How have fans reacted to your EP Archaic Malevolence?
It has been insane. We are all massively proud of how it turned out but we didn't expect the reaction to be so overwhelmingly positive, people from all over the world have picked it up and the response has been really encouraging.
What Was your recording process for your EP 'Archaic Malevolence?
We recorded with up and coming audio engineer Wynter Prior at his home studio in Hove during July of 2017, we each visited him individually and contributed our pieces over the course of the month. We were desperate to get it completely finished before we left for Bloodstock in early August, which caused a huge amount of stress, thankfully Wynter completely broke himself to get it done, the mans a legend.
How did you come up with your album cover for you EP Archaic Malevolence?
It came from a series of phone conversations between me and Alex (Lead Guitar) at the beginning of last year. We looked at lyrical themes of the EP and developed a rough idea of what we wanted, after a while it started to take shape. We took the idea to Riaj Gragoth of Luciferium WarGraphics and after a few attempts he absolutely nailed it. We feel it perfectly puts across the idea of of something huge and terrible emerging from the depths without being gratuitous, like a Lovecraft story, your imagination makes the suggestion of something monstrous a lot more powerful than actually showing the thing ever would be.
What bands influenced you to write your music?
We've got a very broad range of influences within the band, the main two we normally cite are The Black Dahlia Murder and Aborted but there's a lot of other stuff mixed in there. We're big fans of Origin, The faceless, spawn of possession, obscura, alkaloid, psycroptic, Dyscarnate, beyond creation and necrophagist so there are elements of all of those in there. Martin (Drums) also takes a lot of influence from George Kollias (Nile/Sicking Horror) so there's shades of that in there too.
How did your band meet and form?
We'd all been playing in local bands in and around Kent for a number of years, at the end of 2014 me and Alex found ourselves at a loose end and recruited Chris (Rhythm Guitar) and Martin to form Infected Dead. We spent a short time gigging with rewritten material from our previous band but it was clear pretty quickly that the new line-up was very strong and capable of much better. At that point we locked ourselves away and started writing what would become 'Archaic Malevolence' before finally recruiting Nathan (Spyder Byte) as our full-time Bassist in the summer of 2016.
If you could have any band play one of your songs, which band and song and in your style or there's?
The first thing that comes to mind is The Black Dahlia Murder covering 'Resurrectionist' but I also think it'd be really awesome to hear one of the many, many excellent UK doom acts covering 'Invocation of Unspeakable Gods', someone like Bong Cauldron, Diesel King or Gurt.
How did you come up with your band name?
When we started thinking about it, the main brief was that we didn't want it to be ambiguous in any way. Its not exactly a rare sentiment, but we wanted people to think “Death Metal” when they heard it without it being too grotesque. We struck upon Infected Dead really early on and it stuck, seems like it sticks in people's minds for whatever reason so that worked out really well.
Are you recording any new music at the moment?
We're not recording right now no, but we have started writing our debut full length. We're not too deep into the process yet but we are looking to step it up a little in terms of technicality and really push ourselves to our limits to make the best album we're humanly capable of. We're hoping to get it all wrapped up by the end of this year and out into the world in 2019.
Upcoming tour dates?
We've recently signed to the Eradication Booking Agency so we have a tonne of shows lined up for this year. We start in Cardiff for Chaos Festival on February 17th and will then be travelling to Cumbria for Funeral Fest 2018 in early March, after that we have dates in Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, London and Brighton all announced with a load more to be confirmed.
Anything else you want to announce to your fans?
We cant give you a release date or too many details at this point but we can say that we will be filming our first music video at the beginning of March with the extremely talented Andrew Boothby and his company Masterpiece Films. We worked with them on the 'Samsara' lead guitar playthrough video and were really impressed with how it came out, we're really looking forward to working with them again on this. More details will be released through our various social media platforms in the coming couple of months.
