British metal legends Orange Goblin have announced details of their 10th album, Science, Not Fiction. Singer Ben Ward talks us through its dystopian themes, working with Sabbath’s producer, and pondering the end of their three-decade run…
"It's not rocket science, is it?" laughs Ben Ward.
Amid frantically packing ahead of the band's tour of Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Orange Goblin's burly frontman is explaining all about the British metal legends' freshly-announced 10th album, Science, Not Fiction. In particular, he's referring to its lead track, the self-explanatory (Not) Rocket Science, a full-Motörhead-ahead bit of classic Goblin heaviness, all riffs and bellows, that charges like a herd of stampeding elephants and roars like a truck. The title partly takes in writing a no-frills heavy metal rager, of which Ben and his band are longtime experts. It could just as easily be about the band themselves.
Almost 30 years in, in many ways the Goblin remain the same: a reliable heavy metal Land Rover, sturdy and true, packed with impressive power, a model of long-haul hardiness. But for those who see them as the grand old pissheads of British metal, songs about boozing to do some serious boozing to, Science, Not Fiction could surprise.
Musically, the trusty Goblin touchstones are all there, but they've also gone much further into the psychedelic bits that have so often touched the edges of their sound. New bassist Harry Armstrong (Hangnail, End Of Level Boss, Noisepicker, Blind River, replacing original bassist Martyn Millard), meanwhile, has slotted in without leaving a crack.
Having given up the drink and started seriously hitting the gym, Ben's explanation of the albums deeper themes might also prove unexpected. Most surprising, though, is the album's final track, End Of Transmission, which Ben openly says ponders on whether or not it might be the last one they ever write.
To fill us in as they prepare to blast off for a 10th time, we caught up with Ben to get the skinny on Orange Goblin 2024…
There’s some pretty big themes going on with the record, particularly in the title…
“Well, it's no secret that we're all fans of dystopian science fiction and cosmic horror and that sort of thing. Since the last album, obviously, the world is a completely different place. With the COVID pandemic and everything, I feel like we're living in sort of a science fiction universe now. It almost seems like a different world, and things like what Orwell anticipated in 1984, it's all coming true – Big Brother is watching us, whether it's from our cell phones or whatever, the powers that be know where we are and what we're up to. So, we wanted to dive into that a little bit. And Chris [Turner, drums] is an astrophysicist as well, so there’s that. The guy went to university for years, studied astrophysics, got a degree, and then ended up being the drummer in Orange Goblin!
“I've gone through some personal changes as well with my lifestyle and everything. I quit drinking, got myself healthy, and that led to me reading a lot of books on spirituality and stuff by the likes of Jung and Eckhart Tolle, and people like that. It made me think how there’s three key elements to life: everybody on the planet is touched by either science, spirituality or religion. And, obviously, science is based on facts, you can you can see the evidence of it, whereas religion, religion, there is no actual facts to back it up. That was the idea behind the title.”
You’re kicking off with a banger, (Not) Rocket Science. It’s pretty classic Goblin…
“It does what it says on the tin. It’s a real straight-ahead banger: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, mid section, verse, chorus, out. Chris came up with the music, and said he wanted something catchy in an almost Bon Scott or Lemmy style to accompany it, so that's what I attempted. Lyrically, it's just about how we only get one shot at life, we're all born with a one way ticket and we know how it's going to end, so let's make the most of our time here. Live your life the right way, do the right things, be an upstanding citizen and have a good time along the way. It’s not rocket science…”
You’ve mentioned prominent influences of bands like The Beatles and King Crimson and Pink Floyd in there. You’ve always had touches of that sort of stuff, but there’s bits of the record where it’s really pronounced. Was that part of making album number 10 and looking for somewhere new to explore?
“Sort of, yeah. We're 10 albums in now. We're no spring chickens anymore. We don't really feel that we have to prove anything to fit in into any subgenre or anything. We’re just Orange Goblin and we do whatever we think sounds good. We've had ZZ Top influence on stuff in the past and dabbled with Southern rock and country music and bits of everything throughout our career. So having that ’60s psychedelia and influence of The Beatles or King Crimson, it just does felt natural, especially when you bear in mind the lyrical content and the theme of the album. It all ties in nicely.
“When we first started speaking to Mike Exeter about producing the album, he said, ‘Have you got any kind of starting points I could reference for where you want this to go?’ I said there were four albums that we wanted to sound like a cross between: Black Sabbath – Vol 4, the first Motörhead album, Hawkwind – Doremi Fasol Latido, and Dopes To Infinity by Monster Magnet. He was like, ‘Right – sounds like a good record to me.’”
Obviously Mike’s a metal legend. How did he come on board?
“His name had been at the top of our list for a long time, because of what he's done with bands like Sabbath and Judas Priest and Cradle Of Filth over the years – he’s got a great resume. He was aware of Orange Goblin and was really keen to work with us. He said, ‘I've got this residential studio in Oxfordshire in mind where I've worked with Tony [Iommi] in the past.’ It was perfect, in this really old school English village setting, with one pub where you walk in and it’s like An American Werewolf In London. We were doing it at weekends, which meant we could go back into the studio every weekend with fresh ears, so if we wanted to change something we had the ability.
“Working with Mike was unlike any other album we've done. He pretty much immersed himself in the band and became like a fifth member throughout the whole thing, even prior to the recording. We did a little bit of pre-production down in Brighton a few weeks before we started recording, and Mike came down there would make suggestions and say, ‘You should elongate that mid section, build it up here, take that bit out’ – pointers as to how to actually produce a record, which we never had before. And when someone with a CV like Mike's tells you to do something, you listen. It's a real cliché when bands say this is the strongest album of our career, but I genuinely feel it. There's many different factors for that, like working with Mike, the six-year gap since the last album… maybe we're hungry again.”
The artwork looks like an old movie poster or something. Who did it?
“It was done by a guy called Charlie Elms, who's got a company called 10 Years Time. I came across him because he recently did The Obsessed’s new album, Gilded Sorrow. If you look at his website, he does a lot of stuff, cutting out things from ’70s style magazines, and then making these kind of layered, textured, almost mosaic things. That appealed to me because we wanted that vintage sci-fi look, or old pulp fiction books. Mix that with some Asimov imagery, and Bob's your uncle.”
This is also your first album with Harry Armstrong on bass, after Martyn Millard left in 2021. What was that like?
“Harry says that he feels like he's always been in Orange Goblin because he's been there since the very start. We used to play shows with Hangnail, and I remember going to see [Harry’s early ’90s death metal band] Decomposed long before all that kicked off as well. He sang backing vocals on The Big Black album, and he immortalised the phrase ‘Orange fucking Goblin, baby!’
“It was a shame when Martyn decided to leave, because obviously he was a founding member and my best mate, he was my best man in my wedding, and I was at his. We'd all always said that if any of the original members decided to leave then we'd call it a day. He was insistent that he didn't want that, and he wanted Harry to replace him. And it was a no-brainer. We didn't have to go through the painstaking auditioning of new bass players or anything like that.
“It’s big shoes to fill. Martyn was always very, very modest about his bass playing, I don't think he realised how good he was. He said he just picked up the bass to join the band in the first place. But over those 26 years he was in the band, he became a really, really good player. And that's what we knew Harry would be able to do, because Harry's a very talented guitarist, first and foremost, and a good singer and a good keyboard player. But all that makes him an awesome bass player as well. The amount of bands he plays in, he really lives and breathes music. He’s very creative – he shits riffs and ideas, and that's what we needed. I think that gave me Joe and Chris a kick up the arse to say, ‘Right, this guy's here. Now we've got to keep up this enthusiasm.’ And I think now we were probably more driven than we've ever been.”
You’ve said the final track, End Of Transmission, is almost about wondering if it could be the last song you ever write. It’s like a film saying ‘The End’ and then a question mark popping up…
“Yeah! That's kind of idea that we wanted to float with that. With this being the 10th album, that kind of ties in because the first album was obviously Frequencies From Planet 10, which was sort of picking up our first signal, our introduction to the world. And in this, the lyrics talk you through that almost 30-year career we've had, travelling time and cosmic frequencies and all that. It's kind of an autobiographical song. So, to end the album with it and leave that question mark – is this the last song we're gonna record? – was kind of the intention. I sincerely hope it's not. But who knows? We'll see where we go from here.”
Science, Not Fiction is released on July 19 via Peaceville
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