BAND OF THE WEEK: Miss Lava
Fiery yet dark heavy rock from sunny Portugal
As a fun example of how musicians and bands grow, evolve and often turn into something quite unexpected (also a good lesson for all you kids out there trying to meticulously plan this stuff), take this one: Miss Lava’s origins, their core duo of musicians, stretch back to a little death/thrash band called Etherial Grief, formed in 1993 - and yeah, I know some of you weren’t even born then. They put out a demo called ‘Handful Of Grief’ in 1994 (I still have that tape around somewhere), it was very interesting for the time, relatively technical and unusual. You can listen to it here for fun if you’d like, just be aware that this is a demo tape from a Portuguese band from the early ‘90s - as the only comment on that video demonstrates (“Holy shit this sucks lmao”), today’s years aren’t quite accustomed to the sort of essentially unproduced rawness we old timers grew up with.
Anyway, try giving that a whirl for a few seconds at least, and then hit up the new Miss Lava album ‘Under A Black Sun’, the fifth full-length of an already long and very fruitful career that has seen them appear in festivals all over Europe (and even perform in Vegas, as if any place would be more appropriate to their languid yet energetic desert-bound heavy rock!). Compare the two and notice the universes that separate them, right? Well, that’s just the universe of time, as it turns out. That’s basically what 30 years of going at it and never giving up will do for you as an artist. It’s not easy, alright? These dudes are not superstars. They have jobs. They’re still, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively unknown band from a peripheral country. But they’ve come a long way, they get to do what they love at a pretty high level anyway, and I bet they wouldn’t trade it for anything. I mean, imagine how it feels to have one of your songs come to life with an awesome biker-inspired video, filmed in the beautiful west coast of Portugal like this one:
From the description above, and if you weren’t too familiar with Miss Lava before, you might have expected something a bit more feisty, more kinda big-fucking-rock-show, right? Well, though never exactly a party band, always leaving a sort of sombre, even doom-like element in their songs, these guys have actually been slowly getting darker and darker, and ‘Under A Black Sun’, apocalyptic vibes and all, is by far their most layered effort so far. Songs are deeper, more psychedelic in an almost shoegazey sort of way, though never at the expense of the power of a good riff or a strong beat, or even a vocal part that hits you the right way, especially with the toughtful, mature lyrics backing them up. Oh, and look if that isn’t the old Etherial Grief spirit looming over the brutal ‘Chaos Strain’, too! Wink wink, right?
All in all, as a celebration of twenty years as band, you really couldn’t ask for more than releasing your finest, most diverse and also most solid album as a present to yourself, right? Miss Lava are currently riding somewhere along the shorter-than-you-might-think highway that leads from Alice In Chains to Black Sabbath, with a couple of pitstops at the Kyuss diner along the way as always. If that sounds like something you’d dig, then you’re in for a treat. And hey, if it doesn’t, are you okay?
Check out below, the cool interview we did with the founders, singer Johnny Lee and guitarist K. Raffah!
‘Under A Black Sun’ is out now on Small Stone Records Co.
You can find Miss Lava on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.
“We’ve always made music with the honesty of four people banging it out in a rehearsal room, and what comes out is what we record.”
— Johnny Lee
Dude, twenty years! That’s just silly. Have you ever given this longevity thing any specific thought? Did you think it was possible to hit a mark like this when Miss Lava starts? And how does it feel to reach it?
Johnny Lee (vocals): Yeah, it sounds like a lie! [laughs] Actually, I don’t believe we ever thought about or planned anything long term in this band. When we started, we had all been in bands since we were kids already, and that dream of living off your music wasn’t really there in the same way anymore. What always moved us along in this band was the next objective - short and mid-term stuff, like making a record, work with a specific producer, having a label that identifies itself with our work, that sort of thing. After achieving each goal, we always evaluate if we still have the strength and the will to go on, and so we do, naturally, without any pressures or deadlines. I think that’s the secret for us still being around, full of life after twenty years, still excited to promote something new and make our music reach more people.
K. Raffah (guitars): I still remember Johnny’s phone call, asking me to try out some guitar on this band he was putting together. I played bass… I didn’t even own a guitar. I borrowed one and there we went. It seems like another lifetime. The other day, I was talking to a guitar player in another band of our “scene”, and he told me the first show he watched at a festival was ours at Super Bock Super Rock, when we opened the main stage on the day Queens Of The Stone Age headlined. I felt a little old right there, but the truth is that we still have a lot of music to make and a lot of shows to give!
Tell us a bit about the new album - I’ve heard you guys describe it as “intense”. What do you think led to how it sounds, in the end?
Johnny: I think we need a little context to explain why we consider this record “intense”. The release of our last album ‘Doom Machine’ clashed with the pandemic, so aside from being delayed for over a year, it caused that we weren’t able to promote it in the best way that we could have. That brought some frustration and accumulated a certain energy that needed to be liberated. The pandemic also brought a very strong personal impact for us. It made our most melancholic and introspective side to come out more, and in my case, a more solitary side. It was a lot of months being away from family and friends, focusing only on work and managing that loneliness. It wasn’t easy and it left marks. On top of that, we had a member change, a founding member of the band, which forced us to adapt relationship dynamics and to be open to new ideas. It was an important and difficult change, but the person who came in brought good energy and a new soul, which also made everything seem fresh, and therefore, more intense. In instrumental terms, I think we explored more than ever. We used slower tempos, which wasn’t so usual for us, and we added a lot more melody layers, without worrying about the length and structure of the compositions. We wrote in a freer way, unconcerned if it would sound like Miss Lava or not. As for the lyrics, unlike the other albums, these were almost all written during the same time period, and that caused the specific moment and my state of mind to take a more active role in the writing. If you are in a good moment in your life, the writing comes out full of love, colour, flowers rainbows and unicorns. If you are more depressed or tired, something darker, more explosive and denser comes out. In my case, I was coming from a period of too much non-stop work without any rest, and instead of stopping and taking a breath, I locked myself at home all alone for three weeks writing intensively, from dawn to dusk. The title ‘Under A Black Sun’ reflects that a lot. It was summer, but I was locked away purging my demons and all the accumulated exhaustion. It wasn’t a good place to be, but the goal was to come out of that process “alive”, feeling like I gave it my best. Looking back now, I couldn’t be more proud of the album we created together.
Raffah: “Distant moons, spitting fire.” That sentence is on the first song of the album, and to me, it kind of summarizes the creative process for it. Johnny works in Africa for half of the year, Ricardo [Ferreira, bass player] just started a new company from scratch… we all have our jobs and families. The process was sort of on and off in terms of physically being there, which brought a kind of bipolar reality to it. When we were all together it was super intense, because we knew we had to take advantage of that time together to create. But when we were apart, we had the necessary distance from the material to discuss it, test changes, mess with structures and so on. I think we never recorded so many demos before going into the studio. Each time we did, radical changes always happened. The songs were in constant motion. It’s like they were in orbit, attracting new ideas, new arrangements and constantly gaining more weight. Even in the studio, there was more space for improvisation than in any of the other albums. Perhaps that openness towards things was the main inspiration for all this.
You’ve always sort of had the stoner tag glued on you, especially in the first few years, which has always felt a little reductive to me. I’ve always preferred calling you a “rock band”, which is so vague that it can basically mean anything. How do you see yourselves, and does that bring any kind of boundaries? Is there something you won’t try because it’s “not Miss Lava”, for instance?
Johnny: We’ve always labeled ourselves as a heavy rock band, with stoner influences. When stoner was in fashion, that tag served us well, we were in the “happening” scene, even if we knew we weren’t exactly that. Now that it’s not such a popular genre anymore, I understand that it becomes reductive. Having said that, we’ve always felt we were too much metalheads for rock people, and too rock for metalheads. We never denied our influences, and a good example of that is the ‘Sonic Debris’ album, where in the middle of more traditional rock songs, there’s a psych track with only acoustic guitar and voice, and then another one with a black metal foundation that ended up being the opening song. On this new album, we mixed stuff up again - between more ambient and spacey songs, there’s one with a more punk/thrash vibe. Fortunately we never had record labels forcing anything on us, or producers or managers for that matter. We’ve always made music with the honesty of four people banging it out in a rehearsal room, and what comes out is what we record.
Raffah: We’ve always felt a lot of love from the so-called “stoner” and “doom” rock community, though we aren’t at all a band that can be easily labeled like that. I like to believe that we have enough maturity to try whatever we feel like, without excluding anything, especially because most of the stuff we write comes up spontaneously in rehearsal jams. As Johnny said, we’ve had black metal and thrash inspirations for some riffs and arrangements. We’re not afraid to try out different things. This album has a really fast and noisy short song, with Johnny almost going full guttural with his vocals. It’s always one of the songs that gets more comments when we show the album to people. It sounds fresh even for people who know us.
Generally speaking, it seems you’re getting darker from album to album. Is it age? The “weight of life”, or is that looking at it in a very simplistic way?
Johnny: Simplistic as it might be, I think that explanation already says a lot. It’s really that, but not only that… With age comes maturity, family and professional responsibilities, dreams achieved and broekn, victories and loss. Inevitably, there’s also the physical side of things. We’re not getting any younger. But the darkness doesn’t come from just that. The world around us is heavy, too. We see new generations being educated on disrespect, fear and profit culture above everything. Wars, hatred on social media, turning influencers into god-like figures… all of that shapes our state of mind. It’s impossible to not be influenced and to let that dark side show in our music.
Raffah: It’s what we feel relates more to the work we’re creating in the moment, you know? On ‘Sonic Debris’, we tried to look at the album as a whole for the first time. We realised there were songs that didn’t belong to that piece. It was another vibe. They ended up on a satellite EP. It also happened with ‘Doom Machine’, and we ended up with three bonus tracks. They were really that, a bonus, because they simply didn’t belong in that artistic whole. They’re excellent songs, one of them is always in our setlists, they were just not from that album. On this new record, our jams already started to have this energy to them. Since the beginning, there was a magnetism that made us orbit around a darker vibe. Everything that was “less dark” naturally fell along the way, and the denser atmospheres prevailed. It feels like they are more mysterious, they incite discovery more. At least to us, it seemed like we were always going over a new frontier, outside of our comfort zone, exploring virgin territory. When you’re in that place, things have another drive to them.
You already mentioned new drummer Pedro Gonçalves, how was his integration? I imagine it’s not easy to join a band with so many years and so many working routines. What did he bring new to the table?
Johnny: I’m partial when it comes to Pedro because I love the dude! [laughs] But let’s do it. So when you invite someone to join a band like ours, it only makes sense if you give him total freedom, so he’ll feel like he’s always been a part of this. That’s what we did with Ricardo, with Pedro and more recently also with Hugo Jacinto (guitars, also in Dollar Llama), who also joined us after the album was done. From the very first rehearsal with Pedro, I felt this was his band. We already knew him from before, and coincidentially, our first show was opening for Drill, the band where he played at the time. The integration was super natural. He has a vision that is very close to ours and brought a breath of fresh air to the band. Pedro didn’t just bring Miss Lava drums, he brought whole new dynamics to everyone and to all the instruments. Pedro worries about everything - guitars, bass, vocal lines, lyrics, merch, production, graphic design - and he’s always ready to help. He was key to the pre-production of the album. I can’t imagine Miss Lava without him anymore.
Raffah: When he played with us for the first time, the band sounded immediately tighter. He’s got a more laidback, swing kind of groove, with a huge pocket. When a new member comes in, the coolest thing to do is lock on to what that person brings that’s new. He enriched our writing process a lot. We started debating ideas more as a whole, questioning what we had already thought was finished and not being afraid to radically change some ideas. he brought that new blood that we needed to feed the creation of this new record.
There are already many landmarks in your trajectory. Do you feel there are still many other goals to achieve? Any specific dream that you’d like to share?
Johnny: We feel very lucky in that aspect, so I’d say that there’s not a lot left in our bucket list. But I can still find a few! Without a doubt, we still need to do a tour or a mini-tour opening for a big renowned band. We also have to do a show at Pavilhão Atlântico - we’ve played almost all the emblematic venues in the country, and we’re missing that one. I’d still like to see our first two albums come out on vinyl, something we’ve been talking about with Daniel Makosch of Ragingplanet, and I think that might happen soon. Last but not least, I’d like to put out an album with our current lineup. Me, Raffah, Ricardo, Pedro and Hugo, because I feel the energy of us five is magnificent and I can’t wait to see what comes out of that.
Raffah: That’s our flame, that’s what keeps us going since the beginning! Whether it was to record live on tape, mix the record with that mega producer from abroad, open for this or that band, play that festival, make that video… there always has to be something that’s left to do. On this record, the big challenge was the constant change, going for it in the moment, with no net. Both in rehearsals and in the studio. Now we just want to hit the road throughout Europe. It’s the first time we’ll do something like this, we had never lined up fifteen dates after a release. So, that’ll always be the dream. To do something we haven’t done before.
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