Sean McLennan

The pain and suffering that we as humans endure throughout the course of our lives, can oftentimes be our most powerful teacher. For Kyle Rasmussen-the blackened throat and assertive string artificer for Pacific Northwest extreme metal group, Vitriol-suffering is the sole teacher. It’s his guide to better understanding the underworld that exists beneath the surface of flesh and beyond.

Rasmussen, alongside vocalist and bassist Adam Roethlisberger, guitarist Daniel Martinez, and extraordinary blast beast Matt Kilner, spews forth the venom in his veins and channels a seething aggression into the brutalizing and swarming listening experience that is the band’s latest exceptional musical effort, Suffer & Become.

“If there's one thing I would love people to take away from this album, it’s the connection between discomfort, adversity, meaningful suffering and growth, self-realization, self-actualization,” Rasmussen explains. “It's not as though suffering is just a good road to these things, it is the road to these things…Being willing to do hard things, being willing to suffer, being willing to make pain a friend, is your key to everything. The good news is, once you get far enough along in that relationship, pain and pleasure start to not look so different from one another.”

In the same breath, Rasmussen acknowledges the dangers of allowing that mentality to take total control. Through throwing all of himself into the work of writing Suffer & Become, a harsher reality began to reflect back at him.

“Once you develop the relationship between sacrifice of comfort and the production of quality, you can become addicted to that,” Rasmussen reveals. “After doing this for years, I was able to discover that my unique upper hand is my willingness to suffer…to sit in that chair for nine hours, because in my mind, that's what the other guitar player who's making an album this year isn't doing. That logic, over time and without nuance, where does that get you? If I want to make a better album, what does that mean by that metric? Well, I have to suffer more. But here's the problem: It's not a solo project. So if I'm suffering more, I have other guys suffering with me and our values aren't exactly the same, they’re different.”

He continues, “I'll be totally honest, this presented some turbulence within the band…So I’m at a big turning point in my creative process where I’ve got to figure out how to introduce that nuance into my set of values, which was definitely a big wake up call with this album.”

With natural instinct used as Rasmussen’s writers guide, a collective upgrade in members’ instrumental capabilities, and a wealth of introspection generating the swirling storms that comprise Suffer & Become, Vitriol were able to build on and develop the chaotic elements that surrounded To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice, their album prior.

“To Bathe... was really unapologetic and arrogant. Like, this is what I am and I don't care if it's a little fucking off the rails. It had an adolescent explosion of hostility. Whereas, suffer and become is definitely more of a refined, focused, sharpened, surgical sound. The songwriting came more naturally for me because we’d already developed a bit of a voice and a vocabulary for Vitriol. On the flip side, if I ever find something becoming easier for me, I find a way to make it harder. The way that I did that for this album was, of course, trying to add more tools to the kit. I brought in a pitch shifter pedal, so people may or may not notice that the guitars are lower in sections on this record than on the previous album. I was trying to use that as a creative tool.”

“What was most interesting and unexpected about the creative process for this record was that, for whatever reason, song titles started coming to me before anything else. Over the course of, I'd say a year, I had all 10 song titles in the order that they appear on the album. I had the album title and all song titles before I had written any of the music, which was really intimidating because I'd never done that before. Conceptually and narratively, that gave me a lot of direction as to how I wanted the album to sound.”

Having sacrificed instrumental articulation in the past to cater to an overall experience, Rasmussen recognizes the clarity Suffer & Become offers to the listener. “We didn't deliberately go into making this new album cleaner, but because it was more dynamic and there are so many more elements, I leaned more heavily into the post-production…We knew we wanted this album to be much more cinematic. Again, going into that desire to create a truly linear album experience and make it feel like chapters in a book or scenes in a movie, rather than a collection of songs. I felt those elements of post-production lended to that and gave the album more scenery.”

Rasmussen continues, “For me, Vitriol is first and foremost always about the energy; the effect it has on you, and I don't want to lose that energy. I knew I wanted to make something that was a little less relentless. Not less intense, but less relentless. That was the toughest nut to crack: trying to make a more dynamic album without losing its extremity.”

Vitriol’s passion for creating and playing this type of extreme music is unmistakable and tangible, and the all-consuming sonic result is a big part of the band’s identity. However, it’s through Rasmussen’s lyrics where the layers of the band’s depth truly begin to reveal themselves and unravel.

“My lyrical approach has more to do with precision…for me, the point of an extensive vocabulary should be about having more tools in your toolbox to be understood. I think being verbose, especially in metal, has a negative reputation for being pretentious and showboaty. It can be, for sure. It's not about the ‘what,’ it's about the ‘why.’ Why are you speaking that way?”

“The words I'm using are so specific that they could not mean anything else, which might surprise people. I think when you see something that's maybe difficult to understand, you think the point is to be abstract or kind of like, esoteric. It's not. I'm just trying to talk about things that are very hard to speak colloquially about. For me, the experience of writing my lyrics is really painstaking…I take that responsibility very seriously.”