They say history repeats itself, and in almost every way, that’s never a good thing. Yet GWAR, known for finding ways of polishing life’s turds and turning them into some type of palatable gold, managed to inadvertently find the correlations between the catastrophe of reality’s past and present on their newest creative releases.
GWAR recently announced a fall North American leg of their “Black Death Rager World Tour” (tickets available here), while their new documentary, This Is GWAR, debuts on Shudder on July 21st.
Singer Blothar the Berserker took some time to tell us about how their latest album, The New Dark Ages, and its related graphic novel, GWAR: In the Duoverse of Absurdity, are informed by one another, and come all too close to home considering the various atrocities that are currently taking place in the world.
“We let one influence the other,” Blothar tells us in the Zoom video interview above. “That’s the part we’d never really done before — we took topics that were mentioned in the graphic novel and wrote songs about them, and then we took songs that we had been working on anyway for the idea of the album and really allowed the narratives in those songs to show up in the graphic novel, so it definitely went back and forth. And it worked out pretty well.”
The visuals in the graphic novel perfectly encapsulate the “absolute loss of truth” theme present throughout the album, starting with the opening title track.
“You’re gonna hear a lot of musical stupidity on this record,” he quips, noting their characteristic “don’t give a f**k” attitude also making its way into the mix. “The middle part of that song, we kind of lay out everything’s going to shit, but GWAR doesn’t care. We’re just gonna kick our feet up, drink a mimosa and watch the world burn to smithereens.”
With their hilarious use of everything from autotune — “It makes sense for GWAR to discover autotune 25 years too late,” remarks Blothar — to Kennings, which are Norse poetic devices, reiterating how “GWAR is not just for dumb dumbs” with their particular brand of outlandish satire. Take the standout track “Mother F**king Liar” for example, where Blothar insists how the liar, though existent in a larger sense, is within us all.”
“That’s the great thing about the song, it could be the absolute loss of truth — every time you turn on the television you’re looking at a mother f**king liar,” he says. “Or, it could be that your lying ass boyfriend showed up at the arcade with his girlfriend he said he wasn’t talking to anymore … everybody’s a liar, and that’s the great thing about it.”
It sure is, Blothar. It sure is.
Watch our full interview with Blothar in the video above. Pick up tickets to their fall tour here, and don’t forget to get your hands on the band’s “Bud of Gods” line of CBD products, including hemp flower, gummies, Delta-8 GWARtridges, and more. A BOGO 30% off deal is currently ongoing for all “Bud of Gods” apparel, including the new tour-ready T-shirt below.
Trouble viewing the video interview above? Watch on YouTube.