Stoner rock icon Brant Bjork has discussed the unique legacy of Kyuss in a new interview with Metal Hammer. Speaking to Hammer in their latest issue, Bjork explains that Kyuss - widely considered one of the pioneering forces in the stoner rock and stoner metal genres - were saddled with high expectations as their status began to grow in the 90s.
“Our guy at the label would always say, ‘You guys will be the next Metallica’, and that bummed me out," Bjork says now. "I wanted to be this Kyuss! I felt like we fucking rocked and had hit the peak of our chemistry at the time, and Metallica were super-cool guys and really supportive, but seeing it all on that scale, it was just like, ‘This isn’t for me.’ If that’s the epitome of success in a rock band, it just seemed unrewarding. They got up and played the same things every night, said the same things... I could tell it’d become a travelling circus, a machine. I was still 20 years old, more attracted to what we were doing in terms of improvising onstage and being loose. I wanted Kyuss to go more in that direction.”
As it happened, Kyuss would get to see how Metallica did business up close and personal when they supported the metal giants on tour in Australia in 1993. By that point, Bjork was already growing disillusioned with things in the band, and seeing metal taken to its arena-filling excesses didn't improve his attitude to it all.
“Supporting Metallica [in 1993] was fucking bananas," he recalls. "It was weird; by the time our management told us about the offer, I’d already decided I didn’t want to be in Kyuss anymore. I felt like I was no longer jiving with the guys and whatever we’d had that was magical, it was gone. I didn’t want to stick around to watch this really magical ship sink into the sea.”
Ultimately, Bjork would leave Kyuss following the recording of their classic third album, 1993's Welcome To Sky Valley, with fellow Kyuss alumni Josh Homme eventually going on to form Queens Of The Stone Age.
Read more from Brant Bjork in Metal Hammer's end of year special, out now.
