The two guys in Super Goliath – known only as G (guitar) and Ryan (drums) – have been in bands together for “over 20 years”. Most of those were, and technically still are, as members of Bristol-based alt/noise/punk/metal hybrid Left Side Brain. The music they make with Super Goliath, however, is totally new – dark and dirty, slow and sludgy instrumental, dirge-like doom metal.
Their debut LP, Destroyer, Destroy, Destroyed, consists of one 36 minute-long track that traverses the spectrum of doom and sludge and is unlike anything the pair have ever made before. That said, they do see this as something of a natural evolution from their projects of the past.
“We’ve been playing together since our teens,” says G, “and that’s a long time ago now. So this is just a logical progression of all the time we’ve spent together, and it’s turned into this strange, slightly loose, improvised and slightly not improvised beast.”
The entire album/track/album track was recorded live in one take, but don’t think that the pair just went into a studio and made stuff up on the spot. The “slightly not improvised” comment refers to the year or so that the G and Ryan, who started Super Goliath in 2014, spent writing and evolving into what they eventually ended up capturing on tape.
“There was some stuff that was definitely pre-written,” explains Ryan, “and there were definitely patches where we obeyed rules. The beauty of being a two-piece is that with a bit eye contact in the room on the day you can see what each other are doing, give it room and let it breathe a bit.”
Despite the fact that the pair have been working on this one piece of music since forming, they’ve decided to not put too much value on all that time and effort. In fact, record is available to download on their Bandcamp page for a mere 50p.
“We’ve been in bands a long time!” laughs Ryan. “I just want people to hear this. So rather than ask ‘How much can we squeeze from this?’ we just want to get it out there. We’re under no illusions that this is going to make our millions.”
“Yeah,” chuckles G in agreement. “We’d given up any notion of trying to make our fame or fortune with this quite a few years ago.”
That may be so, but for pair, it’s much more important to enjoy and love what they do. Which they do. And despite the gloomy, glowering and dark nature of their music, that enjoyment, enthusiasm and passion nevertheless shines through. Whereas some bands might be jaded after two or so decades of playing, Super Goliath are positively buzzing.
“This is so exciting for us,” says G. “The stuff we did before with Left Side Brain was more song-oriented riff rock, and we had loads of fun trying to subvert that and playing with the idea of song structure, but we have so much fun with this. When we were deciding we were going to do this as a two-piece, we had a night down the pub just laughing our arses off and trying to imagine what kind of a band we could be, because we really didn’t give a fuck. And this is what we decided!”
That, though, turned out to be slightly harder than they imagined.
“We set out to be this slow, ugly prospect,” says Ryan, “but when we started jamming we weren’t naturally like that.”
“No,” confirms G. “Playing slow is actually quite a challenge. It really took us a while to fall into our groove. But now we have, we just want to play some shows, play some support slots with some nice big bands and just play with some fucking heavy bands. The best part of it has been the shows we’ve played – getting out there and meeting with other bands who are like-minded and upsetting people by being too loud.”
For more information on Super Goliath, visit their Facebook page.
