Warbringer Offer No Remorse For Old-School Thrash

The bandmembers may not all be old enough to drink legally, but when it comes to old-school thrash metal, Warbringer are as fast and skilled as many of the veteran groups that inspired them, such as Exodus, Kreator and Testament. The band’s full-length debut, War Without End — which came out earlier this month — is a hail storm of jagged riffs, jackhammer beats and caustic screams. And while the band is firmly entrenched in the new wave of American thrash metal — which includes Black Tide, Fueled by Fire and others — frontman John Kevill insists Warbringer have never been interested in capitalizing on any sort of musical trend.

“There’s a lot of hype about it right now that makes it more of a novelty than I like,” the singer tells MTVnews.com’s Metal File. “But I think it’s ultimately a really good thing that people are getting into metal that doesn’t suck. There’s no reason that old-school metal shouldn’t be played anymore. I enjoy listening to that more than what’s coming out today.”

Warbringer’s seeds were planted in 2005 in Ventura, California, when Kevill was at a friend’s house listening to Manowar. Inspired by the galloping beats and thunderous rhythms, the two decided to form a band that was just as primal and powerful. “You know how on that first album [1982’s Battle Hymns] Manowar signed a pact in blood?” Kevill says. “Well, we decided to do that, too, because we wanted to make sure we didn’t flake out and suck.”

A month later, his friend bailed on their contract, but Kevill persevered. He found a guitarist named Viktor, and while he only lasted a couple of months, Viktor later introduced him to guitarist John Laux and his bass-playing brother, Andy. Then, Kevill recruited drummer Adam Carroll from another band, Zombie, and when Carroll decided to switch to guitar, they brought in his ex-Zombie bandmate Ryan Bates on drums. At first, the band called itself Onslaught, then they discovered there was already a British group with that name, and that it had released three influential thrash albums in the ’80s.

“Some people gave us flak for not knowing that, but we were 17 and 18, and just discovering that music,” Kevill says. “It’s not like anyone gave us a thrash-metal encyclopedia. So Adam and I were looking anywhere we could find cool-sounding names, and we decided war and thrash metal are like peanut butter and jelly. So I was attaching the word ‘War’ to anything I could think of.”

The band arrived at the “Bringer” suffix one day when Laux was flipping through a list of different monsters from the video game “Diablo II” and came across the screen name Painbringer. “We had already been [trying to come up with a name] for three hours,” Kevill says. “So, we were like, ‘Warbringer! Good enough. We’re done.’ ”

Warbringer recorded a four-song demo and played shows in Los Angeles with Merciless Death, Fueled by Fire, Dekapitator and Toxic Holocaust. Then they wrote a new batch of songs and tracked their debut EP, One by One the Wicked Fall, in October 2006. The disc caused a buzz in the underground and earned Warbringer a deal with Century Media, which signed the band at the end of the year. Warbringer recorded War Without End in fall 2007 with veteran producer Bill Metoyer (Slayer, D.R.I.), and while they were stoked by his interest in their music his skill behind the board, they were initially a little weirded out by his personality quirks.

“He has this huge stash of pornography at the side of his studio,” says Kevill. “And he kept inviting us to check it out, and we were all like, ‘Okay, this is kind of strange. We just met the guy.’ So, we were kind of apprehensive about it. But then after a few days in the studio, some of us started looking at the magazines, and he goes, ‘Oh, good, I was getting worried about you.’”

Warbringer recorded War Without End in July and August of last year, and for the most part, the tracking was smooth and without incident. The mixing of the album, however, was another story. “Bill spent a few weeks mixing the record, and then his computer took a massive crap,” Kevill says. “He lost everything he did and had to start over. We almost didn’t get the record out in time.”

At first, the band planned to call the record Combat Shock, then changed the title to War to End All Wars, a line from one of the featured song lyrics. Finally, though, they decided they didn’t want the word “war” on their album cover three times, so they settled on War Without End — not realizing it was a line from Metallica’s “No Remorse.”

“When somebody pointed that out to us, we went, ‘Ah, sh–, not again?’ Kevill said. “But we decided to go with it anyway.”

Now, check out Warbringer’s video for “Combat Shock”:

For the rest of this week’s metal news, check out MTVnews.com’s Metal File.

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