Karl Sanders is the resident mummy master of metal. The driving force and sole constant member of America’s most Egyptology-obsessed death metal band Nile, few musicians in the underground have forged a brand quite like Karl, without the corporate connotations of that word because well, this is death metal.
For over thirty years now his band have delivered mystical brutality ripped straight from the ancient world, credited as helping rejuvenate death metal after its first lull period in the late 90s. With latest album The Underworld Awaits Us All arriving over 27 years since the band’s debut, Hammer caught up with Karl to find out what words of wisdom he had to share.
HISTORY WAS THERE BEFORE DEATH METAL
“I didn’t get really exposed to metal until I was a teenager, but world history I loved from a very early age. I was in fourth grade and had to do a book report on Alexander The Great, and that just fired my brain up. My dad was always watching the epic flicks of the day like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Land Of The Pharaohs, so it was a worm in my brain from an early age.”
THE SEEDS OF NILE WERE SOWN EARLY
“The 80s were a lot of fun. It was a time where everybody had disposable income so everybody was always going out. There were half a dozen places to play in my home town. You could have quite the life playing four nights a week, even as a cover band, but after a while we wanted to write our own songs. You have to start asking yourself, ‘What is it I wanna do? What do we wanna sound like?’ It was a chance meeting with [ex-Morbid Angel frontman] David Vincent while we were playing Charlotte, North Carolina, where he introduced me to this whole universe of underground death metal that I was completely unaware of. That was the poison apple that I bit and it soon infected my entire band.”
IGNORE THE TREND…
“The vibe in the late 90s was that death metal was dead. We didn’t care though, because we were going to do whatever we wanted to do, the world be damned. We were from Greenville, South Carolina, which is a nowhere town. Already we had wrestled with the idea that probably no one was going to give a fuck, so let’s just do what we like and own it. We didn’t care about the ebb and flow of whatever is currently popular.”
DO IT FOR YOURSELF
“That mindset has helped us over the years, remembering who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s humbling in a way that we are just some guys from South Carolina who are willing to work hard. We were happy that the timing of the universe then worked in our favour. You can’t complain - you just have to thank the metal gods.”
MAKING THEMED METAL IS A BALANCE, NOT A GIMMICK
“It became obvious to us early on that if you put in too many exotic elements, at some point it’s no longer really a metal record. Different Nile albums have had varying levels of extraneous elements to them. The new one is very streamlined. If you stack it against other Nile records, there are certainly records much thicker with extra shit. It’s always a variable based on what each songs need. It’s the randomness of the universe and this time, we wrote a whole bunch of metal smashers.”
DO YOUR RESEARCH, BUT DON’T BE BEHOLDEN TO IT
“If we were using the music of the local area here, it would sound nothing like a Nile album. In a way it’s a form of escapism. There are a lot of Eastern modalities and tonalities adapted into the guitar playing, but it’s not purely authentic because it can’t be. In the same way that the soundtrack for a Mummy movie or whatever is not all ancient stuff from 5000 years ago, it’s music that puts you in that mindset, which is a different thing. Are you scoring a Hollywood movie, or being a musical preservation society? We’re a metal band, so we lean towards the ‘Hollywood making a horrific Ancient Egypt movie’ [approach]. There was a band from the 70s called Mountain, and one of the great songs was Theme For An Imaginary Western. That showed me you can write music to a movie that doesn’t exist.”
USE MYTHOLOGY AS METAPHOR
“Every song that gets written is filtered through our own lens and our life experiences. The new single To Strike With Sacred Fang, on the one hand we’re talking about ancient assassins, but we’re also talking about in some way a disgust for what we see in the American political system of today where America is in a mess. Black Seeds Of Vengeance is about people doing some despicable stuff where I’m talking about the Amalekites and the terrible things they did, but I’m also talking about my first ex-wife and the seeds of vengeance that she planted. You can’t help it that whatever glasses you’re wearing are going to filter how you look at history.”
YOU’LL SEE ECHOES IN UNLIKELY PLACES
“In the case of our song Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Faeces By The Four Apes, when I came across that [spell] in the Book Of The Dead, I thought, ‘how is this not a metal song?’ Part of the genesis of that was we were on stage and the pit was particularly animated that night, with people going apeshit. We remarked that it was like a gigantic swarm of apes losing their minds like at the zoo running around their cages throwing faeces and [thought back to] that chapter in the Book Of The Dead!”
FIGHT FOR YOUR FRIENDS…
“We don’t get targeted by people who are upset about anti-Christian lyrics or anything like that, but Belphegor were our tourmates on a little Russian tour [in 2016]. We’d toured with them three times before that and when you live with your metal brothers in a tour bus for five-six weeks at a time, there’s a certain amount of bonding.”
…BUT PICK YOUR BATTLES
“We were confronted by religious zealots in the [Saint-Petersburg] airport. It was a stupid situation because the guy was trying to provoke [Belphegor frontman] Helmuth on camera to fight him. We were just trying to get the fuck out of there making our way to the van, and this 300-pound, 6”4 bear of a dude went to take a big swing at Helmuth. I stepped in and shut it down because that was the right thing to do. You can’t let your brothers get fucked up. If I stood there and did nothing and the guy fucking clocked him, nobody would feel good about that. That would have fucked up the tour, and so I stepped in, like anybody would have.”
LEARN WHAT TO LET GO
“I have a black belt in taekwondo and a fourth degree black belt in jiu-jitsu, but I had to put it down and retire. It was killing my wrists and they were always in a brace. I have a career in playing guitar and martial arts was a personal hobby, and one of those things had to go. I am no longer active training every day doing martial arts, but I freaking loved it. Much like playing death metal, it’s a cathartic thing to go and release all your stress. It’s great wholesome fun! It seems not, getting beat up and beating up other people, but it is healthy taking all that aggression and doing something positive with it.”
LEARN TO ENDURE LINE-UP CHANGES
“It has been incredibly taxing. I replaced three bass players last year and two guitarists, so that’s five people I’ve trained to do this job which ain’t an easy job. A little part of me died with each one of those guys, because it’s a months long thing to get somebody ready to play in this band. I need a fucking vacation. We have this album though so sometimes you don’t get to the good stuff unless you pay a whole lot of dues. You’ve gotta persevere until you do what needs to be done.”
DEATH METAL COMES FROM THE HEART
“I need to hear the passion, I need to hear the heart and the soul of whatever music it is. That’s the kind of music that I want to give to people. I don’t want to use the word “spiritual” necessarily, but you’ve got to put conviction into whatever it is you’re doing if you want to reach people, otherwise to me it seems a little flat. You’ve got to give metal heart and soul. With Nile, that comes with the darkness. The underworld does await us all.”
