Before working on the meat of this album, this was the longest break I’ve had thus far with regards to writing new material for Decimate Our Kind. As is usually the case, the album is a mix of old songs I have leftover from the writing sessions of previous albums (mostly from the Radical Christianity sessions, as those were by far the longest and have the most leftovers), so I already had a good half of the album done by this time. The main part of most of the production sessions consisted of finishing the first track, which I had already started, as well as writing the two other long songs.
This album continues the pattern that The Prison left off at. Basically my vision was a series of eight albums, and perhaps some break EPs in between, that have a unifying concept that ties them together, obviously inspired by Dream Theater’s Twelve-Step albums. This is kind of considered the “intermission” album of the eight, then the next three are the second half of the main six-part concept, and then concluding with an epic “epilogue” album to bring the grand concept to a glorious close.
This grand concept continues with the signature song of this album, “Intermission: A Chance to Reevaluate”. This serves as the official intermission of the what-will-be six-part suite that began with “I. Businessman on the Ballot” on “In the Name of Our Republic” and continued on the two subsequent albums. This song is the midway point in that saga, with some (though not as many) repeated motifs. The lyrical concept deals with the state of America from the years 2016-2021, during the presidency of you-know-who, although the lyrics reference American society as a whole, especially with this track, with the theme being to think about where we were going then, where we’re going now, and what our priorities should be. As it serves as an intermission, the album does not begin the way “The Prison” ends. Instead, the subsequent album will.
The next song is the first part of a separate two-part suite, confined to this particular album. I envisioned this idea as a story of a person who leaves their religion-run town to experience true freedom and exploration for the first time, only to realize that everywhere else, religion controls the lives of most people, and however good or bad, it brings them peace and order. This song is the more energetic of the two, signifying the character’s newfound freedom and fiery desire. This was one of those songs that I wrote part of a while ago, some parts dating as back as 2020. However I thought it fit perfectly with the ambiance I was going with, and after adding more parts to it, solidified it as part one of this narrative suite.
Part two of the suite is where the title of the album comes from. This is the darker, more gloomy part of the suite, where our character realizes the depressing truth about the role religion has in one’s life. This song was heavily inspired by Opeth’s “The Drapery Falls”. I had just been an Opeth fan for under a year at that point, and I had just rediscovered this song after favoring “The Leper Affinity” as my go-to Blackwater Park song. I loved how melancholic it was from start to finish, and wanted to replicate that atmosphere with this part. I never claimed to be a completely original artist, after all!
This next song was written about my time on Gab. Gab is a notorious far-right pandering alternative social media platform that promotes "free speech", and as someone who is proudly not alt/far-right, I decided to see what it was really like by using an anonymous account, with the goal of trying to get banned simply by trolling its genuine users, and this song documents that whole experience. The riffs and solos were written during the summer of 2022. That period of time between December 2021 and July 2022 was fully spent on writing lots and lots of riffs and solos to pick out the right ones at the right time. In any case, this was also one of the first songs for this album to have vocals recorded.
"Sarcophagic" is another song written during 2022, but this time it was around August when I started writing this song. This song builds off of a single riff that I wrote, which was a very simple chromatic thrashy riff that serves as the basis for the song. The lyrics are about the hypocrisy of many so-called "pro-lifers", who ironically support the most anti-life actions whenever it suits them best. Another fact about this song is that this was one of the last songs I wrote before my life completely changed as I started my first semester of college in fall of 2022.
"Autocratic Skirmish" is a very short, very simple instrumental. I wrote this in 2022 with the idea of "if I were to write a short metal song for a chaotic section of a first-person shooter video game, what could it sound like?" I was deep into DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal at that point in time, and I was discovering the awesomeness of Mick Gordon's metal-as-fuck soundtrack. It was never my intention to replicate that djent-y style with this song, but that was definitely the inspiration for it. I always pictured a Call of Duty-style fight going on in the background with this one.
"The Carnivorous Spirit" is another song that is part of a multi-part suite. In this case, it concludes the "Nine Sins" trilogy that began with "The Malevolent Father" on "Wheels of War", and continued with "The Psychopathic Son" on "The Prison". Each one of those songs is divided into three segments based on three of the Nine Satanic Sins. Musically, they each showcase the more evil, haunting side of my sound, and lyrically, they deal with my interpretations of the meanings of each of those sins. "The Carnivorous Spirit", dealing with the final three sins, concludes the trilogy, and I tried to allude to the religious content and continuity with the titles representing the Father, Son, and Spirit. There are many other hints and nuggets that I put into these songs as well, but I won't discuss them here.
As has been tradition with my albums since “Thrillingly Dead”, I have been including a remake of an older song of mine on each album. Since “In the Name of the Republic”, I’ve chosen to put those songs at the end of the album, as opposed to slapped in the middle on “Thrillingly Dead”, “Hogs in Badges”, and “The Chosen One”. The reason is because I wanted the albums to be a complete listening experience separate from anything I’ve previously done, whereas previously the remake was considered part of the experience. This time around I chose “Subzero and Subhuman”, the 8-minute song that concluded side one of my third album “Plagues and Commandments”. I actually made this remake around a year ago to be used in the future, and it felt like this was the time. This makes Mobile Corpse my second-longest DOK album and my longest single-sided album, at just over 72 minutes.
I know it's extremely commonplace for musicians and other artists to refer to their latest work as "their greatest yet", and I too am guilty of doing that for several of my albums, but I truly do feel that this is my most profound representation of who I am, what my music is, and what I am capable of doing as a guitarist, songwriter, lyricist, and amateur harsh vocalist. I feel like I am getting better at fusing death metal, progressive metal, and thrash metal, my three favorite subgenres of metal, with each album that I write, and I'm already thinking about the next one.
