'We’re A Bunch Of Miserable Bastards'

This response is exactly what you’d expect from the man who penned the lyrics for downer anthems like Kill Your Boss and My Name Is God (I Hate You) as the band trailblazed sludge metal in the 1990s.

These are some angry, grizzled dudes, and the arrests and addiction struggles in the period between 2000’s Confederacy Of Ruined Lives and last year’s self-titled record have hardly tempered their sense of disenchantment with everything. When pressed about how the New Orleans underground band managed to maintain their sense of hopelessness, Williams offers no specifics, only “being angry is what this music is all about. Depression, anger and the feelings that human beings have is what we write about… We don’t tell stories [with our music] – it’s just cryptic and abstract feelings.

“We profusely apologise to our fans for that last fuck-up, but I hope people know that it wasn’t our fault.”

“We’re just like any other person. Pissed off at certain things… We’ve always had something to be pissed off about… I mean we’re just normal humans like everybody else. We get depressed or mad or sad or whatever. But we don’t plan a lot of stuff out, we just kind of take things from the top of our heads sometimes. And being angry, I guess that’s a lot of the times what is on the top of our heads.”

And even after their triumphant return to the recording studio, Eyehategod still have plenty to be upset about. After tracking his drums for the album, original drummer Joey LaCaze died as a result of respiratory failure, the band dedicating Eyehategod to his memory. Williams doesn’t seem like he wants to talk about the death of his longtime bandmate too much more than offering up that it was something that happened. There was also an aborted Australian tour planned for the start of the year that Williams is still bitter about: “We profusely apologise to our fans for that last fuck-up, but I hope people know that it wasn’t our fault.”

And Eyehategod aren’t planning on stopping any time soon. “We’ve got new material; there’s demos that are already done, so we’ve just gotta flesh some of that stuff out and then we’re planning to record… Sometime hopefully in 2015. We’re not going to make people wait 14 more years for a new record.”