Heralding a ferocious new chapter, Counterparts have just surprise-dropped devastating six-track EP, Heaven Let Them Die. Catching up with Brendan Murphy we find out that it’s as much a reckoning on the ongoing process of grief as it is a full-bore celebration of how heavy music is able to make you feel so utterly alive...
Brendan Murphy is heavy music’s pre-eminent cat dad. Sure, Darkthrone legend Fenriz managed to get himself elected to local office in his native Norway thanks largely to photos with his fur baby Peanut Butter, and Obituary drummer Donald Tardy actually runs his own cat rescue charity – known as Metal Meowlisha – down in Florida, but the Counterparts frontman has a special bond with his feline friends. So much so that 2022’s landmark seventh album A Eulogy For Those Still Here was largely written about the slow demise of four-legged companion Kuma who passed away that September.
Joining us on a cool Tuesday afternoon at his home in Hamilton, Ontario, Brendan is accompanied by new moggy Kori who watches intently as he unpacks his band’s surprise-dropped new EP Heaven Let Them Die. Heavier and more abrasive than anything the Canadian metalcore stalwarts have put their name to before, its six songs might continue to chronicle the agonising grief and seething resentment towards religion that has been the singer’s stock-in-trade with both Counterparts and renowned supergroup END, but it also marks a pivot, where drummer Kyle Brownlee and guitarists Tyler Williams and Jesse Doreen have convened with their bandleader to choose mayhem over melody. Because only the harshest can endure this brave new world…
It feels like Heaven Let Them Die has arrived out of nowhere. What gives?
“I’ve been talking about trying a surprise drop for the last two or three records! I’m always saying to our label and management, ‘Rappers do it all the time. Why can’t we?’ Of course, there are a [host of financial and logistical] reasons. We know a secret release is ‘stupid’. Somehow, in The Year Of Our Lord 2024, pre-orders and first-week sales count for a lot. But, right now, we just don’t care. People have been waiting, posting on socials, ‘Counterparts drop a new record every two years... so where is it?!’ Also, while there’s never much hype about our records beyond Twitter accounts with handles like ‘You’reNotYouAnymore’ or ‘HellAndHome’ we think this will get people talking. Plus, we wanted the new musical direction to hit all at once. On November 6, nobody knows, then ‘Boom!’ We’re like, ‘Here’s the EP. Here’s a two-song music video. Here’s the tour. Go crazy!’ We’ve been working hard on keeping it secret, so we’re dreading one of those data-mining Twitter accounts to spoil the surprise, like, ‘Hey, so Counterparts are releasing a new EP!’”
Is its arrival two days after the United States presidential election purely coincidental?
“It’s definitely not down to the election. It’s that we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Things have gotten a little better with vinyl pressing delays and the like, but when we finished in the studio with [producer] Will Putney in mid-August, this was basically the earliest it could come out. Wait until December and it’s too close to Christmas. Push it to January and you need to hope people still remember it come the end-of-year lists. Then we were like, ‘Is there anything else happening at the start of November? Oh, fuck…’ The polls are closing in a few hours as we speak and I’m having visions of rioting and people worrying about their houses getting torn up, while we’re just like, ‘Hey! Here’s a new EP!’ But we’re Canadian! It’s not like we have an American in our band…”
To some extent it sounds like the soundtrack to the end of the world. Does it feel like the heaviest-ever Counterparts release from your perspective?
“For sure. Those heavy-heavy songs have always been a part of the Counterparts sound, where we’ve had maybe one or two on each album. Here, they’re all we wanted to do. This is a genre where it’s more common for bands to do the opposite – starting heavy, then getting more melodic. Hardcore guys decide they want to be on Sirius Radio and suddenly they’re not heavy anymore. We were just like, ‘Fuck that!’ We wanted to be the opposite. So we only wrote heavy shit.”
Why did you have that desire to get so heavy?
“I hate writing and recording. It’s cool at the end when everything is done, but it’s not exciting in the moment. My excitement comes from the atmosphere of the live shows. And the live shows are at their best when they’re crazier. When we’re playing the pretty parts of our songs, or those instrumental interludes, I’m generally just standing with my back to the audience, hitting my vape, wondering what the fuck to do. On these songs, I’ve [always got something to do]. It’s easier [on an EP] as well. There's not too much on the line. It's not like this big, full-length, $100,000 record. No, we were at Will’s house for two weeks just trying something – and I’m excited to see if it works. Singing is too hard, anyway. Screaming is easy. We just want to play fight music!”
The last show you played was the Pure Noise Records’ 15th anniversary alongside Knocked Loose. How inspiring is it to see a band make extreme, aggressive music really massive?
“We’ve know those guys for years. Their trajectory has been insane. What’s impressed me most has been their ability to keep dipping into different things, like collaborating with Poppy or Chris Motionless. A lot of the time, metal kids can be stupid. They see collaborations like that and say, ‘What the fuck are they doing?!’ But with Knocked Loose they don’t give a shit. They’ve got so much self-confidence, such an aura, and they manage to keep it so heavy that they can afford to be like, ‘We don’t fucking care!’ They’re an anomaly, for sure. We’ve seen a lot of bands in this genre blow up in terms of hype, then they make one wrong move and people lose interest. Knocked Loose seem to avoid that, just getting bigger and bigger. Our friends in Kublai Khan TX are experiencing a similar thing where they’re simultaneously the biggest and the heaviest they’ve ever been. It’s inspiring. It makes other bands think, ‘Maybe we can do what we want, too.’ And it’s proof that you don’t need to make butt rock and get on satellite radio to be a ‘big’ band!”
Your Live In Toronto release this summer felt like it was capping off an era, but songs on Heaven Let Them Die like A Martyr Left Alive feel very much like a continuation of what you were saying on A Eulogy For Those Still Here. You’ve alluded to this being a ‘rebirth’. To what extent is it that?
“It’s not necessarily a rebirth for this band – more a rejuvenation. Or a pivot. For me, a real rebirth would be something like when our friends in Hundredth went from being really, really heavy to saying, ‘Fuck this, we want to make some indie rock!’ and then releasing the best stuff they’d ever done. This still sounds very much like Counterparts – just heavier. Lyrically, it’s a continuation of the same themes as always, overlapping with Eulogy, but also the last END full-length, even featuring lyrical references to what I’ve written before. And our records tend to pick up where the last one left off. Heaven Let Them Die is literally where Eulogy ended. Eulogy was a whole record about mourning things that weren’t gone yet – friendships, relationships, my cat – and wondering what I’d do when they were. Heaven Let Them Die picks up with me having lost a lot of those things. Having the heavier musical content allowed me to be heavier in the lyrics. I don’t need to worry about writing around some pretty part when I want to talk about, like, beheading a fucking saint!”
Tell us about the experiences and thought-processes driving that.
“Well, No Lamb Was Lost on the new record is a sequel to Whispers Of Your Death on Eulogy. I was writing about my last cat Kuma, who was sick the whole time I had him – I knew he was going to die, and that it was going to wreck me – then that song, maybe this whole record, is about dealing with the grief. It’s about things dying, literally and figuratively, how I got depressed, how I became a fucking drunk. The big metaphor is how heaven – or ‘God’, whatever you want to call it – let that happen. [That higher power] saw me struggling and thought, ‘Let’s dwindle his friend group, let’s ruin his relationships, oh, and let’s take away his fucking cat, too!’ I did everything I could to save those things, but they’re still gone. I prayed, I begged, I did everything, and Heaven Let Them Die…
“A lot of the record is about the desire to get revenge for that. Metaphorically speaking, I’d like to go to heaven and punch God in the face. We already had a lot of that kind of religious imagery on Eulogy in songs like A Mass Grave Of Saints and Bound To The Burn. This is really just applying the present tense to it. If you believe heaven is real, you [might want to] wage war on it. If everything is going to die anyway, what’s the point? What are we but food for starving angels?”
The artwork is pretty provocative, too. Is that a holy water font filled with blood?
“I’m 99 per cent sure it’s actually just a soap dish. But yes, it’s full of blood! I don't care if we get heat for it. We spent like our first five years as a band with people presuming we were a Christian band – probably because we played with a lot of them at the time. But it’s always been quite the opposite. Of course, that stuff is mostly metaphorical. But Satanic imagery is the coolest!”
You already had trouble with the A Martyr Left Alive / No Lamb Was Lost music video, right?
“The original actress we’d cast in that video quit the first night because she told her parents what she was doing and they were like, ‘That’s Devil worship. You can’t do that. We’ll disown you.’ I was just sitting there like, ‘It’s a song about my cat…’”
It feels like a next-level video to match the new sound. How did it come together?
“Historically, we hate music videos. There are maybe two or three we like, but more often than not we write a treatment or pass over ideas for what we think would be cool, then we get back something completely different. We actually had a whole video for A Mass Grave Of Saints that we just deleted. This time, we worked with Eric Richter who’s made videos with END, Knocked Loose, Jesus Piece, Better Lovers and a bunch of others. I love his work. When we decided that we’d do a video for two songs we started to look at the concept of having something you love taken away from you, then getting your revenge.
“The songs were about my cat, but we couldn’t have a fucking cat in the video. So we thought about having a lamb, but apparently they’re terrible to work with. Then we settled on a goat. It became the story of this girl with a pet goat she loves and takes care of, then these ‘angels’ turn up and fucking devour the thing. She can’t do anything, so she runs away. But then she gets a new goat – like I got a new cat – and sets about getting her revenge. It’s influenced by the music video for Charlotte by the band Kittie. And I think there are elements of the movie Hereditary in there. It snowballed into having guys on fire – this whole house on fire – becoming the most expensive thing the band’s ever paid for. But it’s also the sickest video we’ve ever had. It’s gorier than anything that we’ve ever done before, too. But then again, my girlfriend says the new Megan Thee Stallion video is gorier, so we’re fine…”
Aside from all the righteous anger in there, it’s arguably your bleakest record. Is that your mindset right now?
“When the band started, it was like, ‘Shit sucks, but it might get better!’ Nowadays, I’m trying my best, but it’s not getting better. At the same time, it is so cathartic to have this release for those feelings. I'm probably doing mentally better than I ever have been, but part of that is going back to dig up those feelings and emotions and experiences and explaining what they felt like in the moment. When I’m around other people, I'm never serious, always joking around. I like to be that happy, funny, goofy guy. Maybe that just means that every two years I have to sit in a room in Will’s house for two weeks and be miserable to let it out…”
Finally, as alluded to earlier, there’s no better place for catharsis than onstage. What can you tell us about upcoming plans to get out on tour – and how the heavyweight new songs will fit in?
“Nothing is announced yet, but if you’re a Counterparts fan, then chances are we’ll be playing your home country – if not your hometown – at some point in 2025. And we’ll be headlining for the most part. Kicking people’s asses is essentially going to be the goal. But part of that is being on the heaviest bills we’ve ever played. In the past, we’d often be the heaviest bands on our own tours. It was hard for us to fit with heavy-heavy bands other than maybe dudes doing that early-2000s metalcore style. But we’ve got a headliner coming up where we’re the softest band on the bill! Having these six new heavy songs – and dropping them all into our setlist – where, previously, maybe only had six heavy songs total, means that we’re really able to hold our own.
“Of course, those six songs are maybe only 17 minutes total. There’s another 45 to fill, at least. If we want to do those heavy tours, we’ve got a lot more heavy material to choose from. If we want to do that ‘Sad Guy’ tour, there’s no shortage of fucking sad Counterparts songs to play. So fans should expect a heavier atmosphere, perhaps, but ultimately a good mix of old and new. And for us to have some fucking sick bands out on the road with us. Mostly, I’d like to see people move. There’s a lot of mosh on this album, and there’s nothing worse than playing that music while people are just standing around. Not that I don’t get that. I barely even go to shows these days unless it’s The 1975 or a K-Pop concert. And I understand that it’s totally possible for someone to be standing totally still while thinking, ‘This is my favourite fucking band!’ That’s cool. That rocks. But I can’t read your mind, so if you could just hit a couple of the people standing next to you, that would be really awesome.”
Heaven Let Them Die is out now via Pure Noise
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