Fit For An Autopsy are an angry band. They sound angry, their unique ‘post-deathcore’ a savage outcry about the state of planet Earth. While some of their peers write posturing anthems driven by aimless rage, everyday heartbreak or juvenile gore and grisliness, FFAA dig into real-world trauma – like Gojira and Cattle Decapitation before them, they’re making extreme music with a purpose, tackling political injustice, the environment and capitalistic corruption.
They also look angry. Promotional photos show six big, glowering, tattooed dudes staring down the camera, and live shows reveal a frontman who looks like a pissed-off Uruk-Hai as he screams and bellows his guts out. So yeah, Fit For An Autopsy are angry. They’re furious, in fact. Scratch that: they’re positively seething. They’re… they’re… all bopping around this freezing-cold warehouse singing along to Haddaway’s 90s house banger, What Is Love. Wait, hold on…
“I mean, my first ever concert was Backstreet Boys,” grins frontman Joe Badolato, quickly clarifying: “Into The Millennium tour!”
OK, so maybe Fit For An Autopsy aren’t always angry. They mostly save that for the studio, where they can unleash their frustrations at the world in full, nailing their political colours to the mast, unbothered by the backlash that may follow. In 2017 they released Black Mammoth, a song written in solidarity with those who objected to the construction of the final section of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry oil from North Dakota to Illinois via an area just north of Standing Rock, a Sioux Native American reservation. Protesters feared the project would destroy sacred burial sites and contaminate drinking water. The video for the single showed footage of previous devastation caused by oil spills, alongside protesters, police and historical artwork depicting themes of colonialism.
Many supported the band, but there was pushback from some fans on social media. “I will not buy this album if a single dime goes to would-be protester thugs”, commented one. “So lame and political, you guys and Suicide Singalong should have a tour sponsored by Tampax and L’Oreal,” said another.
On social posts, they’ve shown support for initiatives such as the Black Lives Matter movement and International Women’s Day. When Hammer asks guitarist Will Putney where the band’s interest in politics stems from, he attributes it to his and guitarist Pat Sheridan’s time spent in the New Jersey hardcore scene, where bands would rage against societal injustice – “the general nature of that culture was always more active in being aware of social issues,” he explains. It’s something that’s run through Fit For An Autopsy’s music ever since.
“If you know the band, you know the kind of people we are, you know what we stand for,” says Pat, as five musicians and one journalist attempt to cram into a tiny kitchen space set up next to the spacious room where our photoshoot is taking place. “We’ve always caught a little bit of heat when we come out ‘ultra-political’, or if we take a stance on something, but we’re OK with that. It’s OK to disagree with us, as long as you’re not being violent or aggressive with us. We’ll talk to anybody about anything. We’ll prove to you what kind of people we are.”
Pat, a founding member of Fit For An Autopsy, is an engaging interviewee. Dressed in a thick North Face jacket and a black End cap that covers most of his head tattoos, he’s an intense but thoughtful fella. You soon sense he doesn’t suffer fools gladly; a quick aside on how he deals with people who object to his progressive ideological stances confirms this.
“Maybe you don’t understand me, let’s have a talk,” he explains. “There’s not enough of that, so we can do that. But we also won’t be met with the opposite of that. And if you meet us with the opposite of that, you’ll find out quickly. We will shut you down. We’ll fight. You bring a flamethrower, I’m bringing a fucking truck full of gasoline. You know what I mean? There’s no in-between.”
It’s this zero-compromise mentality that has helped Fit For An Autopsy rise through metal’s ranks. Formed in 2007 as a side-project for musicians in that New Jersey scene, their line-up has been fluid at best: three singers, various touring members, no full-time bassist until 2019. The two constants? Pat and Will, the latter serving as an Oz-like figure behind the scenes of the band since its formation. He writes a hefty chunk of their music while sitting out touring duties to concentrate on his ‘main gig’ as one of the most in-demand producers in modern metal, working with the likes of Body Count, Thy Art Is Murder, Northlane and Knocked Loose.
Since finally establishing a long-term line-up – Pat, Will, Joe, drummer Josean Orta (who joined in 2012), guitarist Tim Howley (2013) and bassist Peter ‘Blue’ Spinazola (touring musician from 2017, full-timer from 2019… keeping up?) – the band have evolved drastically. From Gojira-esque pick-scrapes, to At The Gates-style melodeath hooks, to more intense vocal harmonies and bursts of thrash, doom and tech metal, their last two albums in particular have contained so many ideas and influences that they haven’t so much outgrown deathcore as lapped it five times over.
“We’ve emerged out of any kind of genre-specific ‘thing’,” Pat observes. “Not that I mind being called a ‘deathcore’ band. I don’t care what you call me, as long as you’re calling!”
Oh What The Future Holds, released in 2022, snuck inside the Top 25 of the Billboard 200 – an insane achievement for a band this heavy. 2024’s The Nothing That Is was another career high-water mark, rapturously received by fans and critics alike. As Hammer speaks to the band, they’re about to headline the 1,500-capacity Birmingham Institute – a venue they played as main support only a year prior, and where they played fourth from top just three years ago.
“The crazy part is, it feels like I blinked and we got here,” says Pat. “Then I start thinking about all the things that have happened in the interim. It’s been a fucking long time! But I wouldn’t change it. We all feel like we’ve earned something, and we respect it differently than a band that just comes in and immediately blows up.”
While FFAA have been a relatively slow and steady success story, it was kicked into… well, let’s call it third gear by the arrival of Joe in 2015, following the departure of original vocalist Nate Johnson and then his brief replacement, Greg Wilburn. Joe takes up most of the door frame he’s leaning against as he chats to Hammer – with his long hair and black longsleeve, he would cut an intimidating figure if it weren’t for the fact that he’s all smiles. The only time he breaks his relaxed demeanour is when he speaks of his vow to make it in the metal scene. Joe’s laidback warmth contrasts with Pat’s hyper-focused intensity, but if there’s one thing they share, it’s that determination to knuckle down and get shit done.
“I was in four local bands at the time, just trying to make it work,” Joe recalls of the moment he was asked to join FFAA. “I was a barber; I’d just been cutting hair and playing music over and over.”
While cutting the hair of one of his bands’ bassists, Joe received the phone call that’d change his life, as Will Putney invited him to demo some material for Fit For An Autopsy. Joe smashed it, went for dinner with Pat and Will in New Jersey, and the rest is history.
“They were like, ‘We’re not making a lot of money at all, so we hope that you’re not trying to make some money,’” chuckles Joe, who now owns a barber shop in Arizona. “I was like, ‘Honestly, I’ve been saving all my money so I can do this.’ I was the only one out of my entire friend group that didn’t stop doing music, because I just knew that it was what I wanted. And I’m very stubborn; if I really want something, I’m gonna push as hard as I can, even if I’m homeless, broke, doing whatever I have to do to make it work.”
With The Nothing That Is, Fit For An Autopsy released some of their most urgent, affecting and provocative work, perhaps best exemplified by the track Red Horizon. Written in response to the conflict in Gaza, it includes some bone-chilling lyrics (‘The bodies burned so bright that God closed his eyes’), as well as lines that were interpreted by some fans as antisemitic (‘Beasts of Zion, Curse your name… Every pocket lined with gold has cost a soul in other places’). It also ends with the highly contentious phrase ‘From the river to the sea’ – a line claimed by pro-Palestine campaigners as a slogan for peace, but criticised by many Jewish organisations as an antisemitic call for the dismantling of Israel.
“You’re allowed to call someone who lives in a certain place a bad person without saying everyone who’s there is bad,” says Will defiantly, when Hammer asks him about those lyrics. “My family is Jewish,” he adds. “Saying I’m antisemitic is crazy… we’re calling out a shitty issue.”
The song’s striking video is a little broader in its themes. It features two girls living in parallel – one enjoying a comfortable life with her family, the other surviving in the middle of a war zone. Its message was made all the more pertinent by the fact the girl in the war zone was played by an actress named Milana Nashkova, who had escaped from Ukraine in the midst of the Russian-Ukraine War.
“We were looking for people to be in the video, and their family came up,” reveals Pat. “So we have this person who is a refugee from a war-torn country who wants to play the part of somebody who is going through that very exact thing.”
“Singing the song is always powerful, but watching it all come to life through a video, and then knowing her story, it hits you really differently,” says Joe. “It hit me pretty hard. I was watching it the first time, I was getting a little choked. Like, that was real.”
“That’s why we do it,” adds Pat. “It’s easy to say you have an opinion on something you’ve never really experienced. What would you do if these things happened to you? What would you do if your family lost everything because of decisions of a government or corporations? And how would you get through that? Those are the ideas that push us a lot.”
Seventeen years and seven albums in, Fit For An Autopsy’s anger feels more vital than ever. But how far can a band like theirs go? Considering the ferocious music they make, they’ve already smashed all realistic expectations. What’s next?
“We just move forward,” responds Pat, matter-of-fact as ever. “When the wheels fall off, we pick this up and put it on our backs and carry it up the mountain.”
Joe, it seems, has more crystallised ambitions in mind. “We definitely have dreams of wanting to do certain things,” he says. “We saw Sleep Token the other day in Glasgow on our day off. 14,000, sold out. It just makes me hungry, seeing stuff like that. I will work as hard as I have to to get there, and if I don’t get there, it’s fine. At the end of this career, I’ll still leave, my head held high, knowing that I did so much really cool shit.”
Fit For An Autopsy in arenas? It might sound unlikely, but so does an extreme metal band dropping chart albums and singing along to Haddaway…
