The Arkansas four-piece will also be presenting their serpentine brand of doom metal to fans in New Zealand for the very first time, an announcement that was met with a tsunami of positive support. “It seems like people are excited about it,” Rowland says. And they have every reason to be, that signature Pallbearer hype and energy is one that has to be experienced live.
The impending tour follows the release of their third studio album Heartless, a monstrosity of metal that’s ridden a wave of positive feedback right across the community. Rowland say he’s been floored by the response to Heartless. “We’re thrilled about it, it’s the album that we always wanted to make,” he says. “It’s the culmination of years of honing our skills and working together on our art.
“We’re definitely amped up about getting to play this material live. It’s some of the most fun to play music that we’ve written.”
Perhaps because the album is a culmination of their career thus far is why it has only just come together. “I don’t think we were good enough previously to write an album like this,” says Rowland with a dry chuckle. “All of our ideas over the years have sort of… this is like stuff we’ve basically been talking about for eight years.
“We’ve developed this rapport amongst ourselves, about how we want to write music together and even though the past few years have integrated how we wanted to do all these things, it’s sort of typical, modern metal.”
It seems Rowland has grown pensive about his new material, lost in thought as he hones in on this one aspect of Pallbearer – the actuality of their musical progression. “I don’t know if we would have been able to execute any of those ideas the way we’ve been [able] to now, just because of the amount of time we’ve been spending perfecting the playing together.”
Pallbearer have come to a head with Heartless, and given the way Rowland so lucidly affirms that this album is the album, one has to wonder what that means for the next studio release. “It’s definitely exciting, I don’t know. We aren’t really putting that together yet.
“We’ve already been pushing ourselves. We always want to continue to challenge ourselves. I suppose that’s the definition of what Pallbearer is. I know that we’re going to be trying to build on some of the ideas we tried to quantify at the beginning.”
The word colossal gets passed around fairly frequently in discussions to do with Pallbearer – but the persona that greets this idea seems to be anything but. Rowland talks of Pallbearer’s popularity as if it something he isn’t buying into, maybe even something he doesn’t quite believe.
“Over the years, we’ve had our share of heavy music but also music that’s very expansive. Doesn’t necessarily mean that just because something’s heavy or huge sounding, it may not be metal at all. There’s a lot of different ways that can be processed,” he says.
“Experience, a visual thing, sonically, we are emotionally heavy. That’s the franchising we’ve always had. We always wanted to have these expansive compositions and if people say it’s colossal, well I guess that’s good.”
