It might be quite telling when any band manages to use the word “dick” 9 times to illustrate the meaning behind their music, but when it’s the guys from Krysthla we can allow them some leeway. Aside from that, in the five minutes I have with them, the band shed light on their favourite albums, their short and long term plans as well as where they advise you to go to get into the extremeness that is Krysthla.
So you arrived on site at 12, did you all come up together?
Yep, in our magic bus.
Were you listening to anything on your way up?
Nope, nothing. Whenever we go on these long trips we just chat rather than listen to anything.
Fair enough, what are you thinking of Amplified so far?
Tell you what, we got here and we had a look around and we’d heard about the weather practically drowning everyone and we thought “What a fucking shame” because it’s really nicely out and the bill’s good. It could be a really nice intermediate sized festival for those who don’t want to do Download or Bloodstock. It’s spot on so with another year or so, a bit more advertising and a few bigger bands, this could be great. It’s a shame the weather’s being an arse! Other than that, it’s good.
What have you got going on for the rest of this year?
We’ve got a few more all-dayers and some other little bits here and there but we’re in the process of writing the new album so that’s what we’ve been concentrating on, really. We’ll be in the studio early in the new year with that material.
Any tours or similar things in the works?
We’ve got a few fingers in a few pies but that’s all we can really say.
And more broadly, where do you want to see Krysthla go in the next few years?
The plan has always been to take it to the top and be as big as we can. There’s obviously a limit as to how far you can go with certain sorts of music but we just want to see how far we can take it.
For people who don’t know you, where would you point them to from your own discography to demonstrate where the band is at?
Ooh, well track-wise our first single “Luminosity” is probably a good place to start, but my advice is to just go and buy both records then you’ll know what we’re about. If you’re a bit skint you can check it out on Spotify before buying them!
With your music and the live shows, what’s the key message that you want to get across to people?
Don’t be a dick. We wanna crush people. Crush them into understanding that we’ve gotta stop being dicks to each other, otherwise we’ll be the dick. We’d be the biggest dicks of all if you’re the smaller dicks! To be fair there is a message behind the music and that’s that the world isn’t great at the moment and art should reflect life, that’s what we’re trying to do.
On both albums there’s a lot of social issues addressed like war and immigration. I think the metal community is really nice and quite tight-knit but outside of it there’s a lot of problems. Rather than going down the dungeons and dragons path in songwriting, we kept to real issues which comes back into the original message: don’t be a dick! Otherwise we’ll get our dicks out and make it an all out dick war and there’s nothing worse than a dick war mate, let me tell you that.
And lastly, with Rolling Stone‘s “Top Metal Albums” list going around, what are a few albums you’d compile as a band to create Krysthla’s “Top Metal Albums” list?
Phwar, well Master Of Puppets has gotta go in there at some point, Far Beyond Driven, Gojira’s Magma, Strapping Young Lad’s City, Arise by Sepultura. You’re gonna get a lot of similar answers with that question! A lot from the 90s as well, the 90s seems to be the pinnacle of metal for us. We’ll put some Led Zeppelin and Sabotage in for good measure too because… they’re pretty important!
Krysthla: official | facebook | twitter | instagram | youtube
Amplified Open Air Festival: official | facebook | twitter
