With the departure of their vocalist, Jazmine Luders, the remaining members of Cursed Earth found themselves at a loose end.
There was no new material, no immediate changing of the guard, no touring, nothing. The Perth band didn’t burn out. They didn’t even fade away. They simply hibernated.
“We took the time to go do other things,” explains Kieran Molloy, the band’s guitarist. “I ended up moving over to the east coast and joining Justice for the Damned. Sam [Forward, drums] is playing in Dead Sea, Paul [Cottrell, guitar] is in 9 Foot Super Soldier and Bob [Owens] and Jaz started Death Twitch.”
Under the cover of darkness, Molloy began writing for Cursed Earth again and soon enough, he had a batch of new songs ready to go – but what to do with them? “We thought the material was really sick,” says Molloy, “but the idea of jumping into a full release with someone we’d just met and had never been on the road with again didn’t appeal.
“We just started writing and recording with Sean [Harmanis from Make Them Suffer] and Nick [Adams from Justice for the Damned] to find a direction for vocals. Their songs turned out great, some more friends got involved… and shit just spiralled.”
Although it was essentially starting Cursed Earth again from scratch, with Molloy working with Wreath drummer Elliott Gallart to make the new songs, the decision was made to continue on under the moniker.
“It was never something we thought about,” says Molloy. “Everyone did move on to different guises, in one way or another, but this record was always a Cursed Earth record.” Besides, Gallart is far from some ring-in – his relationship with the band goes a long way, and stretches into a long-serving creative partnership.
“Elliott recorded, mixed and mastered [previous double EP, 2017’s] Cycles of Grief, mixed our EP and played drums on this record,” says Molloy. “He’s been a writing member of this band for as long as anyone has known us. He’s our full-time drummer now, but calling him an official member is really just a formality.”
The end result of Molloy and Gallart’s project was The Deathbed Sessions. Self-described as a “mixtape”, it features different guest vocalists for every track – including The Amity Affliction’s Joel Birch, Kublai Khan’s Matt Honeycutt and Venom Prison’s Larissa Stupar. “We chose who we wanted to work on vocals with around the most interesting song/style combinations,” says Molloy.
“A lot of it felt completely natural – like, obviously ‘Fear’ should have Matt on it. In a mixtape like this, you want to give everyone that’s doing a song a chance to fully own it. The songs were written to flow as part of an album, but the focus was fully on individual songwriting and showing everyone in the best light we could.”
In their latest press photos, the band are presented as hooded figures – and, tellingly, the one in the centre is literally faceless. The mystery of who will take over on vocals for the band remains just that – and, for the time being, Molloy is perfectly content to keep it that way. “The formula for what makes a metal band is pretty rigid, and also super boring,” he says.
“You need a drummer and a bass player. You need one or two guitarists. You need a vocalist, and the vocalist is the face of the band. Unless you’re coming in through a more innovative genre like hip hop, or independently establishing a whole niche like Code Orange, it freaks people out if you start adding or subtracting things.
“Sending a photo of the four of us in our best clothes in front of a graffiti wall would be ignoring a pretty obvious elephant in the room, so we decided to embrace it.”
Cursed Earth’s new mixtape The Deathbed Sessions is out Friday May 31 via UNFD.
