Grant Netzorg, the multifaceted vocalist and guitarist of the Denver-based band In the Company of Serpents, got beyond personal detailing his inner turmoil on the band’s latest album, A Crack in Everything, set to release on July 11. It picks up where previous records left off, highlighting the weird, sludgy, country-tinged influence their unique brand of heavy music has come to be known for.
“I don’t know if I’ve really considered us a doom band since our past our first record,” Netzorg says. “Our very first album is pretty much just as a straightforward doom record, but pretty rapidly, I wanted to write outside of the confines of that. I don’t think much of what we’ve done has been very doomy, but we still get lumped in with that quite a bit. Yeah, there are doomy riffs on this record, but I wouldn’t call it strictly a doom record.”
A Crack in Everything by In the Company of Serpents
While the record pulls no punches when it comes to dealing with tough personal issues, it’s ultimately a very optimistic and uplifting record. He didn’t succumb to the darkness—He overcame in order to be there for himself, his creative world, and his family.
“A big part of this record, really the overarching theme of it, is dealing with my experience of alcoholism and my having been a very heavy drinker for the last 20 years. That caught up to me very hard in the last few years, to the point where I had to completely quit and dry myself out and check into rehab, all that embarrassing, fun stuff,” Netzorg admits. “So a lot of this record really started to come together after I got sober.”
This vulnerability sees Netzorg peeling back the curtain and using less esoteric metaphor—though it’s still present—and more direct poetry about his pain. “For a long time, I didn’t say much about what the songs meant or what I was thinking about when I was writing the songs. And I would try and be coy about it and leave it up to the listener to discern those things. And that never happened. Like, nobody would sit down with my lyrics and analyze them and be like, ‘Oh, I think this is about his marriage, or this is about his kid,’” he said.
With A Crack in Everything, the masking is largely removed. “Some of the songs are explicitly about the horrors of very real, physical withdrawals, and things that aren’t going to hid behind esoteric masking quite as well,” Netzorg says. He explains that the record can also be viewed as a “cord cutting ritual,” a concept where one creates an effigy of self-hated traits and ritually severs ties with it. “The song ‘Cinders’ on this record is pretty explicitly about that process,” he explains. “The basic idea of that sort of ritual is, you build up sort of an efigy, or a thought form, that’s an amalgam of all the things that you hate about yourself or that you’re trying to change about yourself, and you create this sort of personification of all of these nasty things about you, and you envision it sort of tethered to you, and the thrust of the ritual is severing that connection and then banishing this entity, thus ritually removing it from you.”
When it comes to his struggle with alcohol, Netzorg makes it clear that the physical addiction he faced was real, scary, and deadly. “Alcohol is one of two drugs that you could have a dependency on that the withdrawals can kill you. Alcohol and benzos are the only ones that you could die from withdrawals from,” he explains. For a while, he was stuck in a cycle of quitting, then relapsing again. “Inevitably, I would cave because it’s very easy to go back down familiar roads and just start back at it again. I would dry out, get sober, and after three or four days of feeling like shit, I start to feel normal. And then the thoughts would creep in like, ‘Wow, well, you got through that. Clearly that’s not a problem. So why don’t we have a drink about it to celebrate?’ Next thing you know, it’s two weeks later, and you’re back physically dependent upon it.”
Despite these anxieties, Netzorg finds immense catharsis in the process. “Music is always very cathartic to me, and that’s part of why I and many other people play. Performing live, regardless of the subject matter of whatever you’re thinking about, it can be an intensely cathartic experience, and I think many musicians, in absence of the forum to do that, would probably be spending a shitload more money on therapy,” he reflects.
‘A Crack in Everything is a raw, honest record born from the crucible of lived experience. It’s a cathartic listen as well a solid and memorable album.
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