“Rumpelstiltskin Grinder, by nature, is a band that goes a little too far and takes things a little over the top,” guitarist/vocalist Matt Moore tells Decibel. “And we are completely in touch with our core values on Ghostmaker.”
The band is currently putting the final touches on the follow-up to 2009’s Living for Death, Destroying the Rest — a two year thrash metal odyssey of writing, demoing and recording that has lifted Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s game to a new level.
“We’ve always been aware of the fact that a lot of bands start out with a bang and then kind of go downhill from there,” bassist/vocalist Shawn Riley says. “You know when you hear your own voice and say to yourself, ‘Wow I should never talk’? It’s kind of the same thing with recording an album. You have three years to listen to it over and over again and then fix everything you don’t like about it [on the next one]. It’s not like we didn’t like our past albums, but they really gave us an opportunity to make something so much better. Everything is going to really grab you by the balls now and give you nightmares from the cold haunted Netherrealm of Kalyptein.”
And what, dare we ask, transpires once one is held by the balls in Kalyptein?
“Wimps and posers, prepare to fucking die!” Riley enthuses. “Heavy metal maniacs, prepare to transcend into an abomination and hail the destroyer!”
If this exuberance makes Rumeplstiltskin Grinder sound like a band blissfully free of the usual roiling “creative and personal differences” it is because, via Ghostmaker, it has become that band.
“Rumpelstiltskin Grinder is a one-hundred percent democracy,” Moore says. “The four of us have been together since the first recordings we ever made. Coming with the territory of equal say for everyone is the fact that you can get stuck in disagreements that waste time and energy. That did not happen in the creation of this album. We got in touch with something that only happens when you have a group of people that have been playing together for years ending up on the same page. All of our energy has been used for radicalness…a radicalness called Ghostmaker.”
When it comes to further defining that “radicalness,” however, Moore demurs, preferring instead to cite the Ghostmaker mantra — “Nothing boring…nothing fallow…nothing lame…”
“We try to write stuff that is classic on the first listen,” he says. “We would be wasting our time and yours with anything less.”
“Ghostmaker represents everything we have worked toward in the past several years, so you can think of it as not just something we’ve been working on since Living for Death, but what we’ve been striving for since Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s inception,” Riley adds. “When the album drops it will be obvious that this is something created by four dudes thirsty for blood, eager to silence all the critics and to crush all the lames.”
