On Dealing With Your Personal Life Becoming Clickbait Fodder

As various pundits have suggested, eventually there must be a limit of heaviness that extreme metal acts are going to reach, even if such a marker remains undefined at this point. That said, as their latest LP The Violent Sleep Of Reason indicates, after three decades Swedish heavyweights Meshuggah remain almost inexplicably able to up the brutality ante. This time around, their sonic gut-punch was aided by utilising entirely live takes aired via real amps and speakers.

Tub-thumper Tomas Haake believes there are groups capable of further pushing the boundaries in this regard. "I'm sure there are. We always debate... Like, for a while we were thinking, 'Let's go to nine-string guitars. This isn't enough, we need to go lower.' But at the same time, it doesn't really have so much to do with that.

"Holy fuck? When did it come to this? Why do people care so fucking much about these things?"

"It has more to do with songwriting and, I don't know, we're just trying to write something that... Even with this music that we write, it tends to be complex; you still try to write music that's directed at people and not for yourself only. You hear bands that try that and you're like, 'Yeah, this is awesome, but I can't listen to it for more than five minutes before my fucking toenails start pointing right up and I have a panic attack.' So you try to find the perfect kind of in between where you're being true to yourself but at the same time you want to perform and write something for other people."

Given Meshuggah's penchant for uncompromising records and pulverising live shows, almost tabloid-like coverage of Haake's relationship with Orange Is The New Black star Jessica Pimentel (also of metal crew Alekhine's Gun) seems at odds with their heads-down ethos. Although Haake appears nonplussed about his personal life becoming fodder for blogs and podcasts, he offers, "If there's a lot of focus on those kind of things more than just your music it tends to be a little weird.

"But it's not something that I would say I suffer from really to any extent, but it's... A little weird sometimes. Like, 'Holy fuck? When did it come to this? Why do people care so fucking much about these things?' You're just kind of doing your thing and people tend to focus on other aspects of what you're doing with your life. I guess in a sense that's also validation and it's a little humbling in a sense because I guess people are interested and involved, so in a sense it's good."

Pursuing clickbait-style celebrity headlines isn't on Meshuggah's agenda, though. "In a lot of ways we're kind of the recluses of metal. We're not really in a sense part of what's going on. We don't keep a check on what's new, what's going on, what's happening with metal nowadays. We get questions like that a lot of times, 'What new bands are you into?' Honestly, we don't really know anything," he laughs. "We just do this and keep our fingers crossed that people will still appreciate what we're doing and the effort we put into doing it."