Interview: The Offering
Aug 21
Interview With The Offering
If you’ve caught the last couple episodes of this site’s weekly podcast, you’ve likely heard the savage and heavy-hitting sounds of Ontario’s The Offering. The guys from Niagara Falls have something great going for them and I was stoked to play a few tracks of theirs; the band just released their debut album, Codex Mystirium and it’s a great mix of modern metal with a wide variety of songs. Taking some time out from the album’s release, they spared a few moments for an interview.
You guys are from Niagara Falls, Ontario; what’s the current metal scene like up there?
The scene is better than ever right now, its always had its ups and downs but currently there’s alot of support for the shows, a lot of people old and new. Many newer bands in the region too.
How did the band come together?
We all know each other from playing together in various bands in the same scene. As we would start different projects over the years these were the guys that got drawn together wanting to create what would become The Offering.
There’s equal parts death, thrash, and groove in the music on ‘Codex Mystirium’, along with some other pretty interesting flavors thrown in for good measure. How does the band itself describe its sound?
Metal. We like to mix any type of music that might sound interesting and make a song better, but still sound natural. Also, we made a conscience effort to step outside the “metal” box a bit to pave the way for anything we may do on future albums. But mostly we’re just a metal band.
With the amount of diversity across the album’s tracks, where are the influences for each member coming from? Listening to ‘Codex’ I’d imagine a fairly broad range of favorite bands amongst you guys.
Yes, the spectrum of influence from each member is just endless. I’d say we’re a band that between us all likes everything. Prog, hard rock, pop and hiphop, punk, jazz, synth music, latin, funk, reggae, and probably every sub genre of metal there is. We like it all, expect us to experiment more in the future.
How did the recording of the album go? Where’d it happen and who manned the knobs?
Most of it was tracked at Derek’s home studio with the exception of vocals which were recorded by Dan Mackie at Glass Apple Bonzai studio, and the drums were recorded at Woodward studios by Jon Howard who also mixed and mastered the album.
The name, imagery, and song titles have a very occult and sometimes sci-fi vibe, what’s the general idea behind the lyrics and theme of the new album?
The album is a loose concept album. I was inspired by Lovecraftian tales, and wanted to make each song a short story, individual tales of terror or misfortune, with either a sci-fi or horror narrative. Then, we came up with the idea of each song being an individual chapter in a book of mystery. Once the artwork came in, it all came together as a Codex Mysterium, or “book of mystery”.
That’s some pretty sick album artwork, who’s behind it?
Remy Cooper of Headsplit design.
What’s coming up in the band’s future?
We want to see how far we can take this album in terms of getting the music to as many people as possible and building our fanbase. We already have lots of riffs, partially written songs, and song ideas for the next album, so hopefully that is not too far in the future.
Codex Mystirium was released on Aug. 12 and can be found digitally on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, and others. Pick up the physical CD directly through the band or CDBaby.
