Last month the Australian metallers of Nemesium released their new album, titled Continua. Recently, DutchMetalManiac’s Henric van Essen reviewed it here and now he also interviewed them.
Hello, how are you doing?
G’day mate, yeah aside from the global pandemic going on, going pretty good thanks.
Thanks for being willing to participate in this interview. Can you tell us a little about the band Nemesium, the meaning of the name and the men behind it?
Yeah so we started to form back around 2011-2012ish after we dissolved some previous projects we were all involved in. We’ve all been friends for a really long time and mainly all live in the same area, so we knew who we wanted in the band pretty much from day one which is how things worked out with the lineup after a few changes with the bass spot over the years. Marcus was our original bass player, but left for a while and came back around mid 2019. Things are solid at the moment though which is good. The name ‘Nemesium’ is essentially a genitive plural of Nemesis, which we thought was pretty cool. What’s better than having one nemesis? Having multiples of course.
Congratulations with your new album, Continua. It’s one hell of an album, I thoroughly enjoyed it. What is the story behind its title?
Thanks, much appreciated! Clint writes 98% of the lyrics for the songs, and a big part of his writing inspiration comes from topics like multiverses and portals and other science fiction related stories he comes up with, so we wanted a title that represented all that in one word. Continua was perfect and has a cool ring about it as well, so once it came up we were pretty well sold on it.
The first thing that immediately attracts attention when playing this is the peculiar opening tune that seems to be a movie scene. What is that all about?
It might not be a thing as much these days, but we’ve all grown up on albums that have an introduction to prepare you for the music to come, so we wanted to do something similar. The audio behind Antecedent was all put together by Andrew using various warped versions of television and movie samples and sounds and things, and the dialog is all from the film Cube which we love. We just really wanted to set a bit of an unsettling tone that puts you in the appropriate space for what is about to come, and coincidentally after we had completed it all the world started to manifest exactly the way the dialog describes. Very weird, but I guess we timed it well in that regard.
The music is, for the most part at least, quite crushing. What is the reason you play this particular style?
It’s what we love. We’re all children of the 80s and 90s who grew up listening to the most extreme music there was available. Everything from grindcore, death metal and black metal to thrash and even the 90s stuff like Pantera and the newer wave that came through then. This is our passion and we want to put it out with as much conviction as possible.
Can you give us an idea about the creative process of writing a Nemesium album?
It can vary from song to song, but the most work we get done is in the rehearsal room as a band, just bouncing ideas off each other and working things out on the fly. We get the best results out of this environment of writing. Then we all take it home and might come up with other things to bring back in to the next session. Probably the thing we want to improve on is the time we take to get songs completed. We’ve probably been a little too particular in the past. We could have allowed the first ideas to really grow instead of overworking them.
Is there a message behind your music and/or lyrics?
Not a message. Most of what we write is just based on Clint’s themes and stories he is into at the time. The lyrics I write are a bit different and tend to have more of an ambiguity for people to interpret themselves, but I know what I’m referring to at the time of writing.
Now that you have added twelve songs to your repertoire you could easily fill a headliner act, do you have any plans on playing live?
We’ve never really stopped playing live. Even through the writing and recording process of Continua we were always playing shows here in Australia. What we would like to do once this pandemic starts to ease off its clutches a bit is to get around the country in support of the album, look at what we could potentially manage to work out overseas by way of festivals or mini-tours in the first initiations and see how things pan out I guess. But playing live is a huge part of what we do, so we definitely plan to get back into it as soon as we can.
What, if there are any concrete ones, are your plans with Nemesium?
Right now we are limited in what we can actually do, so we have decided really to just jump into writing the next songs and keeping up consistency in the rehearsal room so we’re sharp for the time to play live again when that comes. So I guess we’re just going to focus on all aspects of preparation and make sure we can hit the ground running after that first call comes in again.
I always like to end my interviews with one question that has nothing to do with music. What is your favorite Australian food?
Oh man…. I wouldn’t know where to begin with this. Can I say beer? Haha! I LOVE food and traveling and trying as much new stuff as I can all the time no matter where I am in the world. I guess as far as Aussie food you couldn’t go past the good old Aussie pub parmy and chips, or maybe just a backyard barbecue in Summer. And no we don’t call them fucking shrimp, and honestly most people here don’t even cook them on a barby. We have heaps of awesome stuff. Vegemite on toast is a staple for most of us, Tim Tams, Milo, fairy bread is unreal, caramel slice I’m pretty sure is ours, the traditional Pav would be up there too, we have pretty good food. And the way we make coffee in Melbourne is the best in the world. And I’ve been to the countries comes from too, the can grow the beans but fucked if they can make a decent one. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
Thanks for the interview, is there anything you would like to say to our readers?
Yeah thanks for the support mate. We very much appreciate it. Yeah, thanks everyone out there who has bought the album already. Keep listening to it on whatever platform you guys use, whether digital or traditional. Buy yourself a copy if you’re into what you hear and you haven’t already. Its available through our Facebook store, Black Lion Records and most distributors worldwide. And keep an eye out for the vinyl release coming in late 2020 or early 2021, because it will be a bit different and special in its own right. Hopefully we will get to see most of you at some stage in the next year or so!!
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