But I feel like if you listen to [Homicidal Ecstasy] in comparison to everything else, you can tell that we put a lot more love into it. There’s a lot more ‘us’ in it.”