1. The band started around 2022. Why did you decide to create the band? Why did you choose the name Agenbite Misery, and what does it refer to?
Like all good friendships culminated in the darker and more alternative spheres of music, a simple “Hey man, nice shirt!” can be credited as our starting point. Our guitarist Sam and I have been longtime friends since childhood, and in 2022 were active members in metalcore outfit Vicarium at the time while pursuing adjacent tracks at different higher education institutions. Sam met our bassist Cam in his English graduate program, and connected instantly over bands such as (but not limited to) Cobalt and Suffering Hour, some of our favorite bands and greatest influences in our work to this day. Both had also recently read Ulysses, and soon after, perhaps not even two weeks, we began writing in various basements and bedrooms with the concept in mind. The band name stems from a passage in the tenth chapter of the book, ‘The Wandering Rocks,’ where Joyce’s self-insert Stephen Daedalus is actively grappling with grief and familial pressure. Revisiting his own conjured image of his dead mother drowning, he exclaims, “She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair all around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite. Misery! Misery!”
Black metal & misery go hand in hand, but we felt as though the “again-biting of inner wit” brought about an introspective twist to our songwriting philosophy, as the book does as a whole, and settled on Agenbite Misery as something cryptic yet familiar that invited audiences to ask questions and probe further into what the band was actually all about. The ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ referred to in the prose is a 14th century Kentish translation of a French confessional prose work and translates literally to ‘Remorse of Conscience.’
2. Although "Remorse of Conscience" is your first album, you had already released a couple of demos. What was the songwriting and recording process like for this first album? How do you think your sound has evolved compared to those first demos? What brands of instruments did you use in the process?
Four songs on Remorse of Conscience were adapted from tracks released on both of our demos, with the entirety of the latter Demonstration II blossoming into what would become our eventual full-length debut. We jammed out many ideas live before translating them to tablature, but ultimately everything was meticulously tracked between GuitarPro and Reaper (the working man’s DAW). Sonically, we’ve come a long way in identifying what our sound, and most importantly, our genre tag, should be. We began under the guise of experimental blackened sludge, pulling much from the schools of groups like Dragged into Sunlight and the aforementioned Cobalt (R.I.P. Erik Wunder) whose raw energy was translated into rhythmic driven riffage that invited moshing and deeper listening. We’ve all got an incredibly diverse musical palate, and soon decided to explore incorporations of the nowadays familiar black metal collaborators in post-punk, dungeon synth and shoegaze/broader ‘indie’ music. Now I’d say we’re an “experimental blackened” band, with moments of death, doom and prog metal. As we continue to work on new material, our next record will incorporate much of the same influences but also introduce many more progressive and melodic elements while retaining our often-blistering speed and concrete-like heaviness. For recording, our guitars used were an Ibanez RG Prestige and an ESP Ltd Black Metal EC reamped through a Diezel Herbert with a Boss SD-1 in front of it. For bass, we used a Fender Jazz bass into a Idiotbox Blower Box, and our kit was a 22" Mapex Tornado 5-piece
3. Attending a performance of “Remorse of Conscience” is like immersing yourself in a spiral of metal sounds of varying depths and difficulty to describe, from a foundational black metal, through death metal, a progressive tone, the density of sludge, and all seasoned with a patina of experimentation. How would you describe the sound of the new album? What bands or styles influenced you when composing the album?
The ‘sound’ of our album is an eclectic one for sure, and at times we’ve worried that the genre-whiplash might detract from what the album is trying to convey; being habitually online music listeners, it’s hard to not get bogged down in the groundbreaking works of bands from around the world. The response from audiences at our live shows has undeniably assisted in both communicating what steps we’d like to take sonically moving forward, in addition to assuring that what we’ve already explored is not in vain. During the conception of the record, we were spinning lots of eclectic efforts of recent black (Imperial Triumphant, Blut Aus Nord, Doldrum) and sludge (Primitive Man, Chained To The Bottom of the Ocean, Chat Pile) artists with new records out at the time. There are also clear inspirations from artists that are important to us which manifest on the record, like Boris, Slint, Emperor, Sumac, Discordance Axis, Agalloch, Opeth, Gorguts, Pyrrhon, Convulsing, Have A Nice Life and Oranssi Pazuzu to name a few.
4. Many bands find inspiration for their lyrics in literary works of varying depth; however, in your case, we can consider that you have taken it to the extreme, among other things by centering the album on a reference point like James Joyce's “Ulysses.” How did the idea for this ambitious work come about? Do you think that your style, with its “experimental” touches, lends itself perfectly to conveying all the irreverence and counter-morality contained in the text? How did you work on this aspect of adapting the music to the lyrics or vice versa?
After we recorded our first demo in the early months of 2023, we recognized the daunting and nearly impossible task we had set out to complete. To adapt Ulysses into something that truly paid homage to the text would be nearly impossible, as the amount of variability in characters, prose styles, and referential immersion one must commit to with the book would result in something like a five-hour album with hundreds of lyrical annotations. It works for Melville’s Moby Dick sure, and we certainly looked to Mastodon’s Leviathan and Ahab’s The Call of the Wretched Sea for inspiration but settled that highlighting the important thematics of the book was essential, comparatively to its actual content, especially as Ulysses is a truly monolithic work in many regards. In this regard, I appreciate your mention of “irreverence and counter-morality” in the text, as that’s something we’ve tried hard to maintain across the translation of medium. Ulysses, regardless of its hyper intellectuality and out-of-touch literary and historical annotations, is a humorous story about the everyman trying to get home after a long day of work. We try to incorporate lots of humor into what Agenbite Misery is on a frequent basis; our social media presence, lyric writing and stage performance is often thoroughly memetic, and we believe this juxtaposition to the tone of the music itself keeps things light for us as performers as well as for the audience to somehow connect to the seemingly impenetrable context in which our band exists. When Joyce writes about his main character using the bathroom, what could be our response but to mimic that of humanity as he displays it and translate that into a sonic context (that is “Cascara Sagrada”)? As a work itself, Ulysses also pushed boundaries in its form of prose and release structure, as well as in its legality, challenging censorship laws. We aren’t fully monitored in what we say in this country, but Joyce says much about his modern Hibernian urbanity that couldn’t be translated in a better way, hence the books received apprehension in the broader Western world for tackling various obscenities, blasphemies, and historical tensions at the time. In this vein, there’s nothing we could say that would adapt the text better than the text itself, and most of if not all the lyrics on Remorse of Conscience are actively pulled directly from Joyce’s own prose.
5. Continuing with the theme of literary inspiration, it's true that in extreme metal, or more specifically black metal, there's often literary inspiration, from occult or satanic books, as well as philosophical texts or fantasy works like Lovecraft or Tolkien. However, tackling a more mundane narrative text isn't as common. What is the band's relationship with literature? Which literary works have most recently impacted you, and which of them would you like to explore in a hypothetical future release, assuming there's life beyond "Ulysses"?
Literature and art are incredibly important to us. There’s certainly life beyond Ulysses, but we will be staying rooted firmly in the Joyce camp for the next batch of releases. I am not as active of a reader as I would like to be and find little time between listening to oodles of black metal, various musical projects and service work to read anything that isn’t related to the creation process of Agenbite Misery. This being said, the next text the band is definitively tackling after Joyce lays next to me on my desk as I type these responses giving me an evil, post-modern eye. I’m well versed in Kafka and Camus personally and would like to see their works potentially explored by the band or with something else down the line. As mentioned previously, Sam and Cam are both intellectuals with education in English literature and are active daily readers. I know they like Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon and a bunch of classics and literary fiction.
6. The album will be self-released on CD on February 6th. Have you considered working with a record label, or has there been no interest from any of them?
We haven’t been approached by any labels at this time, but we would consider working with one in the future for potential pressings or for future releases.
7. You've worked with Highwire Studios, Blackheart Sound, and Audiosiege Studios. Eric Sauter, who mixed the album, also contributed guitars and synthesizers. How did you approach this process, which from the outside seems somewhat complex? How did Eric's collaborations come about?
We recorded guitars, bass, synths and vocals independently, at home. Being young and fortunate enough to have the resources to work on the tracking at our own pace has been increasingly helpful in our process as we go about the broader rat race of our world. We recorded the drums at a friend’s home studio, dubbed Highwire before bringing the tracks to Eric at Blackheart. As a good friend and Agenfan from the scene, having previously worked with Sam and I in Vicarium, we knew that we wanted to work with him from the inception of our album process and will be for at least the near future. We went into the studio for close to a full work week to iron out the mixing and do sparse dubs for strings and vocals, but as a seasoned instrumentalist with a plethora of different synths and amplifiers, he was able to add natural layers and ambience that helped elevate the record to a place we’re really proud of. Big ups to him and Brad Boatright’s mastering for their abilities to help shape Remorse of Conscience into what it is today.
8. You've paid special attention to the artistic and visual aspects, from the meticulously crafted album cover to your blue robes. How did Alex O'Dowd design the cover art? What does it represent, and how does it relate to the album's content? And the robes—what do they mean to you?
We’re a band that fully appreciates and understands the importance of visual enticement within the black metal sphere and have even pulled out the corpse paint with the robes on more than one occasion. As far as our art goes, we’ve actively worked with artists that we feel fit our style and motivations. Alex is an accomplished artist in his own right, and working with him has been nothing short of extremely professional. We offered a very rough cut-and-paste collage of the general layout and items we wanted to be included and let him put his own flair and creativity into it. We’re ecstatic about the result and still gawk at his attention to detail within the work itself to this day. Our intention was primarily to convey not only accurate historic Dublin in 1904, when the book is set, but also to embody the sound of the record itself. Large swaths of darkness cover the weathered buildings while melding with the focused light provided by the city’s iconic streetlamps. The center of the piece, illuminated as such, allows for the three characters of the work to proceed to their goals; for Stephen Daedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom, this is the acceptance and appreciation of love and familial companionship in a changing world growing ever harsher alongside dwindling support for the educated arts.
For Agenbite Misery, it is roughly the same thing. The attempt to find creative meaning and personal fulfillment while exploring maximalist artistic sensibilities is exactly what we strive to accomplish and feel that the album cover does that very well. The robes in this vein are a vessel to accomplish this. Rather than obscuring our identities and using theatrics to provide a veil for what the band seeks to output, we don our blue robes as a signifier of change and lucidity. We aimed to match our robes to the color of the original edition of Ulysses published in 1922 and got close, but it has also allowed us to have a unique signifier in our local scene and the world beyond. Joyce frequently writes about the sea in the text, and for blatant reasons. Not only to further expand on the Homeric parallel between itself and the Odyssey, but also as a reminder of Ireland’s place as an entity. Snotgreen, scrotumtightening, dead. The sea is labeled and referred to in many ways and represents death, change and rebirth to Joyce, and us hailing from and infrequently leaving the southern coastal part of the state, we are often reminded that our ~21km of coastline is the shortest among any in our massive country. This isolation often parallels how we feel about our increasingly insular style of music, yet our love and growth is to be embraced and experienced with openness and clarity that only the sea can relate to.
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9. You've created a series of videos to illustrate and give greater visibility to the songs. When did you decide to make these videos? What was the process of creating them like?
We decided to create a series of videos for the album after we had been in the studio for mixing. As a narrative piece, we felt that bringing the songs to life in that form would also connect the lyrics to something a little more concrete for those, and most, who haven’t or won’t read Ulysses. Keeping them more esoteric and mysterious has also allowed us to get around period accuracy (for the most part), whereas attempting to recreate the events of the story exactly would be fruitless. We have filmed a lot of content in the last six months, primarily taking them as they come in terms of filming, choosing locations we like and getting as many shots as we can before self-editing and deciding how the framing of the videos will go. Eventually, a full visualizer will be released for the entire record, consisting of the videos for the singles as well as for the three remaining unreleased tracks.
10. You come from New Hampshire, an area with a strong tradition in extreme metal. How has this influenced your desire to become musicians and also in terms of inspiration?
Being from an area with such a developed scene has been a boon in a lot of ways. With the plethora of black metal in Maine, Vermont, and even New Hampshire to a certain extent, we’re blessed to have attended an egregious number of local shows that have truly blown us away. The hardcore and other heavy scenes in Massachusetts are a staple for us in a lot of ways, and there’s a closeness, due to pure proximity and personal connectivity as well, that we truly appreciate and can thank for our current success and recognizability amongst our peers.
11. Do you already have any dates planned for the live presentation of the new album, or is it not something you're currently focused on? Would a concert based on your album require anything special due to its themes, and by that I mean costumes, something more theatrical?
We have booked a small run of shows here in New England to coincide with the release itself and have many more shows planned for the year to come (and will also take any offers!), but at this time we do not have any established plans to present Remorse of Conscience in full. It is something we have heavily thought about and entertained, but at present we just do not have the capabilities to perform it to the extent we would like to, especially as a trio. In the case we do decide to go through with a presentation of the full record, we’d like to bring in at least a few more folks to play keys and additional guitar, as well as employ the theatrics you asked about. To present the record in a way that feels like it would also encompass what the album’s trying to say, especially in relation to Ulysses, we’d need a decent amount of preparation and even a budget increase to put on the spectacle we think it deserves. It is not out of the question at all however!
12. How did you get started in music: the first concerts you attended, the first albums you bought? What event in your lives pushed you to want to become musicians?
The piece of physical media I ever purchased was Master of Puppets on CD, which I still own and will spin irregularly, and my first two concerts were on the two Puscifer Money Shot tours in North America, which came roughly around the same time. Sam and I played trumpet in primary school before expanding our palates further in secondary school with additional instrumentation and vocal performance, all while he had been learning guitar for some time. 10 years later, here we are. We’ve always been somewhat musically inclined, but did not really start anything up in terms of making metal-adjacent music until we entered higher education and were going through our own bouts of circumstantial tumult and anxiety.
13. Which album represents the essence of black metal for you? What are the most recent albums you've bought?
There are lots of albums that for me really represent what ‘black metal’ is; We as a band saw Emperor on the first stop of their In the Nightside Eclipse anniversary tour last year, which reinforced that record’s strong influence on us and the world as black metal musicians and listeners. Some of my personal all-time favorite classics that have stuck with me over the years as true testaments to the genre are Ulver’s Bergtatt: Et eeventyr i 5 capitler, Blut Aus Nords’ Memoria Vestuta I: Fathers of the Icy Age, & Paysage d’Hiver’s self-titled from 1999. Contemporarily, Mare Cognitum’s most recent solo efforts Luminiferous Aether & Solar Paroxysm (and the Spectral Lore split!), Havukruunu’s Uinuos syömein sota, & Yellow Eyes’ Immersion Trench Reverie hold special places in my heart as the trvest exemplars of the style today, each in their own ways. Speaking of Yellow Eyes, their newest full-length Confusion Gate might be one of the best American black metal albums ever, and I am ecstatic to hear the vinyl once it arrives. I love physical media and have an ever-growing collection of LPs, CDs, and cassettes. Additionally, I recently acquired Gigan’s Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus on CD as a gift (thanks Cam!), the newest efforts from Ulcerate and Umulamahri as LPs, and have filled out my full collection of Trhä tapes with his most recent solo record and split with Barbelith.
14. Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions for Black Metal Spirit. If you'd like to add anything for Agenbite Misery fans, this is the place. I hope you enjoy the questions.
Thanks again for the thought-provoking questions and chance for a deeper understanding of the band as a whole! To think this time three years ago we were still drafting the bare bones of what would eventually become Remorse of Conscience is reeling, but we are thrilled with the response already to our entirely specific and niche amalgamation of metal music. Eternal hails to Black Metal Spirit and here’s to much more metal to come.
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