Ingested Interview

It is an exceptional honour for me to be able to publish today this interview with Lyn Jeffs the Manchaster based Ingested, one of my favorite bands these day. Their brutal style is what is to me the essence of Death metal – regardless of whatever sub-genre you want to assign to their sounds, slam, brutal, technical etc. Especially with their latest release they got my attention and surely will go down in history of one of the landmark Albums of this genre.

But lets jump right in!

Your last Album “Where only gods may tread” absolutely blew my mind. How was it to release the Album in the middle of a pandemic and how was the resonance?

Thank you! It was not the most ideal of circumstances to release the album and to be honest we made the decision to delay the release in hoping that the global situation would improve, sadly it didn’t. We originally wanted to release it in June and had different music videos in mind but as we could not be together, we had to think outside the box so decided to push the release back to August which gave us time to create the music videos for “Dead Seraphic Forms” and “Another Breath”.

All in all, we have been absolutely blown away with the response and support we have received for the album, especially during such difficult times for everyone worldwide.

Where do you get your inspiration from? What gets your ideas to write new material?

These days we really draw inspiration from ourselves, in usual circumstances we spend most of the year touring, so we get to see first-hand what works for fans and what doesn’t. We all have quite an eclectic music tastes but are confident in the “Ingested sound”, so we are always pulling in the same direction and have a solid vision of what we want to do with each release.

How is your song writing process and workflow? And how long do you work on a song? Each piece sounds perfectly composed….

Sean does most of the original composing, he will then track pre-production guitars with Sam who might tweak some things here and there, for WOGMT we then composed the demo drums together while on the road, same goes for lyrics – Jay and Sam wrote most of them on the road, although Sean also wrote lyrics for one song on this album “The Burden of Our Failures”.

After this process is complete, we have a coherent “Pre-production” demo for us all to listen to and make notes of any extra ideas we have or things we want to tweak before entering the studio.

We have a fluid writing process which has been built over many years and has helped cement our “sound”, but the most important thing is that we always stay open to each other’s ideas but after being the same 4 dudes for 15 years this gets easier as time goes on.

Tell us a bit about the history of the band! You are around since 2006, but there is little information around on how you got together and how the project started out….

Sean and Sam met first over a mutual love of skateboarding, guitars, and metal in 2002. They attempted to get local friends together to try and make a band, but it didn’t really pan out in the beginning, they then got a band together and called it Age of Suffering, they met Jason through the drummer of AOS, so he joined on vocals and then met Brad through Jason, so he joined on bass. After playing a handful of shows as AOS they then met myself at a Deeds of Flesh show in Manchester, I was then drumming for Crepitation. Sean joined Crepitation shortly after, around that time AOS were having trouble with their drummer so they broke up and we decided to form Ingested in 2006. Our first ever show was in Sunderland and in the same year we tracked “Stinking Cesspool of Liquefied Remnants” which we are re-releasing on January 15^th fully remixed and remastered for our 15-year anniversary.

How does the pandemic affect you there in Manchester? How did your life change?

Well, the biggest change is that we are unable to play any shows which has been difficult as we live for touring.

For me personally I have tried to make the best of a bad situation, doing lots of exercise and I gave up alcohol 6 months ago. Sean’s fiancée gave birth to twin boys in June and Jason also has 2 young kids so I’m sure that’s kept them busy haha.

In October 2020 we streamed a live show online which was awesome! Apart from the release of WOGMT, that was a highlight in what was otherwise a pretty depressing year.

We have also been doing a lot of writing and spending time in the studio so we have plenty of things in the pipeline but in all honesty, we just want to get playing shows for our fans again, it doesn’t matter what you do as a band, nothing can replace the moments on stage you share with fans around the globe.

Do you miss touring and playing live?

Yes, massively! We are desperate to get back on the road.

What do you think about today metal scene and the new bands? Did you discover any interesting new bands recently?

Metal is probably the healthiest it’s been years in terms of the sheer volume of bands, unfortunately quantity doesn’t always mean quality for me, maybe I’m getting old but metal has a tendency to stagnate much quicker than other genres and for a much longer time, there’s few bands that really have their “own sound” these days and that doesn’t mean they have to be uniquely original, just maybe start with a blank canvas instead of paint by numbers. Some metal albums that really stood out for me this year are Loathe, Mephistophelian, Ulcerate, Trivium.

I also started a metal studio project with Ingested’s studio producer Nico Beninato that you might want to check out. It is called MAL and we have an EP releasing on Blood Blast this year which features a whole host of special guests, it was a lot of fun to do and helped us stay sane during quarantine.

How did you get personally into metal? What was the first step into the scene?

My gateway into metal was through my Dads collection of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, from there it slowly got heavier, I was prime teen age for the early 00s nu-metal scene so the first really “heavy” album I heard was Slipknots self-titled, that not only opened the window for extremer styles of metal but catapulted me through it. That was when I really began my journey through Slayer, Sepultura, Pantera into Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Nile and then into the depths of the underground brutal death metal scene with bands like Devourment, Brodequin, Skinless. Luckily for me, in 2006 I met a few guys who had the same ear for music and the early Ingested sound was born.

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