FER DE LANCE

Occupying the hard-to-find place between Hammerheart-era BATHORY and RAINBOW's “Rising”, FER DE LANCE released "Colossus" in 2020 and "The Hyperborean" in 2022 on Cruz del Sur Music. Rife with intricate and melodic guitar riffs, powerful and soaring vocals, a thundering rhythm section, and crisp acoustic guitar arrangements, FER DE LANCEstrives to make music that is venomous yet melancholic, incorporating diverse soundscapes and dynamics into a complex heaviness. Fer de Lance will enter the studio in July to record a new and undisclosed album for release in Spring 2025.

Named after a poisonous snake, they have demonstrated their own lethal bite! On to the interview.

WORMWOOD CHRONICLES: Hello, please introduce yourself.

MP: Hello, I am MP, singer, guitarist, and songwriter of FER DE LANCE. 

RUSTY: Hi, my name is Rusty and I play bass in FER DE LANCE.

J. GEIST: Hey, I’m J. Geist and I play guitar in FER DE LANCE.

WC: Do you remember what got you into metal? Was it a record you bought or a show you saw?

JG: Well, as far as I can remember as a kid, I was always drawn to any music that was faster and more aggressive that I’d hear on TV and in movies and video games. METALLICA and BLACK SABBATH were probably the first metal bands that I heard and was told this was metal. Growing up, my parents always had music playing, especially on the weekends when working around the house. As I got older my dad would make cassettes of bands, I said I liked from CDs he had, or we got from the library. I was really into punk more at first after playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater so once Napster (sorry Lars) or Lymewire was around I’d make my own mix CDs of whatever I could find. Then I heard MAIDEN and that was when I was like ya man, I want to do that. After that I just kind of kept getting more and more into the subgenres of metal and then the real extreme ones in high school. My good friend Ben, let me borrow CHILDREN OF BODOM’s “Hatebreeder” and “Follow the Reaper” which made me want to practice and play even harder.

MP: I come from a musical family. We would listen to everything from Motown, classical music, folk music, prog-rock, and hard rock in my house, and when I started buying all of the metal records that I could as a teenager my family supported that. I think a couple of the earliest and biggest records for me—the ones where I said “Yes, this, I want to fuckin do this”—were either SAVATAGE’s “Hall of the Mountain King”, BLACK SABBATH’s “Heaven and Hell”, or BLIND GUARDIAN’s “Somewhere Far Beyond”. I also remember seeing SAVATAGE on their “Wake of Magellan” or “Poets and Madmen” tours when I was young and deciding based on how it made me feel to hear a great solo, a great song, and Jon Oliva shrieking into my ears that I wanted to be on that stage and play music. 

R: Yes. Around 2006 my good friend Chris sent me mp3’s of two albums: “Powerplant” by GAMMA RAY and “Dawn of Victory” by RHAPSODY. It was the first time I heard very fast double bass drumming, and it blew my mind. In 2008 I attended the Progpower USA festival (at the urging of that same friend) in 2008 and saw live HELLOWEEN, GAMMA RAY, and another band I’d never heard of, AMORPHIS. I was hooked on all these power and progressive metal bands right away. A few years later I found the NWOBHM and more importantly several fantastic local/midwest hard n heavy USA heavy bands like HIGH SPIRITS, ZUUL, BIBLE OF THE DEVIL, and BORROWED TIME. This discovery pushed things even further and eventually pushed me to play heavy music

WC: What about the idea of wanting to either start a band or join a band, how did that come about, do you remember what year that was and what band that was?

JG: My good friend George who plays in a band called FARSEER started playing bass about the same time I started playing guitar when we were in junior high. Our first “gig” was a Christmas recital for the guitar shop we took lessons at, Doc Woods. We played “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and scared the shit out of some grandparents. After that we had a couple punk/metal bands in and out of high school. It was hard to find other musicians who were serious and liked the same type of music as us.

MP: I have recorded my songs and been in bands since I was thirteen. So, I was playing bar gigs before I could drive. My first bands played everything from DEEP PURPLE, JETHRO TULL, and UFO to power metal, death metal, and black metal, along with original material. My first bands were built around spontaneous jams ala DEEP PURPLE. What kept me wanting to play music then and even now, is that moment of jamming with friends and creating a melody out of the ether. That is toned down in FER DE LANCE live, but, in the studio, we never know what will happen.

  After my bar band phase, I kept making demos and sending them to friends. Rusty and I grew up in the same town, but we never joined in a band until he invited me to join MOROS NYX. We released “Revolution Street” on Underground Power in 2016. However, MOROS NYX was too hard to keep going due to a member taking issue with the band’s political message and other band commitments. Now in FER DE LANCE, creatively, I am happier than ever before, and I can’t wait for what we do next.   

R: MP and I played in a band called MOROS NYX which was more influenced by the aforementioned power metal bands. Maybe it was not being 100% happy with the debut album, maybe it was 2 band members quitting abruptly, or maybe it was the general atmosphere of the USA in 2016/17 but the songs MP wrote got darker. This coincided with MP getting me more into atmospheric and extreme heavy bands like AMORPHIS, BATHORY, and BORKNAGAR. The first time I heard “Foreverdark Woods” by BATHORY is another core memory.

WC: Which leads into this question…how did FER DE LANCE happen and tell me about the name of the band itself. Who came up with it and is it in reference to something?

R: Sometime in 2016 or 2017 MP sent me a demo of the song “Colossus” and it really blew my mind. Seriously. It’s like if PETER GABRIEL and Quorthon (of BATHORY) collaborated to make a campfire metal-song. It’s still my favorite FER DE LANCE song. The band name FER DE LANCE was the title of another MP demo from that time and I can’t remember exactly when or why it was chosen, but it was! I believe it can refer to the archaic term for spear head or a family of venomous pit-vipers that are found in South and Central America. 

MP: So, in late 2018, I started to write music similar in style to MOROS NYX, but darker, slower, heavier, and focusing on atmosphere and whatever, creatively, I want to do, but the bands have the same bones. Rusty and our friend and guitarist C. Wolf of SMOULDER enjoyed these demos and our first EP, “Colossus” was put out on Cruz del Sur in 2020. The name, I took from the FER DE LANCE snake of Central and South America, but I also know that Fer de Lance, beyond its literal meaning of “Iron of the Spear,” was used in the same way that English speakers use the word “cutting edge,” or “spearhead,” in terms of movements or music. I like the ambiguousness of it, but being fed up with all of the genres, classification, elitism, etc. of the metal scene, FER DE LANCE is a great name for whatever music I want to make. No rules, no genre, no expectations except my own.

WC: There’s a big fantasy vibe which feeds into the band and your image. Where’s this coming from, are you all avid readers, does it come from movies or TV?

R: MP should weigh in as he handles the writing, but in general I believe the band and songs are much more influenced by our experiences with nature, culture, and history/science than what we’ve seen (and enjoyed!) in entertainment media like books, TV, and movies. That said, my favorite fiction writers are London and Tolkien.

MP: I read too much. I am a historian by trade, so a lot of FER DE LANCE’s lyrics and themes come from the histories that I read mixed with a lot of ancient and contemporary philosophy, my love of hiking and roughing it, and storytelling inspired by contemporary authors. I have not consciously used movies as inspiration for my music. However, movie soundtracks and movie composers like Basil Poledouris, Nino Rota, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and Howard Shore are inspirations for me. 

WC: Do any of you game at all (either TTRPG such as “Dungeons and Dragons” or video games), does this factor into the fantasy vibe?

R: I definitely have a healthy addiction to Skyrim, both the game and soundtrack. MP might, also. Though we play, I don’t see games/fantasy/fiction really being an influence on the vibe of the band. For me, those things are more like tools and outlets to enhance my free time and help me to be well-rested for when I need to get to work.

MP: I have always played video games to unwind. I like games with a lot of storytelling and immersive environments, but I would not say that video games have influenced my songwriting. Although, the soundtracks for Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age games have always been top-notch. 

JG: At home if I’m not playing guitar, I’m typically playing video games. Like Rusty and MP I also love Skyrim and the music. I play mostly RPG’s and JRPG’s nowadays like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Octopath Traveler. Growing up we didn’t have Youtube yet. If there was a song I really liked, I’d either sit there in the pause menu to listen and let it loop or I’d find a “safe” space in the level where I wouldn’t get hit by anything to enjoy the track. I don’t specifically think about VGM when writing but I’m sure the influences are there even if it’s subconsciously.

WC: Listening to “The Hyperborean”, the songs are epic, sweeping, and from a sonic perspective, crushing, especially with tracks like “The Mariner,” and “Arctic Winds.” What gets you into the headspace to creatively write and come up with this music, are you channeling certain bands which have influenced you or is it the outside pop culture influences coming into play?

R: MP can talk about this question and how it relates to the music of FER DE LANCE but I’ll answer more generally, in case it is interesting to your discussion about songwriting. First, it really doesn’t matter to me these days. There are so many great bands and songs past, present, and future…I don’t think we really will ever have a shortage of great songs or bands. That really takes the pressure off for me and makes things much more fun. When it comes to creativity or originality in heavy music, everything really feels like it’s been done and recycled 3-5 times already. That said, I think the biggest opportunity to be creative and original is within the song arrangements and the lyrics, and it’s where I put much of my focus when I write songs

MP: While my lyrics are not escapist, the music may be. I listen to metal music, prog-rock, classical music, and folk music regularly to take me away from the dreariness of the everyday. So, our sound is meant to take you on a journey into the story. I want you to feel the pain and anguish of being fed to the beasts, the loneliness of the Arctic, and the peace of a cold night with the aurora borealis above. If “The Mariner” in the “Hyperborean” album feels it, then I want the music and lyrics to allow myself and the audience to feel that too. Musically, I am merging disparate things to make a FER DE LANCE song. We have been compared a lot to BATHORY, DOOMSWORD, ATLANTEAN KODEX, or SCALD, and those are very flattering, but I am not trying to write like these bands. Rather, I mix a lot of what interests me musically: Dio’s voice and lyrics in “Stargazer”, Quothorn’s and BLIND GUARDIAN’s use of massive orchestration, the similarities between Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter (Bringer of Jollity)” and Basil Poledouris’s Conan Soundtrack, a way of playing minor chords with folk melodies over progressive drums like JETHRO TULL, ENSLAVED, or BORKNAGAR, Ritchie Blackmore’s solo in “Gates of Babylon”, Criss Oliva’s solo in “Ghost in the Ruins”, how to build a 23-minute long epic like “Supper’s Ready” by GENESIS. I mix all of that within myself and out of me comes my version of music.

WC: “The Hyperborean” was 2022. Are you all in the process right now of writing and coming up with a new record or just concentrating on playing live now?

R: Writing for the next album was finished early this year and we’ll record it this summer. 

MP: As Rusty said, we finished the album and its story at the beginning of the year. I began as soon as we returned from KIT and our German tour with VISIGOTH and SANHEDRIN, two amazing bands. We are going into the studio in a month and should hopefully have the new record out next spring/summer. Till then, we are looking to start playing more shows and hopefully hop on a few tours before winter. I am really excited about this new album. We have been rehearsing the songs for several months, and I think that a lot of people will enjoy the direction the music has taken. We are really pushing the envelope of our style, implementing a lot of diverse music, but still keeping the music epic, atmospheric, and powerful. I am also excited that the band has contributed to writing this album too.  

WC: We’re coming up on summer shortly. What does FER DE LANCE have planned not just for the summer but the rest of 2024?

R: The main priority this year will be finishing the new album and getting it ready for release as well as hooking up with ADAMANTIS and IRONFLAME this Summer for a couple Midwest metal shows in Chicago and Indianapolis. Thanks for your interest in FER DE LANCE.

MP: Recording the album and some short tours. We have a couple of other interesting things we might release over the next year as well, and I am always writing music. We are excited to get out and play the new album! Thanks for the interview and your interest in FER DE LANCE.

FER DE LANCE