BANDS OF THE WEEK: Terzij de Horde & Ggu:ll
A whole noisier than the sum of its blackened parts
If you follow this whole shindig I put together here, you might recall I was lucky enough to be flown to Utrecht in the Netherlands a few months ago to watch a bunch of awesome black(ish) metal bands currently making a huge splash in both the local and international scenes. Among the five that performed at the event were Terzij de Horde, who were actually headlining and presenting their most recent album live, and the most genre-dislocated (thought they fit the overall vibe perfectly anyway) act of the bunch at the time, the awesome drone-doom merchants Ggu:ll. It made sense they were part of the same bill - not only are both bands known to be buddies, whose members have collaborated in several projects before, but they had actually done a commissioned piece together some months previously for the 2022 edition of Roadburn. As you can see in that perfectly captured moment by Paul Verhagen’s expert lens up there, both bands took to the stage at once for a performance of noisily epic proportions. Was it doom? Was it black metal? Does anyone care? As Terzij de Horde wisely mention on their description of the experiment, “Black and doom metal are sometimes just a snare’s strike apart.” So there.
If you were there and have been longing to repeat the experience, or if you weren’t and curiosity has been killing you, well, both bands have good news - a full year after that special show, once again during Roadburn, on Record Store Day, the studio version of the thing, ‘Van Grond’, has finally been made available for you to spin it as much as you’d like. Oh, and you will spin it many times. Here, start right now:
There’s not much to wax lyrical about here - if you’re a fan of the bands in question it’s a complete no brainer, and if you aren’t, hey, it’s also a no brainer, except you’ll have to spin all their other records after being blown away by this one. It’s remarkable that what started as a crazy idea thrown over some beers - using each other’s drum tracks as a basis for writing new songs - has actually made it all the way into full fruition, both as a live performance and now as a proper record, but that’s how great minds work. The twist is interesting enough to make both bands sound a bit different from what they usually do - not that these people are exactly the kind of band that always sound the same, neither of them, but you can still feel by listening to these songs that this was a special experiment, and one that, as William from Ggu:ll tells us in the interview you can read below, helped broaden his band’s horizon even more. Johan from Terzij de Horde also mentions that the endeavour helped them free themselves even more of any pre-determined constraints of what a TdH track really is, so yeah, if the next releases from any of the two bands sound particularly wild, you know where that came from. Now check out a couple of the songs with some cool visuals that Terzij de Horde put up on their YouTube channel, and read our exclusive chat with the lovely Johan and William after the jump.
I don’t think that the guys from TdH know this, but we felt like we killed their song with our riffs.
- William van der Voort (Ggu:ll)
When were the main ideas for this piece first sown between you – was it the Roadburn invitation that set it off, or had you already thought about something like this before?
Johan van Hattum: It had actually started a year or so before our Roadburn show. When Jelle (TdH) and Bart (Ggu:ll) went for a beer whilst we were all recording our full-lengths, they pondered whether it would be interesting to swap drum tracks and write a new track with them, purely as an experiment. All of us dove in, because this was a challenge among friends!
William van der Voort: We were both in the process of recording, for us it was our «Ex Est« album and for TdH it was their ‘In One Of These, I Am Your Enemy’ album, when we came up with this idea. As Johan said, this was way before the Roadburn show we did in 2022. Because both bands already recorded the drum tracks, it only took those few beers to think of this crazy idea to exchange these and write our own interpretation of riffs on it. It was around the end of 2021 that we both finished these songs and Johan (TdH) came up with the idea of the show for Roadburn and contacted Walter. It took another year to finally release the split ‘Van Grond’ during Record Store Day 2023 which took place during Roadburn again, so we were happy to both play an exclusive show for the Offroad program.
How would you describe the relationship that exists between the two bands?
Johan: A dysfunctional family! Nah, most of us have known each other for ages, via local scenes, bands (Nihill predominantly) and friends, and so we knew we’d get along anyway. It wasn’t until we started playing shows together we found that our energies onstage ran parallel as well. We play different styles of music, but with the exact same approach. That alongside a love for stupid adventures and horrible jokes is a match made in heaven.
William: We have a very close relationship, we call it friendship actually. Jelle (TdH), me and Gert-Jan (Ggu:ll) actually all worked for that other amazing festival we had in Tilburg called Incubate some years ago. So we go way back. But we obviously met each other multiple times during shows and Roadburn as well. We’re also on the same label nowadays (Consouling Sounds) and since we have the same booking agency too, we have played a bunch of shows together, which always seemed to be a perfect fit.
How do you think this exchanging of elements, with the drum tracks going back and forth and whatnot, change the sound of either of your bands? Did you have to approach things differently so that everything would… “fit”?
William: Surely this was a completely different approach than we normally use to write songs. It mainly starts with a riff or a melody and gets worked out to a song by adding elements, like the drums during the process. So starting with only a drum track and even a very fast one, was a challenge. But despite this sounding very difficult, it happened almost automatically. As I mentioned before the two bands seem to be a perfect fit which made this writing process as if it was meant to be this way all along. Surely we had to anticipate the fast black metal(ish) drums but the feelings that came up were just the same as the ones that come up when we work on our own songs.
Johan: For us, also yes, of sorts. When we listened to the drum track, we hadn’t heard ‘Falter’ yet, so we really stepped in using a completely blank slate. The first thing Demian proposed was trying to write a crushing riff in drop A, to make it the heaviest thing we ever did. It sounded amazing, and so we went along for the ride. I don’t think I’ll ever play a 5-string bass again, but for this moment it was glorious. The song writing here opened up new possibilities for us, as in: we now seem to be far more open to experiment with different approaches than before. This 10” really brought us further as a band.
Would you like to discuss or reveal anything about the lyrics or concepts of these pieces?
Johan: For ‘A Robe of Words’, Joost and I considered the intensity of grief and mourning, the crushing effect it has to isolate yourself to embrace the anguish, only to find out how embedded this emotion is in everyday existence. How placing mankind at the centre of being, to create a narrative where the “I” operates away from the world, is both a lie and self-destructive. How we can have a heart that wants to embrace the world, and crush it at the same time as everything falls apart around us. It's a slightly more emotional track than we normally have, but again, for this track we felt we could go places we hadn’t gone before.
William: Yeah, our singer has no lyrics, his voice can be seen as an additional sort of instrument and he also uses it to express his raw emotions and leaves this open for the interpretation of the listeners to evoke their own emotions. On our track ‘Poison Arrow’ we got the drum track of TdH’s ‘Cheiron’ to work with and again our singer looked inside to let his raw emotions run wild. After the writing process we always have to come up with a title and so we called this ‘Poison Arrow’ because the Greek mythological figure Cheiron was killed by one of those. I don’t think that the guys from TdH know this, but we felt like we killed their song with our riffs.
After doing this, did you ever imagine perhaps going even a little further, maybe a longer, fully collaborative album with the two bands acting as one, some bigger project like that?
William: Honestly, we haven’t thought about this or discussed this yet. It actually feels like a one off experiment for now, but we can’t look into the future to rule out the possibility that something might happen again. We will surely share the stage again as each other's support. The 2022 Roadburn show was something special and it asks for another special occasion to do something like this again, so when such an occasion occurs again it might just happen.
Johan: Looking at how much effort this cost, I’d say no. But yeah, who knows what the future will bring?
Of course everything you do as an artist shapes everything else you do. But this experience in particular, do you feel it has helped reshape your own individual bands afterwards in some fundamental way?
William: This whole experience has broadened our horizon and given us new ways to think about composition and the writing process. Because we had to write guitar tracks to an exciting drum track, we realised a Ggu:ll song can also find its shape in the computer. We still love to explore riffs and ideas by jamming them over and over again, but after ‘Poison Arrow’, we don’t fear using recorded ideas and playing around with them in the virtual space, before playing it as a band. Also, the way Terzij de Horde used our drum track showed us new possibilities of placing and using drums. This has given us a wider look at the compositions of our own songs. So while maybe it hasn’t really reshaped us in a fundamental way, it definitely broadened our view on how to get into the writing process.
Johan: Yeah, as mentioned before, it really allowed us to experiment more, to not feel too limited by what we felt used to constitute a “Terzij de Horde”-track, whatever that means.
What are you plans, if you can reveal anything, for the next steps of both Terzij de Horde and Ggu:ll? Anything already in the works?
William: With Ggu:ll we are now in the process of writing new songs and with this new experience we really hope that it’ll go a little faster than before. But keep in mind that we’re a doomy band, so not only is our music is on the slow side, but so our writing has been too. Besides that, we have some nice shows planned in the future and hope to add a few along the way.
Johan: Shows, so many shows! With and without our buddies, it’s looking really good. We are well known to take forever releasing new material, but this time it might be less than seven years.
Just for the heck of it, would you guys like to recommend us anything cool you might be listening to at the moment?
Johan: These last weeks, I’ve been listening to loads of Memorrhage (really weird nu-metal revival, USA), Hubert Selby Jr. Infants (harsh noise rock, IRE), the last Ossaert (BLACK METAL, NL) and the Botch (metalcore 101, USA) reissues.
William: Afsky made a great imprssion on Roadburn as well as Antichrist Siege Machine. Our homies in ZWART made a great album last year and Crawl made one of the nastiest and ominous records with their 2023 Damned.
Find Terzij de Horde on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.
Find Ggu:ll on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.