Undeath's "Skull Metal" is Authentic As Hell (and Surprisingly Wholesome)

How is it October already? The last two months have been a blur, and I owe all of my regular readers an apology for slacking on my publishing schedule here; it's been a little dicey over here at Salvo HQ, but we're back, baby! I've been saving today's interview for just such an occasion, because firstly, you all deserve a treat for your patience, and secondly, this week's band just happened to have dropped one of the hardest records of 2024 last week.

The leaves here in Philly are still stubbornly green, but it's already been an excellent month for death metal. There was a little something special for everyone, whether you preferred to reach for the starry void with Blood Incantation, let Maul pulverize your bones to dust, or take a good old-fashioned clobbering from Undeath. The latter just released their third album, More Insane, via Prosthetic Records, and it's a real heater—brutal, bouncy, blood-splattered death metal that makes no promises, takes no prisoners, and proudly proclaims its sonic allegiance to its Buffalo-born 90s forebears.

"Yeah, like, our shit is Cannibal!" Undeath vocalist Alexander Jones told me outside the Fillmore in Philadelphia a few months back. "If you listen to one second of music from Undeath, you'll see that that's our guiding influence, in just about everything that we do. They're from Buffalo, and to this day it infuriates me when people are like, ‘Oh, Florida death metal, Cannibal Corpse.’ They moved there! They betrayed us!"

As a Rochester, NY band, Undeath's lineup—which is rounded out by guitarists Kyle Beam and Jared Welch, drummer Matt Browning, and bassist Tommy Wall—have undoubtedly heard enough about a certain city to last them for several lifetimes, but that hasn't stopped them from laying claim to their rightful heritage as New York death metal. Their love for their home state is apparent onstage and off, and is especially visible at the merch booth (though as an Eagles fan, some of their designs pain me more than others).

Thankfully, the last time they rolled through my fair city, it was only April, so there was no need to argue about football. I grabbed Jones right before their set, and we did our best to find a quiet place to chat (which is generally easier said then done at the best of times, and certainly presented a slight challenge during the pre-show for Decibel's Metal and Beer Fest, which they were slated to headline later that evening).

I could only fit so much of our conversation in here, so if you catch Undeath on tour this month, make sure to ask him about Star Trek. As always, this Salvo interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity—and while I decided not to awkwardly type out "haha" every time one of us laughed, rest assured, this was a very giggly conversation!

SALVO: We've already been chatting for awhile so I should probably start recording. Let’s talk about your lyrics!

ALEXANDER JONES: When we started the band, Kyle had mentioned in passing that maybe I could write some lyrics but he already had some ideas. I was used to writing lyrics, so I spent the whole night in my room meticulously typing out what I thought would be the most thought-provoking metal lyrics possible. And then I showed up to practice with like, printed out lyric sheets for Kyle and he's like, ‘Nah, man I already got all the lyrics, we’re good.’ And then I read his and it was like “skulls… graves… skulls in graves…”and I was like, okay, that’s the direction we’re going in? I can rock with that!

I always joke with Kyle about it, how his school of lyrics half the time is like, ‘I'm gonna kill you (non-gendered),’ and then the other half are like, ‘What if there’s like a fucked up guy who was into weird stuff.’

Those ‘SKULL DEATH METAL’ shirts at the merch table are more apt than I realized!

ALEXANDER: We did a show in Bristol last year, and this guy came to the show who worked with intellectually disabled people. He was a big fan of our band, and one of the adults that he worked with made a little skeleton mascot for us. It said ‘Undeath’ on the front of its little t-shirt, and on the back it said, ‘Skull Death Metal,’ and we were like, ‘That's it, that’s us, we’re skull death metal.’ So we got the artist’s blessing and made it into a shirt.

[They're also donating a portion of the sales to The Arc, a nationwide charity serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities]

It works! You’re out here playing this festival tonight, but before this, you were working on your new album, More Insane. I assume you just spent like a month locked into a windowless room playing death metal riffs—that's how records are born, right?

ALEXANDER: I could say it was a windowless room for effect, but it was a very nice apartment! We were all very comfortable! But yeah, we were down in Nashville with Mark Lewis. I'm super proud of both of our records, but we did both of those of our friends, and we thought, ‘You know, it's our third one. Let's branch out a little bit.’ We compiled a list of records that have production that we really, really like, like Black Dahlia Murder’s Ritual and Cannibal Corpse’s Skeletal Domain, and the common thread there was Mark Lewis. So we hit him up and he was super down to mix the record. We thought it was gonna take like, two weeks, like every other album we've ever done, but I think we spent two weeks on drums alone! It was intense, but it was a lot of fun. 

I want to know what kind of weird shit you got into when you were done in the studio, as a bunch of Rochester boys loose in Nashville.

ALEXANDER: I mean, I hate to disappoint, but we watched a lot of YouTube! This is the thing that needs to be established: Undeath, we like to party and we like to drink and smoke weed and shit, but we're not social animals. Our idea of a party when we're all together is like, let's get 60 beers and watch YouTube all night. We start with like a 20 minute long fail compilation, then dash cam crashes, then like, gnarliest football injuries, increasing in grotesqueness, and then we somehow end up watching every Michael Jackson video. And then eventually, everybody just silently stands up and goes to bed. 

Dudes rock.

ALEXANDER: That's the upstate New York in us. We’re New York meets the Midwest. A lot of time spent inside!

I do love that you rep New York death metal so hard, because people can sometimes forget about what’s going in the state on outside of NYC—especially in terms of old school 90s death metal, upstate NY was such a locus for that moment.

ALEXANDER: There's a whole other part of the state. I lived in the city for a little while, I grew up downstate, I was born in White Plains, so I've seen all sides of it. There’s just something about the easy pace of living upstate. I lived in Rochester for 11 years, and I actually just moved to like the literal middle of nowhere at the beginning of last year. I have one neighbor, she's a mall cop. She works nights and shows up randomly every now and then, and I'm just like, in my garden.

What are you growing in your garden this year?

ALEXANDER: I had that conversation with my fiancée the other day, and we were kind of trying to figure it out. At the end of last season, we were super motivated and were like, ‘We're gonna build raised beds next year. We're gonna plant shit along the whole fucking side of the house,’ and now we're like, ‘Let’s do carrots! Let's just do carrots and see what happens.’ We're gonna do lettuce, carrots, potatoes, onions. Zucchini is so easy to grow, but you end up with so much of it and I don't really like it that much, it’s like slimy cucumbers. We're gonna improv a little bit. 

It's so funny. People associate us with New York death metal, and they assume we're living in the city and have this fast-paced, gritty, urban lifestyle, but it couldn't be farther from the truth for any of us. New York, at least where we live and where the other guys live, it might as well be eastern Ohio, you know?

Wow, so you’re not pumping iron with Will Rahmer all the time?

ALEXANDER: I remember when we started the band, and we were nervous to put “New York Death Metal" on our merch, because we were worried that someday we were gonna pull up to a show in Brooklyn or whatever and Will Rahmer or one of his affiliates was gonna beat our asses. He's got like the sinewy old man muscle, which is kind of like the scariest kind of build you can have. But eventually we just rolled the dice and nothing's happened yet. My fucking driver's license say New York—I can put him on a T-shirt.

Mortician-related pseudo-beef aside, you all have such a wholesome existence outside of this band. When you tell the non-metal people in your life about Undeath, how do they react? 

ALEXANDER: Pretty much everybody in my life is not metal, you know? It’s becoming more and more apparent. When I was younger, in my early 20s and late teens, I wanted every single person in my life to like and be interested in the exact same things that I was. If you aren't into fucking Mutilation Rites, and like watching Acheron videos on YouTube, and reading Noisey or whatever, I was not interested in what you're telling me. I was like, if it doesn't concern these things, I literally don't care and I don't want to be associated with you. 

But now as I get older, it's become this interesting dichotomy where my life at home is so un-metal—and then I go on the road. I talk so much shit online, I just can't help it. I'm a loudmouth. But I'm always just talking about random shit that happens to me, and I feel like people who come to our shows know that about me, and expect that a little bit. When we first started playing, I would try to do the whole leather jacket thing, roll up in my Doc Martens and my skinny jeans, and be like, ‘Yeah, I'm a fucking death metal guy, this is what you want.’ But you don't want that! That makes people uncomfortable when I roll up like that! 

Even Corpsegrinder doesn’t present himself as a big tough metal guy all the time, and he’s literally Corpsegrinder. His Instagram is one of the most delightful things on the internet, and it’s just him being proud of his kids and taking his wife to Disney World!

ALEXANDER: We played a show in St. Pete late last year on the Exodus tour that we opened, and he showed up to the show. It was him and John Tardy. Those are like two Popes to me, and they were just hanging out at the show. And I was like, ‘Well, at least they won't go in the green room, so I don't have to be nervous and awkward around them.’ And then I'm sitting there and Tommy, our bassist, comes in and tells me, ‘Corpsegrinder’s here! He’s right outside! You have to go talk to him!’  He finally coerced me to go into the room and of course Corpsegrinder’s holding court, he's talking to like 16 different people.

I'm just standing there looking at him, and then I kind of inched my way into the little half circle and eventually he looks over at me—I’d completely forgotten that we did a death metal roundtable interview thing with me and him and Chase from Gatecreeper and Trevor from the Black Dahlia Murder—he looked at me and he kind of doubletake and he said, ‘Hey, what's up Alex?’ And it was like a deep focus poll from an Orson Welles movie. 

Do you remember hookups, that skateboard company whose whole thing was very perverted cartoons and anime girls? It’s very stupid but a band that we played had a rip-off of that kind of design, and I bought it because I thought it was hilarious. And of course I was wearing it that night. Corpsegrinder looked at it and was like, ‘Is that an anime shirt? My daughter loves anime!’ and he talked to me about anime for like 15 minutes while I was experiencing just total ego death.

Oh my god.I love him so much.

ALEXANDER: You can go the Chris Barnes route, where you can just choose to live in eternal hate, or you can go the Corpsegrinder route, where you can choose to live in eternal love.

That really is like the yin and yang of old old school death metal.

ALEXANDER: We used to have conversations when our band first started—we'd be at the bar obliterated going, ‘Do you think Barnes would like us? Do you think he would think we were cool?’ And then little did we know, eight months later, he would go get on Twitter and say that us and our peers were the worst thing to ever happen to death metal! Haha!

I do think that having Chris Barnes be mad at you in 2024 is kind of a badge of honor, though. In 1994, that might’ve been devastating.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, we probably would've hung it up. If I saw him in real life, though, I would probably just dap him up, and I'm sure he would have no idea who I was. 

Your Twitter presence (and political viewpoint) is much more pleasant than his, at least, and you’ve also been really open about some of the challenges you’ve faced over the past year, emotionally and otherwise. If you’re up for it, I’d be super interested to talk about the idea of vulnerability and extreme music.

ALEXANDER: I would love to talk about it! Sometimes I feel like I'm the last person that should be giving anybody advice because my guiding policy in life for many years now has been that the only thing I can do to retain my sanity is to do whatever I want within reason and then deal with the consequences. Obviously, there's limits to that. I'm never going to act outside of myself in a way that hurts other people or act outside myself in a way that diminishes anybody's hopes and feelings. I just want everybody to live in total peace and harmony with one another, and that's a very un-death metal thing to say. 

And I did struggle with that for a little bit, because a lot of the bands that I loved growing up were like, fucking nihilism. You know, Craft’s Fuck the Universe, everybody needs to die,I hate everybody, there's just no saving this wretched world. And that was something that I half heartedly believed for a long time until like, honestly, three or four years ago. I don't know what triggered it but I realized, I don't want to be this person. It doesn't feel good. I like people. I like talking to people. I like getting to know people. And I was tired of very poorly putting on this facade where I had to pretend to be somebody that I wasn't. I had to pretend to be this guy who didn't have compassion, didn't have feelings, didn't have empathy. It was just so fucking demoralizing.

Toxic masculinity probably played some of that pressure you felt to present like that, too. It hurts dudes, too; it doesn’t let you be a full person!

ALEXANDER: Absolutely! Absolutely. In the very early days of Undeath, we would play shows, and I would be smiling and shit on stage—not as a front, I can't help it. I literally can't stop, I'm just having such a good time. And the second I'm like, pouting and scowling, it just makes me want to laugh, because it's so not me. It's such theater. And one of our first shows was with a death metal band that’s fucking sick. And the singer came right up to me, as soon as we were done, and he was like, ‘You've got to stop smiling on stage. You have to stop. It takes everybody right out of the experience.’ And that really hurt me! I'm up there, I'm trying to perform in the realest sense that I possibly can, I'm trying to connect with people in a way that makes them feel good, makes them enjoy the time that they're having, and that makes me feel good as well. 

And to hear somebody say,  essentially, you have to stop being yourself, it really was a pivotal moment where I had to go one of two ways— I could stop being myself, or I could lean into it even further. That really was the guiding moment that made me realize I just want to be comfortable being myself 100% of the time.That's what I've been trying to do ever since, and it's not always easy. Everybody's on a different path of self discovery. It takes a long time for these feelings and the reality of these feelings to manifest in people. But I just think, at the end of the day, you can only be you. Fuck any of the other bullshit, let's just be real 100% of the time. The second you stop doing that, you're cheating yourself, you know?

That's the thing about the theatricality and illusion and the sort of escapist fantastical element that people love about metal—no one's like that all the time. We all contain multitudes.

ALEXANDER: And I'm never gonna fault anybody for wanting to do that— if that's what's true to them, if they want to go on stage and put on a persona, more power to you, vaya con dios. But for me, I can't do that, and I've come to peace with that.  If I went to see Mayhem or something, and they were on stage, smiling and doing line-dancing, I'd be like, ‘This is not the experience I paid for!” But at least with our band, I hope and I feel like people are catching on, and realize that when they come to see us, they're just getting 100% positive authenticity, because that's all we can provide.

You know, I've talked to a lot of metal bands over the decades, and some of them really do feel they can't let their guard down and let that human part out, at least in the context of their work as artists. I don't think you’re alone in ditching the facade that many people maybe felt like they needed years ago. I wonder what changed.

ALEXANDER: People have such ready access to the people they admire now. When I was growing up, people in bands were gods; I knew I could aspire to do that someday, but those people were inaccessible. And now, somebody like Dylan from Full of Hell, when I was first getting into that band, that guy was like Superman to me, just the shit he can do with his voice. And we were about to start recording, and I thought, man, I would love to pick his brain about techniques and what he does in the studio, and realized, ‘Oh, I can! I can just DM him, and maybe he'll respond!’. And I did, and he responded immediately, and had very helpful tips. 

The world really has gotten a lot smaller. Maybe it’s time for some posi death.

ALEXANDER: Posi death! Oh my god, I hope that doesn’t catch on! I'm gonna get my ass kicked in every city in America! 

But we all need some levity in our lives. It's fucking hard out there, and my hope for the human race is just for peace and prosperity for all mankind.

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Stream 'More Insane', support skull death metal, go see Undeath on tour with Kruelty, subscribe to Salvo, and remember to stay posi!