What do death metal, black metal, hardcore and post-hardcore have in common? If you find yourself in Belgium, the answer is easy: drummer Wim Coppers. A percussionist for over two decades, Coppers claims membership to five bands in Belgium’s vibrant underground scene. It’s not uncommon for groups in his neck of the woods to share talent, but his recording bonafides are nonetheless impressive. He can be seen drumming for black metal outfit Wiegedood, post-hardcore artists Oathbreaker and newly formed death metal classicists Living Gate, which he represents for the following interview. Along with frequent collaborator Levy Seynaeve (vocals and guitar), bassist Aaron Risesberg of Yob and guitarist Lennart Bossu of Amenra and Oathbreaker, their first full-length offering, 2024’s Suffer as One, displays a reverence for ’90s death metal legends all while utilizing their diverse histories to keep their fatal formulas fresh. We don’t know if they qualify as a supergroup, but to us, they’re quite super.

Even with such a robust musical output, Coppers still finds plenty of time for his secondary love—video games. Today’s player character has been a dedicated console gamer since the mid-’80s and shows no signs of stopping, though the program is quickly changing. His gaming habits are unsurprisingly as varied as his tastes in extreme music, but live service games—titles which provide seasonally new content for the purposes of receiving continuous payment from its player base—have been in regular rotation for years. With pandemic lockdowns supplying him a captive audience of teammates, his hours spent in the immensely popular Call of Duty: Warzone were no certainly game. Now in his early 40s, Coppers no longer sees the fun in suffering rounds of Warzone or indeed any other live service model, choosing instead to go solo. The co-nerds of Kill Screen were more than happy to commiserate in the misery of the gaming industry’s most predatory practices with the self-described “hardcore casual gamer.”

Looking for some less predatory DLC? Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Decibel (dB245/March 2025) for an exclusive excerpt from this interview detailing the reasons Coppers finds little joy in Nintendo’s vibrant, bubbly aesthetics, due to arrive in our web store soon.

What was your first gaming experience?
That was actually the Atari 2600 and it was Millipede. There was that game, and then there was another one. I can’t really find much about it, but it was about the Olympics on the Atari. I remember I was just tapping a button and there was long jump and you just had to time it precisely. Video Olympics is what I think it was called. But those two games were my first gaming experience.

I’m from 1982. The Atari 2600 is from before 1982, so I guess I was just playing my dad’s old console. I always thought it was bought for me, but apparently it wasn’t, so my dreams were crushed. I just got some secondhand bullshit from my dad. [Laughs] But anyway, I enjoyed it very much and it got me into gaming. Those two games are very vividly in my memory still. I can see the old TV we used to have, and it was fun.

What have you been playing lately and what are the games that you typically prefer to play?
I bought a Steam Deck OLED not that crazy long ago. It was in a second hand store, like a sort of pawn shop. They sold it for the price of the LCD one, so they fucked up. I saw it and I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. And then as I paid the man, I asked him, “Uh, did you notice this is OLED and it’s worth a lot more?” And then he looked it up and he’s like, “Aww, fuck.” So I got it for a really good price and it was brand new. The battery health was 99 percent. I don’t know, someone wasn’t into it and I got it. I’m lucky. So, I’m on that thing.

The last thing I’ve been playing on it is Pathologic 2, which is not really my go-to game. My girlfriend is way into those point-and-click, mysterious, weird games. I’m more of a PlayStation 5 kind of guy. I’m more a classic gamer. I like the classics, I like shooters, I like adventure games, sci-fi games. I’m not really into point-and-click-y games. But then my girl said, “Check this out,” and I’ve been enjoying it. It’s just super weird. I don’t mind that it doesn’t play as fluidly as a God of War. It’s this clunky first-person thing, but I’m really enjoying it. The Mortuary Assistant is another one of those games that I somehow really liked.

I’m mainly also buying cheap games. I got a whole long wishlist. I don’t really care anymore if a game is released last week or eight years ago—I’m kind of over it. I used to always buy games on the day of the release because I used to work in a game store, which was great. I had the games right there and you could take them home for a week to test them out and then bring them back. I mean, it wasn’t really OK, but it was OK.

So, those are the games I’ve been playing. I bought Bramble: [The Mountain King] and I finished it in a couple of days. I’m enjoying Dying Light 2: [Stay Human]. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, I’m getting back into it because I played it on PlayStation and now I’m just re-enjoying it. It’s fun on tour, having the Steam Deck. I can plug it in the van, so I don’t have to worry about battery life and I can just play.

That’s a question that we often ask people, if you get a chance to play it all while you’re on tour.
Oh yeah. I play on tour a lot—like, a lot a lot. Levy, who sings and plays guitar, he cannot sit in a van if he’s not driving, so we have someone driving always. In the morning, he just says, “Alright boys, it’s an eight-hour drive.” And I’m like, “Fuck yeah!” I always have the same spot in the left back of the van because the power is there and it’s great. I just have my own little bubble and I put on my headphones and I can just enjoy gaming. So yeah, I definitely play a lot on tour. I would say many hours every day, just going for it. Every once in a while, I pass my Steam Deck to whoever is next to me.

I had a Nintendo Switch for a couple of years and I enjoyed it. It’s nice. Especially those Zelda games I liked a lot. They’re great, but there’s not enough games on it to really keep me interested. I’m not really a Nintendo, colorful, Pikachu kind of guy. That’s not really my go-to and that’s mostly what they have. I sold it for €300 [approximately $310]. It’s a funny story, actually. I sold it to a dude and, as he was coming over, I realized, fuck, I gotta factory reset the thing. I hadn’t started it in months. I plug it in and nothing happens. I see the little battery indicator going and I’m like, Oh, fuck. I had to wait 15 minutes and then all of a sudden it started, but this guy was arriving 15 minutes later. As he gets here, I’m in the middle of the factory reset. I also just came back from the Living Gate tour. I landed and I got home and 30 minutes later, this guy walks in.

I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings at all, and my whole living room table—I’m not lying, you can ask the dude if you don’t believe me—was full of knives. I collect knives and machetes. Before we left, I was organizing everything. I came home and I just put the thing on my table. You know, you start doing the thing you’re supposed to do, you don’t even pay attention to your surroundings. And the guy walks in and he was so uncomfortable. He had his wife and his child in the car outside and he had to wait for 10 minutes for the thing to factory reset. I tried to have conversations with him, but he was so freaked out. He was just standing in my doorway, just looking at me like, “Yeah yeah yeah. Is it ready? Can I go? Can I go?” It’s only later that I realized that, Oh, this guy was fucking freaked out. I live in the middle of nowhere, I have a little driveway into my house in the woods, I’m a weird-looking dude, I can get it. And this guy was so uncomfortable. He didn’t check the thing. There were some scratches on it, but he didn’t even see it. I asked him, “Do you need the box?” And he’s like, “No no no, I’m fine, I’m fine.” “Do you need a bag?” “No, I’m fine!” He just grabbed everything and he was out of here. It’s one of the first things I sold online and I didn’t get a review afterwards. Normally everyone gives me five stars because I’m kind of a good dude, but that guy was just out of here. [Laughs]

Was the Steam Deck your first foray into PC gaming or did you do PC gaming before?
I did, but this is right after the Atari 2600, so this is the floppy disk era. Golden Axe, Sim City—I played it for hours. I can still remember the dinosaur walking in and the flames and the whole thing. Stunts, I don’t know if you guys ever heard of that. It’s super primitive. You can make your own track and there’s loops involved, the background is just coming closer. Carmageddon I also still very vividly remember. If I’m not mistaken, that’s one of the only games that took more than one floppy disk, so I was like, Whoa, this game’s gotta be huge! This has gotta be the biggest thing ever!

This was probably in the early ’90s, late ’80s. Steam Deck is my first PC gaming [machine]. I always used to be a console guy, always PlayStation. I’ve bought every PlayStation since the first one. I bought one Xbox at some point, apparently to play either Alan Wake or Gears of War because those were the two exclusives that I remember that I owned. But I wouldn’t consider myself a PC gamer. I’ve thought about it many times. My girlfriend lives in Germany, so I travel all the time. I live here for 30 percent of the time, 70 percent I’m there if I’m not on tour and I take everything with me. PlayStation is just easy. I unplug it, I have an extra HDMI cable, an extra power cable, I plug it in there. If I have to start moving my no doubt fluorescent PC?

And also, it’s so expensive. I could never have not the best option. You know what I mean? Like, Oh, there’s a new graphics card? Let’s just throw another €800 down the drain. I would constantly put so much money into it. Every time a PlayStation comes out, I buy a new TV that is future-proofed for this generation of PlayStation. When PlayStation 5 came out, I bought an LG OLED CX C10 TV, which had the 2.1 HDMI ports and it had the 120hz and the blah, blah, blah. It was perfect for PlayStation 5. I’m good until PlayStation 6 comes out, and then I’m going to buy a new TV. That’s how I roll. I’m really happy with how everything looks. It looks great, it plays great. It’s super smooth, there’s no stutter. I don’t feel the need to invest another €2,000 for a PC and then €1,000 for a monitor. And then, Ah, I need a new mouse! I want a new keyboard!

And then you’re like, I’m going to get a new desk chair, and whatever else.
Yeah! I didn’t even think about that. I would consider myself a very hardcore casual gamer. I like to sit down while I play many, many hours. I vividly remember when the quarantine hit. My god, best gaming days of my life by far. There were about five, six people who were playing Warzone nonstop. And I mean nonstop. There was always one dude up and it’s like, “Alright, wanna do some duos?” For about one to two months nonstop, I would say I would wake up at 8 in the morning and I would play until 2 at night. The whole day is just Brrrrr!, shooting, shooting, shooting, and then go to sleep for four hours and like, “Alright, who’s up? Who wants to play?” And there was always someone! I reached the [top] 0.1 percent of Call of Duty players, but 0.1 percent in Call of Duty doesn’t really mean that much because that’s still, I don’t know, a couple hundred thousand people globally. But still, it’s nice to be in the 0.1 percent KD. I was pretty good. We had a lot of fun.

But I must say I grew out of Call of Duty. I bought the last one [Call of Duty: Black Ops 6], I played it for maybe four hours and I was just ready to kill myself. I hated it. I guess I’m just enjoying Dead Space single player more than I’m enjoying just getting shit on 24/7 by dudes who just are so much better than me. You also have to practice to stay good, and I’m just so over it, you know? I bought it and it’s the worst €70 I’ve ever spent. I bought it digitally, so I can’t even give it to someone.

“For about one to two months nonstop, I would say I would wake up at 8 in the morning and I would play until 2 at night. The whole day is just Brrrrr!, shooting, shooting, shooting, and then go to sleep for 4 hours and like, ‘Alright, who’s up? Who wants to play?’”

Was there a specific point when you were like, I don’t like this, I’m over Call of Duty? Or was it gradual, coming off of the pandemic where you no longer can game for 14 hours a day?
It’s hard to say, really. There was a point when Warzone 2.0 came out, when the map changed and it went to Caldera. I wasn’t into it as much anymore. Also, I can still play 14 hours a day usually. I’m a musician, so when I’m not on tour, I’m either writing music or I’m gaming, really. I still have a lot of free time, but my friends had to go to their job. My friends have kids, they gotta raise kids—but not me. It was kind of a combination of either their girlfriend or wife told them to stop, it’s been enough, or they had to go to work, or they had to take care of their children. And then the new map was not the best, movement wasn’t the best. Slowly you get out of it. When we won, it was like [in a monotone voice], “Alright, yay. Let’s queue again.” There wasn’t really much to play for anymore. The fun got sucked out of it because we did it so much and the game changed a bit.

I don’t know if you guys know The First Descendant. It’s a futuristic shooter. Every chick you can play, she’s got her butt hanging out of her pants. It’s this super over-sexualized game, but it’s based on Warframe and Destiny 2. It’s also transaction based, like, “Hey, you want a backpack in the shape of a teddy bear? Just give us 99 cents.” I spent more than 100 hours in it and I kept on grinding for in-game currency and better weapons to make a better build. After 100 hours, I thought, What the fuck am I doing? There’s really no fun at all. You stood in a certain spot in the map, you waited a minute, then enemies appear in this little area. You kill them in eight seconds because I was already so overpowered, and then you wait another minute. And I did this for hours on end. I was just standing there, on my phone and then I hear an enemy spawn. Oh, yeah, [mimics shooting an automatic rifle]. After doing this for hours, I stopped playing because it’s like, There are so many great games I could be playing and I’m doing this? It bummed out one of my friends because he was with me for 80 of the 100 hours and he was really invested in it. He tried to get me back in afterwards. He’s like, “Hey, they did an update and there’s new guns!” I was like, “Ah, no, thank you.” He’s still kind of upset. So sorry, buddy. But I’m not coming back.

I’m [Michael] very much in the same place, just slightly different games. I feel like this concept of the “forever game”—these games where you play these quick 5 to 10 minute rounds and the live service model of just changing something every single month—there’s so many of them now that the landscape has just become fractured. You can only do that with three or four games in the whole field, but as soon as you get to the volume that we’re at now, none of them are sustainable. With that realization that these live service games are no longer giving you that high, do you find yourself seeking out that single-player experience more? Or [are you] waiting for the next high from the next extraction shooter, battle royale, whatever?
No, exactly what you said, just literally word-by-word, I agree 100 percent. I find myself in that situation very often. And I’m really over it. At this point, I enjoy being immersed in a good story. I obviously like it when a game has great mechanics, when a game feels great, when it’s not clunky, but I would say overall, atmosphere and storytelling to me has become so much more important. I don’t mind if they feel arcade-y. I don’t have to prove my gaming skills to nobody anymore. I used to always feel like that. Playing any sort of multiplayer, I always take it so seriously. I play a game, I get a feel for it and then I start [thinking], What are the meta weapons? What is the meta loadout? And I start grinding to get this thing. I get 1 percent better and then I look at my stats and I’m like, Oh, there’s 1 percent progression! Let’s put more hours into this. I’m 42, so I might just be old and enjoying a more casual gaming experience. And I don’t mind.

There’s nothing wrong with your tastes changing a little, playing something that isn’t yelling at you and grenades exploding constantly.
It’s true. I always played Call of Duty. I pretty much bought the first Call of Duty and never really stopped. This is definitely the last one I’m ever going to buy. But I always enjoyed it because it’s a social thing. I had my friends and some of them I’ve met through Call of Duty. It’s like a friend of a friend, and then they come to a show and they’re like, “Dude, what the fuck is this? It’s great!” And then they become friends.

I tried because some of my friends still play. They were like, “Please get it! Come on, please try it! It’s great!” I tried, but it’s not for me. I’m playing the Dead Space remake because it was free on PlayStation. I’m having such a good time, and the same with God of War: Ragnarok. It’s already kind of old, but it was finally at a discount. I got it and it’s so good. And then I see my friends come online and they send me an invite and I’m like, “Alright.” And 12 minutes later, I’m back in the single-players, like, “Dudes, sorry, but really, I don’t enjoy this at all. I don’t know the maps, I don’t invest the time anymore. I’m just getting my ass whooped.”

Over the pandemic, the game for me [Michael] was Overwatch. I played so much Overwatch and I made a shitload of friends, but recently I’m just like, Man, this game is just not fun anymore. The main thing for me that kind of breaks my heart is that I love video games and I want to experience as many as humanly possible, but it is hard to hop on the computer at night and then have friends be like, “Let’s play!” And I’m like, Do I really want to tell my friends to fuck off because I want to play Silent Hill 2? It almost feels like these live service games have your friends held hostage. That’s the way that you can best hang out with them, and then you feel guilty putting in those hours into Silent Hill 2 Remake when your friends are like, “Hey, hop on and play!” It’s kind of like saying like, “Fuck you guys. I got better shit to do!”
I don’t feel guilty about it. I’m going to be honest. I’m always up front with my friends. Every once in a while I stay in the party with them so I can still hear them and I can say something, but it’s so shallow. I’m trying to get into this slow-paced game where music and sound is immersive, and I can just hear, “There’s a grenade! We gotta get out of this room!” And it’s like, “Alright, dudes. I love you, but I’m out of here.” And they understand. I’m really the only one of my friend group who’s really into single-player games. It’s funny. I keep convincing them, like, “There’s Assassin’s Creed, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding! There’s so many great games that you can get into.” And they always try, I don’t know, the first hour and they always say, “Ah, yeah, it’s a bit boring and it’s not for me.” So, it’s fine. They understand, and I understand.

We did try some co-op stuff. In the last six months, we spent more time online together looking at the PlayStation store, just browsing through games that are co-op and like, “I don’t know, maybe this? I don’t know. It Takes Two? I don’t know. A Way Out? I don’t know.” And then after an hour of browsing and obviously talking and having fun while we’re doing it, it’s just, “OK, I’m just going to play my game and you’re just going to play yours.” Now, whenever I see my friends online and they’re playing something that I don’t know, I always instantly request to share screen and I just hang out with them while they’re playing a game, which I think is a good feature. It’s like Twitch for your friends.

Did you jump right from Atari to PlayStation or were there some Sega Genesis or Nintendo years in there?
The Segas and the Nintendos, I had a friend who had one of those and we would constantly just go to each other. I vividly remember [this], it’s really one of the youngest memories I have. My friend had Duck Hunt. I remember the first time I played it as well because it was a whole new interface of playing. I had a gun in my hand and I’m shooting at a TV and it’s reacting. It’s a weird childhood memory that I have, but I remember the dog coming up and me standing there like, Dude, what the fuck? This is the best!

There was a Game Boy in between and the two games I played the most were Paperboy and Gremlins, which are not really AAA titles, but I enjoyed it. Paperboy, you ride around with a bicycle and you throw newspapers in mailboxes or at criminals. I had so much fun playing it. My mom actually gave away my Game Boy at some point. She’s a physiotherapist. She had a child years ago in her treatment and he was crying the whole time, so my mom gave my Game Boy with all my games to this random ass child. That kind of annoyed me when I found out years later. [Laughs] This is not that long ago, let’s say 5 years ago. I went to my parents and like, “Hey, I’m here to pick up the Game Boy.” It’s like, “Oh. Yeah. I gave it away.” [Grumbles] Kind of annoyed, but hey, what can you do? It’s gone.

Actually, a fun, quick story. When the PlayStation 5 released, I didn’t pre-order it and I really wanted a PlayStation 5. I had worked at a gaming store and a friend of mine was still working there, so I called him up two days before the release date and I’m like, “Hey dude, do you maybe still have one? I mean, I’m sure you have one. There’s one in a back room that you kept for someone special like me.” [Laughs] And he’s like, “No, I don’t have one, sorry.” I’m like, “There’s got to be a way to get one.” And he’s like, “No, if you didn’t reserve, you’re not going to get one.” And then I said—and this is probably in a weird way some karma because my mom gave away my Game Boy, I felt like karma owed me a PlayStation 5—“Did the people pay in advance?” And there was no advance pay. You had to write down your email and your name and then pay on the day you got it. That made things slightly easier. I just said, “Isn’t there an asshole that reserved one and you kind of hate the guy?” And he was thinking about it and he said, “Yeah, there’s one guy that I really don’t like.” It’s like, “Just tell me what his name is.”

I went there two days later on the release day and stood in line. It was my turn. My friend pretended that he didn’t really know who I was because all his colleagues were there. I don’t know what the name was, like “Steve Smith.” “Hey, I’m Steve Smith. I ordered a PlayStation 5.” I bought it and I was out of there. It was months before people were able to really get one unless you pay over €1,000. Steve Smith, whatever your name was, I’m sorry. [Laughs]

You’ve mentioned a lot of AAA titles. Now that you have the Steam Deck, do you hope to dive into any kind of indie gaming or are you more comfortable with the tried and true titles out there?
Definitely. I have enjoyed some indie games, especially thanks to my girlfriend, like this whole Pathologic 2 kind of thing. Layers of Fear is another one she advised me to play, which I enjoyed a lot. Limbo and Inside, I enjoyed those a lot, too. I do tend to gravitate towards AAA games because I guess they also have a longer longevity in a way. I usually notice when I finish an indie game, that’s it. I’m not gonna dive in again. I just finished the game, had fun, great—delete, uninstall. Whereas Assassin’s Creed, I can constantly jump back in and enjoy being in that world. Visually, it looks great. I still have 700 treasure chests to dig up, so I’m just riding around on my horse and just enjoying the time. Same with Red Dead Redemption 2. How old is that game by now? But I can still easily jump in and enjoy it. I played it online with another friend of mine, we would meet up in-game. I’ve known this guy for 20 years, so he’s a good friend of mine. We would just [say], “Alright, let’s shoot a bear.” We hop on our horse and not even sprint, just gallop through the mountains and talk about our lives, like “How are you?” “I’m good, buddy.” I wouldn’t say we were role-playing, but in a weird way, I guess we were. [Laughs]

Which is another interesting thing I only found out during the pandemic—[Grand Theft Auto] role-playing. I had never heard of it and all of a sudden it got suggested to me. There was a Dutch guy playing GTA. I was like, Let’s see what they’re up to. For hours, I was glued to my screen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were a police force and they were having a meeting. They were taking it so seriously—for hours! “OK, and then we go to this neighborhood and you have to look for parking tickets. And then you do this, and if there’s a robbery, you know…” I was flabbergasted. I woke up some of my friends that I was playing with, sent them a Twitch link and said, “Look at this! This is nuts!”

And then obviously, like everything in my life, if I like something, I waste too much time on it. So, the next couple of days, somehow it called out to me. It was like, Let’s see what this guy is up to. He’s just walking around in fucking GTA doing nothing. It’s absolutely nuts. They’re talking to other people and they have this little script that they follow. To this day, it’s still weird to me. I still haven’t quite figured it out. It’s like a theater, but it’s online, it’s not real. You know Bub Games? He’s a YouTube guy and his whole thing is he goes into those servers and he just ruins those people’s day. It’s really funny, the guy is really good. I try not to be a dick, but that guy, he’s great at what he does. If you have 15 minutes on the toilet, whip out your phone, enjoy it. It’s really fun. I didn’t know it existed, but apparently it does.

If you think about it, it’s just a more visual representation of something that’s existed for decades. People have been playing [Dungeons & Dragons] since the ’70s and back then, you might have something just as similarly mundane where your characters are sitting around the hall at the adventurers’ guild and discussing the exact gear needed to go into a cave. The idea that now there’s just a visual representation that can bring together more people together more easily, it’s not hard to understand why people would find that fun.
Absolutely. I guess it’s the same with metal music. If you get it, you get it and if you don’t get it, you really don’t get it and you’ll never get it. It’s just a bunch of noise and it’s a bunch of dudes or whomever just yelling angrily at the sky. But if you really get it, you’re in it basically for life. There aren’t a lot of things that I’m into and then five months later I’m like, Eh, this doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m always committed to whatever I’m into. I’ve been gaming now for, I’m 42, so let’s say 35 years, a little bit longer. That’s nuts.

I’ve never stopped and I don’t think I ever will. I don’t see why I should. I’m fortunate that my girlfriend is into gaming, so she’s on the bed playing on her laptop and I’m in the living room playing on the PlayStation. I can play for five hours and then just open the door and [ask], “Are you okay?” She’s absolutely OK! She’s fine. And then I can go back to my friends and like, “Alright! Another five hours!” And they’re like, “Ehhh, I can’t do five hours.”

Have gaming OSTs ever influenced any of the music that you’ve made?
In a weird way, yes. It’s Gustavo Santaolalla who plays The Last of Us soundtrack. There’s this theme playing, [mimics guitar progressions from “The Last of Us”]. I showed it to [guitarist] Gilles [Demolder] who plays in Wiegedood. He’s really into Spanish acoustic guitars, so he really liked it. This year, we were invited by [Film Fest Ghent] to write a soundtrack to A Page of Madness, a 1926 Japanese movie. It ends with, I would say, three to four minutes of Gilles playing on a Spanish guitar. It’s definitely not ripped from The Last of Us theme, but you can definitely see… we say, “he got the mayonnaise from Gustavo Santonella.” It’s an expression in Flemish: “you were influenced by.” It’s a very small influence that somehow seeped into the soundtrack that we wrote for this movie.

But other than that, I find it interesting that every game that has metal in it, to my ears, it usually sucks. It’s not really the kind of metal that I would listen to or enjoy because it’s always this Pro Tools kind of metal. You know what I mean? It sounds so fake and it’s so not organic, which is exactly what I like in metal music—in every sort of music, actually—some sort of life. How wonderful is it for me as a drummer to hear a drummer play and then there’s one snare that’s not really hitting the center and you can hear it’s slightly off. It’s such a small thing that in a weird way makes me so happy. It’s like, This is a human who played an instrument with hands and feet and there isn’t a computer quantizing everything. It’s the worst trend in music, as far as I’m concerned: the over-quantizing of everything and putting it on a grid and we need a click and at our live show, we need seven computers running and if the computer stops working, we’re fucked. All of those things are just so far from what I like in music. Every time there’s heavy music in games, it tends to just annoy me a bit. I try to not pay attention to it too much. The Doom (2016) soundtrack is like, Yeah, it’s nice, but why am I listening to this when Meshuggah exists? It’s so much better! And I know Meshuggah is a quantizing sort of band, but they’re maybe the only exception that I can really get into. [Laughs] I’ll always be really into Meshuggah.

I [Michael] feel like there’s this tendency [in video games] to caricaturize [metal]. If you have metal, it has to be with a dude wearing corpse paint and then there’s thrash riffs playing in the background with a trad metal solo cutting in out of nowhere. But I think, maybe not necessarily in terms of aesthetic representation, at the very least you have games like Cyberpunk 2077 that are including bands like Tomb Mold and Converge. Do you see any kind of future for this more organic and authentic feeling of underground metal being represented in video games? Does it even matter?
Authenticity doesn’t sell, unfortunately. It never has and it never really will. If someone who has an affinity for the underground scene ever gets into game developing, game producing, no doubt it will happen. But you need the right person at the right time to do it. Cyberpunk is a great example. Indeed, there are a couple of bangers on there and it’s nice. Purely from a business point of view, underground stuff is not really selling games. It’s not what I want, but it’s just the reality. Let’s say Living Gate—a true underground band that not really that many people care about—“Yeah, Living Gate is writing an exclusive soundtrack!” No one would care, they wouldn’t sell a copy more. I would buy one obviously, but I guess that’s the problem—money talks. It’s the stupid cliché. Underground music, in that way, is condemned to stay underground.

And then you can automatically ask yourself the question: Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, I think. Sometimes it’s great that underground stays underground. We did a tour recently and [attendance] wasn’t all that good. Is that a bad thing? Obviously you would like to reach more people, but I only want to reach people “the right way.” I don’t want to be a social media monster that’s just posting stuff every day. We’re the worst at promoting ourselves. We always have been and we have no one else to do it. Commercially it’s not great, but it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, I barely survive making music and that’s perfectly fine for me. I have a house, I have a car, I can get to practices and I have friends that I play music with. It’s fine for me. I don’t need to become rich off what I create. If I would become rich off what I create, I probably wouldn’t like what I’m doing at that point.

I [James] see lots of interviews with people who were playing live and stopped or they they quit playing with the band, and there will be quotes like, “I hit this point where I realized I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore.” They have to kind of realign and either take some time away or a different mental way to look at things before they enjoy it again. You don’t want to get to that point where what you do makes you miserable.
Yeah. It makes me think that playing drums is the best multiplayer there is for me. I’ve been playing drums 25 years at this point and it never gets boring. It’s a multiplayer thing because you need other people to really have it shine. That’s a beautiful cheesy quote, but it’s true! In a bit after this interview, I’m gonna drive to practice. I’ve been waiting all day just to get there. I had a busy period doing lots of things and this is another band I play in that I haven’t practiced with in three months now, so I’m just excited to go there and play drums. It’s the best thing there is.

Suffer As One is available now via Relapse Records and can be ordered here.
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The post KILL SCREEN 055: Wim Coppers of LIVING GATE Chooses to Thrive as One appeared first on Decibel Magazine.