Over the last 10 years, the music made by prolific Chicago/Baltimore trio Locrian has always been tough to categorize: Is it noise? Black metal? Dark ambient? Industrial? Drone? Things get more complicated on their most recent outing, Infinite Dissolution, where they manage to be more triumphant and bigger than before (and even a little bit catchy). The nine-song effort, recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and produced by Greg Norman (Russian Circles, Pelican), is a concept album about the extinction of the human race, but you’ll find yourself pumping your fist as frontman Terence Hannum’s haunting black-metal vocals slither through a mournful, melodic mix of fuzz, hiss, and riffs. Stitched together by woozy instrumentals that feature birds chirping and iron scraping, the album marks a new peak for this creatively restless group.

I spoke to the band about the bleak concepts behind the collection, capturing field recordings in ghost towns,the importance of Deafheaven to metal-hybridization, 19th-century anti-industrialization tracts, and what it means to be a father focused on the apocalypse.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to make an album about the end of mankind as we know it?

André Foisy: The songs are inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent book The Sixth Extinction, which discusses past extinctions on the planet and argues that humans and the Earth are in the midst of a mass extinction event.

Terence Hannum: We wanted to use what’s actually happening and then gaze into the future and make our own science-fiction story out of it—to think of how we push the Earth to such an extreme with our behavior that it’s pushing back and making our existence impossible.

Pitchfork: The lyrics read like apocalyptic manifestos.

TH: Thanks. I spent a lot of time looking at 19th-century anti-industrialization tracts as well as reading some of the science behind Elizabeth Kolbert’s book. That started to set the tone and helped form the vocabulary that the instrumentals needed.

Pitchfork: What role do the instrumentals play in the story?

AF: There are layers of meaning behind them. A number of the field recordings I used were taken from places that have regenerated from human impact. For instance, one came from a place that used to be a quarry, but that’s since been transformed into a native prairie. And Terence used a recording from the top of Monk’s Mound at Cohokia, which is an abandoned city near St. Louis. The people that lived there likely destroyed themselves through environmental exploitation.

Steven Hess: The instrumentals help hold everything together and accentuate the realism of the record. “KXL I” includes field recordings and the sounds of amplified metal grating being struck rhythmically. I wanted to replicate the sound of someone hearing the bashing or destroying of a pipeline from miles away. The field recordings add texture and possibly help transport the listener to a place—either imaginary or real—while they listen to the songs.

Pitchfork: For an album about the idea of human extinction, it's pretty triumphant. Is this intentional?

TH: I think there’s the hope that humanity can continue, but I also think that if you love the Earth, realizing the main thing that can hurt it will eventually wipe itself out is also a bit of a triumph.

AF: For my part, I wanted the album to have some sort of triumphant feeling since I’m hopeful about the future of humanity. The album is deeper than just glorifying the excitement in feelings of terror, or the fear of the end of the world. It’s meant to inspire people to have discussions about themselves. 

Pitchfork: Terence, how does being a father affect the subject matter of your work? 

TH: It definitely feeds my lyrics and my dedication—I’m trying to say something about this destruction, to form some ideas. It’s not just three guys playing to be cool. Considering how little time I ultimately have, I want what I create to count. That said, I don’t have a lot of optimism for what the world will look like when my kids are adults, and a lot of what motivates me is shame that we didn’t stop or shift our behavior. Though perhaps kids and teenagers now are way more sophisticated about environmental issues.

Pitchfork: You've refined and shifted your sound over the last decade, but did you ever think you'd be writing music this catchy?

AF: We didn’t plan for it to be catchy, but that was different for us, so I didn’t resist. When we went into the studio, “Heavy Water” got catchy all of a sudden, so Steven played some blast beats over it and it got a bit weirder, which we liked.

TH: We just always want to challenge ourselves. Once you establish something, it’s best to break it.

Pitchfork: Does the crossover of a band like Deafheaven affect you at all?

TH: It's interesting that there is potential for such a broad audience. I’m also fascinated that it can get under the skin of so many who perceive themselves as voices of the metal scene. But it doesn’t affect what we make. 

AF: Perhaps the broad appeal of a band like Deafheaven might inspire more general listeners to find our music, which is good for us. Maybe a Locrian track would come up on an Internet Deafheaven radio station? They could be a gateway band for listeners to discover more challenging music. I hope so. 

Pitchfork: Even though Terence has moved to Baltimore, I still think of you as a Chicago band. How important is that city to what you do?

TH: Chicago is just an important music city. It will always be where Locrian began, and two-thirds of the band live and create there. When we started, the blight on the edges of the city really inspired us, like the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois. However, I must say, I love my adopted city of Baltimore and its music scene is very different, much smaller, but still inspiring. I like how the genres aren’t as important here, and there is more mingling.

Pitchfork: What does black metal mean to you in 2015?

TH: Black metal has always changed for me. The bands I was interested in were always a bit weirder, like Abruptum, even though I really enjoyed Venom, Bathory, Darkthrone, or the more orthodox bands in that genre. So in some ways that era of black metal is an anachronism. A lot of what black metal was founded on has past—and that’s good, that is what happens with time. But I never thought the gambit with any genre was to copy it. To me, bands like Obituary, Dissectionm, or Weakling weren’t saying “follow me and go forth and make sub-par clones in expensive packaging.” They presented challenges to do better and go further.

AF: It’s a controversial issue because people identify themselves as black metal, but I don’t identify myself like that and I don’t identify our music as black metal. We’re deeper than that.

Generally, I think people generally agree that black metal started around the time of the church burnings in Scandinavia in the 1990s and with the music scene that supported those acts. Many of those early black metal bands had atavistic themes, and their music and imagery harkened back to a time when the cultures of the area were diluted by outside influences, as if Scandinavia was an isolated land, even though it has never been an isolated land. Remember, the potato—the main ingredient in many traditional Scandinavian dishes—originated in South America, from the Incas, and not from Europe.

That golden age of black metal was anachronistic, but the era today that harkens back to that period of black metal imagines that era through a warped reflection. Any bands that think of themselves as black metal today are merely an anachronism of an anachronism, a reflection of a reflection.

That said, my favorite black metal band today is Forteresse, and they play music that harkens back to both the audio aesthetics of some early Scandinavian black metal as well as traditional Quebecois music. Their album Métal Noire Québécois has an image of the turn-of-the century Quebecois fiddler Joseph Allard on it, and it positioned him as an image of Quebec tradition, but Allard played jigs regularly, which originated in England, not Quebec or France, and many Quebecois think of the English as the oppressors. Also, Allard’s music flourished at a time when the Catholic Church was much more powerful in Quebec than today, and the golden age of black metal was staunchly anti-Christian. So Forteresse is an anachronism of an anachronism, but I’m not saying that to be pejorative. I’m a huge fan of theirs, as I’m a huge fan of Allard.

Pitchfork: If you guys had longer hair, do you think the questions of whether or not you were metal would be moot?

SH: We’re metal at heart, but “uncategorizable” or “other” by our appearance, and I’m completely fine with that.

AF: We could write a death metal album, and some people would probably still refuse to call us metal.

TH: What is metal anyway? I just hope to see a day when Rob Halford, Kerry King, Kirk Windstein, and Phil Anselmo are accepted as metal musicians despite the length of their hair.