Adam Nergal Darski has never been one to hold his tongue — but usually he's railing against shit like organized religion and cancel culture. In a recent interview with the Australia's Heavy, the Behemoth frontman turned his sights on the state of heavy metal, which, to his mind, has become too technically polished and "perfect."
"Ninety-nine percent of the records, they sound robotic," Nergal said. "Every fucking click, every kick, every snare drum, every part of the record is exactly the same.
"Every band these days, you talk to every band, and every band — literally — heavy-metal band, thrash, death, whatever, says, 'Oh, we managed to get that organic sound.' And then I go and listen to those records and I'm, like, 'There's nothing organic about this record.'"
"These days, you can fucking perfect things to the point that you cannot fucking listen to it," he continued, "because the perfection makes things boring, imperfect and a whole lot uninteresting. Live, it's not perfect; that's why it's so fucking exciting.
"So why make things that are just so fucking polished? I don't get it, especially in extreme-metal music. It's gotta be fucking weird, it's gotta be dangerous. Where is the danger factor? So I really wanted to bring the danger factor back to our music," he concluded, bringing up Behemoth's latest LP, 2022's Opvs Contra Natvram. "It was present, but maybe this is the record [where] it's the most present ever."
Nergal's comments echo the opinion expressed by Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx last year. Speaking to Classic Rock magazine, Sixx said of modern rock music, "My criticism is that it's extremely overproduced in a lot of cases. It's ProTooled to death, it's chopped to death, and I miss some of the slop. I miss some of the flat notes. I miss when a guitar player doesn't exactly come down perfect. I kinda miss some of the nuts and bolts of just being in a raw rock & roll band.
"With that being said, there's some cool bands that are coming out and just going to the studio and cutting it pretty much live off the floor, and it's real — you can feel it, that they mean it."
