interview with Objector
Have any of you played in other bands?
Yeah, most of us have been playing with bands for a good number of years.
Filip was a founding member of Belgian thrashband Leave Scars, and Jos plays drums in Mästürbätör.
How is it that you started playing music? Because it's fun? We all started at an early age, even as young as 9 years old. What's not to like about playing music?
What are your names? / Who plays what? / How old are you?
Bock, 42, plays guitar and does lead vocals.
Filip is 33 and plays guitar and backing vocals.
Jos is 17 and is our drumming machine.
Stef is 40 and plays bass.
Have you had other previous members?
Yes, Objector has had some line-up issues in the past, mainly drummers have been hard to keep.
A little over 2 years ago, after the previous drummer quit, the bassplayer and guitarplayer also quit to persue other (musical) interests.
Only Bock remained and decided to go ahead with the band and seek out other musicians, so jokingly refer to it as Objector 2.0
Where are you from? We all are from the Turnhout/Antwerp region of Belgium.
What year did the band form? 2007 was when Objector first started.
What's your style of genre?
We think it's quite fitting to label ourselves as thrash metal. We are all fans of the original thrashbands, Slayer, Kreator, Annihilator, Exodus, Destruction,...
And I guess it shows in the kind of music we make.
How have you developed since you started with the music?
I guess most musicians will say that their playing improves over time, certainly when playing with other people. But there's always new stuff to learn, new skills to master.
With our style of music, the tempo is pretty high, so the challenge is to be tight and not make it sound like a blender crushing ice cubes...
Do you have other interests of work outside the band?
For all of us the band is a hobby, the older guys in the band all have jobs to do and Jos is in school.
We're also a big bunch of geeks. We're all into sci-fi, gaming, comics, movies, Star Wars,...
Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that? We've just released our 2nd album through Malevolence Records. But as I understand it, that label will be closing in the near future. So we'll be interested in talking to other labels and see what's possible.
What made you decide to make this music?
We're all fans of metal. Thrash metal being the most metal subgenre (according to Lich King), it was obvious we'd make this type of music.
Not that we don't like other subgenre's, of course we do...
What are your songs about? Classic thrash lyrics about the downfall of mankind, how dumb we as a species are and how we are creating our own demise.
Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? We write songs together. But lyrics are done by Bock, we provide ideas, but he works them out into patterns and actual lyrics he's able to sing (at breakneck speeds).
Do you start with the music or the lyrics? Music first, our songs are very guitar oriented, lyrics are just the icing on the cake
Have you done any covers live?
We did a Kreator cover once, but we've not played any after that. We've been discussing it for quite sometime, but there's so much to choose from and we all have to agree on the actual song of course.
Perhaps we might put a cover song into our live set, but that remains to be seen.
What ages are most of your concert attendants? I guess late 20's and beyond. Or even 30's...
Do you always play the same songs live, or do you vary?
It completely depends on the time we're given. We work with that and move songs around. But usually they are the same songs, perhaps in a different order.
With our Social Intolerance album coming out recently, the focus of our set is on those songs, which makes sense I guess.
Do you have a regular place you play live often? We've been playing a lot in the greater Antwerp area, and we're trying to move out of there a bit, but Antwerp will remain our stomping grounds.
What was your latest gig?
That would have been Antwerp Metalfest. A nice, two day, open air metal festival, where local talent and international acts come together. Nile and Testament were headliners this year.
We had the huge honour of opening the mainstage and we thrashed the place! Responses were good and people seemed to have had a good time.
Where do you plan to gig the comming year? Hopefully we'll be playing in Holland and Germany a bit more, that for us seems to be the next step. Also more festivals would be nice, those are fun to do, and you reach a bigger audience than local gigs.
When did you start to sell merchandise, and what do you have for sale? Like most bands we offer cd's, shirts, stickes, badges, pins...
Where can people buy your merchandise? People can get in touch with us through Facebook or Bandcamp and buy merch directly from us.
What do you think about people downloading music instead of buying records now a days?
Well, that's the big question isn't it? I'm sure that a lot of metalheads still buy cd's and vinyl, because they see it as an ever expanding collection, i'm no different.
But you have to be fair and say that services like Spotify or iTunes are VERY handy. I'm a Spotify user and I gladly pay that small amount every month to have almost everything available on my smartphone.
We put our music on there too, just because it's really handy and people can listen to it whenever they want.
Since we're a local band and we don't live of our music, the not getting paid enough story is not something we bump into ourselves, but I can imagine that when you're a professional band, you'd like
to see some revenue and not give all of your earning to these companies. Therefore Bandcamp is a nice intermediate, which gives artists their fair share.
How do you think the music industry have changed because of this?
To be honest, Lars Ulrich was right all those years ago, and we've been seeing the effect of that in the way that music labels are dying out. The good thing is that bands these days can pretty much do everything themselves, recording at home is easy,
printing physical copies is just a few mouseclicks away, and you'll find decent artwork all over the world...
On the other side, talk to any band that's doing this pro and they'll all say the same thing. If you want to live of your music, you have to tour, tour, tour and be able to be away from home for 10 out of 12 months.
What do you think of my work?
I guess the underground metalscene has always been about DIY. You have musicians who create music, you have fanzines that spread the word and do interviews, reviews, gig-reviews. You have people who run distro's and small labels, there's people
who have stores and online-outlets for merch and cd's. Whenever you visit a festival you'll see these boots with loads of merch and cd's. I've always liked that, the metalscene is by and for metalheads, and it'll always be like that.
How do you think and know that this interview will help you in the music business? To be honest, I hope more than 10 people read this, and if you, the reader reading this, like our music and like to support us, that's fuckin awesome!!
Do you have any role models or idols? I don't think any of us are really fanboys, but of course there's some people we admire. Chuck Schuldiner for one, has always been an example. The dudes in Slayer are a huge inspiration.
I like Darth Vader.
Is it easier to find inspiration from older bands, or bands that are more active today?
For Objector, certainly older bands. We're not trying to be the next Municipal Waste because there's enough bands who're in that subgenre. We've noticed that, in Belgium at least, there's not many old school thrash bands that are active. Most of the other thrashy bands
do a more modern form of thrash, or combine it with other subgenre's.
What have been your biggest obstacles? Getting good gigs is always hard. You depend on others to give you the chance and opportunity to play. Which isn't always easy.
What advice would you give other bands or artists? Stay true, be yourself, have fun!
How do you get psyched for a gig? The adrenalin is always there before we go on, and it's a bit stressy, but as soon as that first note gets played, we're in the zone and focussed on what we have to do :)
Do you have any new material? Working on it as we speak.
What are your web sites?
https://www.facebook.com/objectorband/
How can people reach you? Facebook is the easiest way. Just like our page!
What are your plans for the future? Keep making kick ass thrash metal!
Do you have something to add?
Support your scene. Go to shows. Buy merch!!
Metal!!! \m/
