Four teenagers in Melbourne chose Harlott in 2005 largely because the name looked good on a black T-shirt. More than two decades later, guitarist and vocalist Andrew Hudson still cannot say what they got right, only that they got lucky enough times to carry the band through five records. Their newest one, “Exsequiis“, comes after the longest album gap of their career, and Andrew says Harlott have reached the point where “caution might not even apply anymore.”
“The beautiful thing about that accident is that I still don’t know!” he said of those early years.
Hindsight gives him plenty of decisions he could warn the teenage version of Harlott against. He has no interest in removing them from the band’s history. The mistakes brought their own lessons, and whatever choices they made led to the band they have now.
“You win some, you learn some, and whatever decisions we made lead us to this moment here so I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Harlott released “Origin” in 2013, followed by “Proliferation” in 2015, “Extinction” in 2017 and “Detritus Of The Final Age” in 2020. Then came six years without another album.
Andrew calls those years a perfect storm. Creative slowdown was part of it, but so were families, responsibilities, the pandemic and a change in what the members wanted from their lives. They found new hobbies and new joys. Some started families. Careers changed. Covid forced a shift in priorities that stayed with them afterwards.
A fifth Harlott record was always supposed to happen. The response to “Detritus Of The Final Age” left Andrew keen to keep working with the ideas that record had opened up. Getting there simply took much longer.
Harlott had already described the change this way: “Detritus… was a great experience in digging out sounds and ideas that we would have been too trepidant to explore. For Exsequiis, we went further into that, but with the confidence that it would work as it had done before.”
By the time they actually made “Exsequiis“, Andrew’s thinking had gone further.
“At some point you do stop being too concerned with the expectations and just have to trust that you know what you are doing.
“Obviously we want people to enjoy the music, that is the goal, it’s the payoff, and it’s why we do what we do. But you can’t guarantee that as an outcome.
“People will like it or they won’t and there is very little you can do to influence that so it’s best to just shoot for what you feel is right and hope that you’re not alone.”
That attitude changed the shape of the whole album. Harlott treated each song as its own experiment and paid little attention to the usual structure they had followed across previous records.
“Exsequiis is start to finish a collection of things we wanted to try, with a complete disregard for the usual formula for the structure of an album. Each song was an experimental expression and we are pretty happy with how it all came together as a whole.”
You can hear that from the opening minutes. “Incipiam” starts with layered lead guitar melodies before “Void” tears into much faster thrash. “Messiah Simplex” brings blastbeats and thin, high guitar tones that push into black metal, while “Vice Borne” runs on quick riff patterns before opening into a much broader, bouncing chorus.
The lead guitar work is one of the places where Harlott allowed chance to stay on the record. Andrew and Leigh Bartley share the guitar roles, although Andrew is very direct about the difference between them.
“Leigh is a demonstrably superior player to myself and it would be absurd to insert myself into the solo breaks of this album anymore than once,” he said.
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A lot of those solos began with the track running and Leigh simply playing. Andrew likes the instability that comes from recording that way. Ideas appear that would probably disappear if every passage had been written out in advance.
“There is a level of chaos that comes from starting the track and letting loose and that kind of process allows for passages and ideas that never would have happened if you sat down and deliberately wrote out the idea.”
Some accidents stayed permanently. Parts of the solos were recorded with guitars out of tune, and the band kept them because they sounded too good to replace. That creates another problem later when the same passages have to be reproduced on stage.
“It does make replicating them live a difficult proposition but that’s always a problem for later when youre in the studio.”
Cephalic Carnage’s Brian Hopp heard the same mix of speed, groove and technical playing in the record.
“Our mates keep pumping out some heavy fast riffs. Crushing grooves, some super tricky right hand speed picking, catchy melodies with ripping leads, and raw AF vocals. Thrash metal doesnโt get much better than this!”
The anger on “Exsequiis” stays close to things Andrew can see around him. “Trial By Liar“, already released with its official video, grew out of his exhaustion with a culture where lying carries fewer moral consequences and false stories can spread as long as they serve somebody’s motive, agenda or attack on an enemy.
“Truth doesn’t appear to matter anymore and there aren’t any consequences for anything. There is a war on information raging and we yearn for the day when judgement is met on these perpetrators,” Harlott said when introducing the song.
Andrew points directly at the shift towards algorithm-driven information systems. In his view, deception has been monetised, society has failed to prepare people to filter what they see, and those who knowingly spread it rarely face sufficient consequences.
“The shift towards the algorithm has monetised deception and we have not sufficiently prepared as a society to filter it, nor do we adequately punish the perpetrators.”
He also has modest expectations about what a thrash song can achieve here. He does not expect Harlott’s lyrics to reveal something hidden from view. The subject already sits in public every day.
“I don’t expect any of our lyrics to illuminate anything that isn’t already clearly on display, I just needed something angry to sing about for that song and this is something that particularly pisses me off.”
Harlott leave supernatural evil alone because Andrew sees enough of the human version. The members are not particularly religious or spiritual, although religion itself remains fair game when people or entire civilisations use it for purposes disconnected from enlightenment.
“There is enough evil in the world without needing to get them involved.”
There is one piece of thrash culture he has drawn a firmer line around.
“The only thing I absolutely refuse to do as a reaction to scene, is sing about beer….”
Religion and gods still enter “Exsequiis”, though from a different direction. Latin appears in titles including “Incipiam”, “Messiah Simplex” and “Kleptogenesis”, with the album title itself continuing the idea. Andrew likes Latin because of how it sounds and looks in metal. There is a practical problem: he does not speak the language.
That leaves him permanently open to using the wrong ablative and having somebody who does understand Latin point it out.
“Wouldn’t be the first time a metal band had made that error…”
The larger idea was the death of the gods. Harlott had already gone through civilisation and the end of the world in earlier thinking, so Andrew started asking what could possibly remain after that.
“The death of the gods was a theme that seemed the only step further than the end of the world. What is left to destroy after civilisation has ended and the planet is cold? Only the catalysts of our creation remain to be the targets of our destructive passions.”
The album also sends Harlott straight back to Europe for ten shows between September 11 and 26. Krakรณw comes on the third night of the run, and this will be their third visit to Poland.
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September 11, Juz, Burghausen, Germany
September 12, Nuclear Intervention Fest, Kadov u Blatnรฉ, Czech Republic
September 13, Garage Pub, Krakรณw, Poland
September 15, Music-House, Graz, Austria
September 16, Escape, Vienna, Austria
September 18, MK Bar, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
September 23, Bambi Galore, Hamburg, Germany
September 24, Mukkes, Leeuwarden, Netherlands
September 25, Musicon, The Hague, Netherlands
September 26, Hellfort, Bruges, Belgium
Andrew sees very little being lost when Harlott move between Australian and European crowds. The Australian shows give them more room to lean into an Australian sense of humour because it is the environment they grew up in. Abroad, the basic exchange has held up.
“Music is a beautifully universal language so i don’t think too much gets lost in translation at our shows. At least i hope that is the case!
“Obviously the Australian audiences are what we grew up with and that allows us to really lean into that aussie sense of humour, but i find that everywhere we go people are there to have fun and we can usually help facilitate that.”
“Exsequiis” arrives September 11 through Metal Blade Records on CD and digital formats. The vinyl edition includes the “Coagulation” A Side/B Side variant, limited to 500 copies in Europe. Pre-orders are available through metalblade.com/harlott.
