Q2 2024: Updates

I’m hoping to have a steady flow of album releases in the coming year. I’m in my normal creative energy surge right now, and I got a lot of things to say and a lot of riffs to write, so I’m just having fun pumping that out and then I’ll release them steadily throughout the coming months. I have some other big projects that I hope to begin working on soon that I won’t talk much about here, but I’m excited for the future. In any case, my next album will be coming out in August.

The first single for the new album, “Shutdown”, was released a few weeks ago. This new album as a whole follows similar patterns to my previous four. I think I’m getting a lot better at combining thrash, death, and progressive metal into something unique and personal that I’m very proud of. This album leans more into the proggy side compared to my previous ones, but there are still plenty of thrashy and death-y moments in there. In any case, I’m proud of it. 

What I can say about some of my other big projects is that I plan on releasing a new instrumental metal album under the 71011-NINJER name, as I haven’t touched this since almost three years ago. But I think I’m ready, after doing nothing but extreme heavy metal for the past three years, to return to something more experimental and weird, which is exactly what 71011-NINJER was. I also have other musical projects outside of DOK and 7N that I’m working on, as well as several non-music projects too. Looking forward to continue releasing my art to the world in the future. 

Mobile Corpse: Written Commentary

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.

Q1 2024: Updates For Whoever's Reading

I don't even know what I'm doing here anymore, not gonna lie…but I do have a following of sorts, and I do enjoy writing, so I might as well update whoever might be reading this on what's been going on. Anyway, I recently completed my eleventh studio album under my "Decimate Our Kind" artist name, titled "Mobile Corpse". I know people are bored to death of artists talking about how their latest work is their "greatest yet", but I am genuinely proud of this one. I feel like I'm finding my death-thrash-prog-fusion sound more and more with each album.

I am thinking about pursuing other musical projects, however. I don't plan on stopping Decimate Our Kind, however, as I genuinely do appreciate what's been going on here. My following is small, but it's the biggest following I've ever had for a personal passion project, and I genuinely appreciate all who do listen to my music. I am still planning on more DOK material to come out later in the year. But at the same time, I think about doing something different. As is expected of most artists, after all. It's not easy doing the same thing for years on end.

Some things that I thought about doing were going back to my previous musical project, 71011-NINJER, which was entirely focused on instrumental music from whatever genre I felt like dabbling in. Obviously the quality is much lower compared to what I've produced with DOK, but I do still think about that project often. The thought also crossed my mind of creating an entirely new project, focused on soft, clean/acoustic-style rock. But these are all just ideas in my head at the moment. Regardless, I have a new album being released in April, and if you feel compelled to do so, I would appreciate you taking a listen. Thanks for everything, if you're reading this.

August 2023 - 2023 in Metal

Figured that I’d do something different for this monthly entry. I kinda just want to ramble a bit on how bland 2023 was in terms of metal releases. It’s interesting because 2023 so far has been an absolutely phenomenal year when it comes to other kinds of artistic media, namely video games (Hogwarts Legacy, Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, and upcoming stuff like Starfield, Spider Man 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Sonic Superstars, etc.). Yet, in my opinion at least, the only good metal album that I listened to this year was Overkill’s “Scorched”. 

I’m especially disappointed in Metallica’s latest effort. While I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s God-awful, it’s easily their biggest modern letdown since St. Anger. It’s just so effing boring from start to finish, and the reason why I felt compelled to aimlessly ramble about them is that so many other metal bands have released wonderful “comeback from COVID” albums (Dream Theater, Megadeth, Overkill, Municipal Waste, Kreator, Exodus, and Iron Maiden to name some examples), yet Metallica go ahead and release one of the most lifeless 77-minute metal albums of the century. 

It’s kind of interesting to me how, despite the fact that so much when it comes to releasing art is mere coincidence, certain trends are more widely followed than others. In 2021 and 2022 it seemed like every metal band was releasing “comeback albums”, similar to how 2016 was such a packed year in metal, but now it’s slowing down again. While thousands of underground metal bands are always going to be active, it seems like the time for more well-known bands to shine ebbs and flows often in unison with each other. I know this is an extremely rambly post, but idk what else to talk about. No real updates since the last entry have occurred.

July 2023 - Long Time No See, Updates, Going Forward

 Be warned: this blog post is quite rambly.

I kind of gave up on this blog a while ago. A lot has been going on in my life and a lot has happened. I gave up on this blog because I didn't really find any motivation to write in it due to a lack of any ideas regarding what to put in this fucking thing. As much experience as I have in writing, I've never really been a blogger. But since my last post Decimate Our Kind has gotten bigger in terms of my following, and I have been "noticed" several times, so to speak, and I've actually started earning money from making music. So I'm primarily bringing back this blog, despite the fact that barely anyone reads these entries, to establish connections towards audience members that may choose to stumble upon these, regardless of how many or how few do.

Going forward, I'm going to try to stick to keeping this blog a lighthearted project. As mentioned before, I haven't much experience in blogging, and coming up with ideas for writing in a blog as specific as mine (with it being an official music artist's blog and all) has never been easy. My goal at the moment is to limit my activity on this blog to writing one entry per month. I'm also going to vary it up a bit in terms of what I write about. I will of course be writing about my music, but I may also write about other musicians and bands I'm interested in, as well as other non-music related topics I'm into (which a lot of Decimate Our Kind songs are about), such as religion, politics, literature, etc.

In terms of what's going on with my music, I'm continuing to spend much of my free time creating, writing, recording, mixing, and producing new original material. Since I do everything by myself on basically an empty budget, that's why I'm releasing new material so often, because I have perhaps too many ideas that I think are worthy of expanding upon. I'm one song away from completing my tenth "studio" (if you count my bedroom/dorm room a studio) album. This upcoming album, along with the previous two and (as of now) the following five, will be connected through a concept that I've already released the first two parts of (I. Businessman on the Ballot and II. The Wall of Nothing). I'm titling the concept "The Fundamentalist Suite" and it's basically a grand metal recap of the past several years in America and how a certain leader changed everything and the legacy he left behind.

I'm also working on another concept in addition to this, titled "The Nine Sins Suite". It's basically my take on Dream Theater's "Twelve Step Suite", except with the lyrics I'm giving my interpretation of Anton Lavey's Nine Satanic Sins, each song containing three parts (the first in the trilogy, "The Malevolent Father", is out now on my latest album, "Wheels of War").

As of right now, the album is slated to be released in October, with two singles coming out in August and September. At this point I don't want to say any more about what will happen next, because everything is unpredictable these days.

I think that should just about do it for this month's entry. I know not many people will read this, so I just want to say thank you to those who do take the time to read my rambly, directionless-as-fuck blog entries.

09/17/2022 - Update: "Path to Damnation" now on Spotify

I said from the beginning that I wouldn't write here often…and here I am, close to a month after my last entry. But I do have some news…

"Path to Damnation", the opening track to my latest album (and the one I'm most proud of) Radical Christianity, is now out on both Spotify and YouTube music. This is definitely a milestone that I'm proud of. Previously, under my old instrumental solo project by the name of "71011-NINJER", I released a good chunk of my albums on Spotify before decided to take them down after committing to doing something else, and the process to take them down was very painful, and there's still one album on there that, on my RouteNote profile, is completely absent, implying it's taken down, but it's there on Spotify, it'll be there forever, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Amuse.io is very much a breath of fresh air, because the option to take down releases is built-in, whereas I had to email the RouteNote staff to delete all my albums. The process to release my music (for literally free) was very straightforward. As a matter of fact, I have another little announcement to make: my entire fourth album, Radical Christianity, is coming to not only Spotify and YouTube music but also Deezer, Tidal, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. I'm very happy to be growing my platform and getting my music to places besides Bandcamp and BandLab.

In terms of music production, things are going well. As I'm living in a college dorm room, I obviously can't cut vocals. But I have the instrumentals of two albums all ready to go for when I return home for the holidays. In addition, I'm currently working on the instrumentals for a third album. I should definitely have a number of additional albums ready for vocals by the time I return home, but obviously I'm going to release them gradually instead of all at once. That's pretty much all I wanted to write about, thanks for reading.

08/21/2022 - Update: A Few Changes Going Forward

 Hello. I haven’t written in this blog for a while…I might as well update the people who are reading this (I’m not sure how many are, but you know who you are) as to what’s going on with me. The way I create, produce, and share my music is going to be real different going forward as a couple of days ago I, an incoming college freshman, moved into my dorm room. The walls are, according to our residence hall assistant, “thin as fucking paper”, so as such, that changes how I record and hear myself playing guitar. I’m also making some changes as to the distribution of my music, and I’m also doing things differently musically outside of Decimate Our Kind as well. I’m going to be writing about all of that here. 

First of all, I’m going to discuss how music distribution will change. For starters, I got a PayPal account set up. Yes, this does mean that on Bandcamp, I have started to charge for my music. I know this represents a feature previously available to you the listener being removed, but it is what it is. Literally every artist does this, so it seems. Besides, there will soon be a way for you to still listen to my music for free. Thanks to the power of amuse.io, I am going to start distributing my music onto Spotify and YouTube music. I’m going to start slow (so far I’m just gonna release the “Path to Damnation” song as a single) but I hope to grow the library from there. 

Which brings me to the second main thing - college. I am starting college. My current goal is to get into the college of music. I’m most likely going to be auditioning in January or February. The only thing they have for electric guitar is jazz, and funnily enough, they have no available jazz guitar teachers on campus, so I’m going to be spending a hell of a lot of time studying jazz guitar online and practicing plenty in order to have the best shot at getting into the college. Obviously I want to study music production while I’m here, and there’s also a whole bunch of music-related clubs, organizations, and extracurricular activities here that I want to get into as well, so I’m going to be very musically active here. 

With that being said, I will most likely be unable to record vocals here. Like I said, the walls are thin as fuck here and I have a roommate, so there goes my ability to comfortably record vox with my phone. What I will do is write and record and produce the instrumentals for the next couple of albums (and write all of the lyrics) while on campus, for none of it requires my voice, and when I go home for the holidays (which lasts about a month), I’ll do all the vocals for all the ready albums then. I think it’s the best way for me to stay productive during college while not disturbing anyone, as I have wired earbuds in order to quietly play while still getting the full metal sound for me to hear. 

Anyway, that’s about it. Thanks for reading and understanding. 

08/05/2022 - Update: “Radical Christianity” Out Now

The following piece of writing is outdated and as such it contains content that no longer applies and therefore cannot be considered accurate to current circumstances. 

Hey everyone. Just wanted to write a bit about how my fourth album “Radical Christianity” is out now on bandcamp, and per usual with my albums, it is completely free to download and play (I have no intention on making money with my music, at least for now). But nonetheless, this is definitely one of my proudest efforts yet, not just with Decimate Our Kind but with all my music in general (I have a couple of other projects besides DOK). This is definitely, in my opinion, the best thing I’ve created production-wise, and I also think it’s one of the first albums that I think really does achieve what I was trying to go for - a classic extreme thrash metal album. 

This album definitely took the most time for me to complete in terms of when I started working on it to when I completed it. Some of the songs on this album are, relatively speaking, quite old. The song I wrote first was the title track, back in autumn of 2021, right after my third album was released. The most recent song was “Path to Damnation”, which was started and completed this July (2022). This also marks the first time where I triple-tracked all the songs, most of which was done long after the songs were already written because I guess I never really thought about triple-tracking before up until very recently. And I apologize if this is information I already wrote about before. 

In terms of what’s next for me, I already have a couple of unreleased songs in the vault that I might put on the next album, and I already triple-tracked some of them (they’re pretty old too, so obviously the third guitar track was recorded much later after the first two were). I am also in two other bands (one’s metal, one’s rock, the metal one hasn’t released anything yet but we do have an EP coming out for the rock one. The band is “Empty Hallway” and the EP is “Rally of the Forsaken”) so I’m going to be doing stuff with them, and then of course there’s my other solo project (71011-NINJER) that I haven’t touched for a year. I’m also going to college in a few weeks (gonna take some music classes and audition for the college of music), so there’s a lot for me to look forward to.  But for now, I’m proud to present Decimate Our Kind’s latest and greatest, “Radical Christianity”!

07/29/2022 - Update: The (Completed) 4th Album

Hi!

I’m happy to say that I’m feeling much better, and my fourth Decimate Our Kind album is now completed. 

Firstly, I’m going to clarify/correct some things I mentioned in the previous post. 

I said that there was no grand concept in this album. That is now only partially true. Yes, there is a small concept to this album. There are four songs that tell an original story put together. A very small concept when compared to what most people picture in their heads when the phrase “concept album” happens to come up, yes, but still a concept nonetheless. In addition, the nine songs from the last post have now been cut down to eight, and as such the album is now just over 40 minutes long. After experimenting heavily with the last two albums, I wanted to go the more traditional route this time around. 

Regardless, I know every artist says this right before releasing a new album, but this is easily the effort I am most proud of so far. This album is, admittedly, a pretty been-there-done-that traditional thrash metal album, but with my own unique twist and style and flair steering the wheel, of course. It’s got fast, thrashy, shreddy and technical guitar parts, but there’s also some slow and heavy songs as well. There’s (admittedly poorly executed) death growls as well as (even more awkwardly performed) harsh spoken word as well (what, I have to get my music out there somehow).

I maintain that this is easily my best-produced/best-sounding album ever, and it represents my composing, songwriting, and guitar playing skills higher than they ever were before (though that should be logically obvious). As far as releasing the album goes, I’m currently without a working computer (I made the album using entirely myiPad and smartphone, as I have always done) so release of the full album will have to wait a bit. However, the instrumental versions of two songs from the album are already published on my BandLab page (https://www.bandlab.com/71011ninjer) if you’d like to get a preview. Thanks for everything, everyone!

07/27/2022 - Update: The 4th Album

The fourth Decimate Our Kind album is almost complete.

There will be nine songs on the album, and it will be almost 50 minutes in length. This isn't going to be a colossal conceptual overly-ambitious album like "Plagues and Commandments", or an overly condensed extreme package like "Decency is Dead". This album will be closest perhaps to my first album. It's more of a traditional extreme-adjacent thrash metal album, nothing particularly groundbreaking. This album will definitely, at least according to me, have by far the best production out of anything I've produced so far. This is the first time I've triple-tracked all the rhythm guitar parts, and after mastering all but three tracks, the songs definitely have a powerful and resonating punch with the drums and the guitar beats. I'm definitely quite proud of this one.

All that's left to do is I still need to record vocals for three songs and then arrange (because the DAW I use doesn't allow for BPM changes mid-project) and master those same songs.

However, I don't know when I'll get around to doing that. I've recently been sick with a cough and sore throat (thank hell it's not COVID, I have immunity and vaccines exist so yeah), and yesterday morning something rather shocking happened within my personal life, so I need to take more time for my physical and mental health. I'm going to be okay, but I need time.

But the album is almost finished. It should be releasing before the end of the summer.

Just wanted to update on this. Thanks for reading.

07/19/2022 - First Post: What to Expect

Hello. Nice to meet you. Words simply can't describe how glad and happy I am that you came across this brand new blog of mine, but I'll try to make them - I feel like, with each additional person that's stumbling across my creations, my artistic works and projects, I feel more and more like I'm contributing something creative and artistic to the world, and thus I feel more like myself and my dreams (of which I might not even fully understand myself), whatever they are, are coming truer and truer.

Anyway, enough of that.

I thought about something like this for quite a while. I wanted to have a specific and particular kind of outlet for expressing things such as the current status of my artistic projects, Decimate Our Kind or otherwise, as well as other statements I feel are necessary for me to make under the Decimate Our Kind profile name. Admittedly I am writing this more for the satisfaction for myself, as opposed to my fellow metalheads (I don't want to use the word "fans" or any equivalent like "followers" because I really don't like calling people who like my work my fans/followers, for that implies a hierarchical relationship between myself and them. We are equals, the people who like my work are obviously people who enjoy the arts, and as for myself, the creator of my works, I'm just another person who enjoys the arts. Nothing more, nothing less), but I do hope that you enjoy what you're reading and I welcome you into an additional section of my nerdy, metal world.

I'm not intending on fully committing to this project in any way. My primary focuses are, obviously, on my music (Decimate Our Kind, and the bands I'm in, more on that in the future) and my other writing projects (short stories, a novel I'm working on, multiple memoirs and nonfiction book-length projects, several personal journals, and of course poetry and lyrics). Don't expect me to write posts here all that often. That being said, I will definitely not refuse the opportunity to write here when I deem it necessary. After all, although IRL I'm very much an introverted, shy nerdy metalhead, when given a pen (figuratively speaking, technically "keyboard" is a more accurate term), I have a lot to say.

As briefly mentioned before, the stuff I will be writing and posting here includes but it not limited to: updates on the current status of my projects, mostly Decimate Our Kind projects but probably other stuff too, written commentaries on already completed DOK projects, and my statements/takes on topics that relate to music, the arts, literature, politics, religion, etc.

Hopefully you find my totally unprofessional and perhaps laid-back and lazy-minded blog posts worth reading.  Thanks very much for everything.