KING PARROT // Tales From The Lair

Somewhere in the mists of late 2017, Australian grindcore maniacs King Parrot were hard at work.

MORE: KICK OUT THE JAMS with IN HEARTS WAKE // ALPHA WOLF: Nothing Quiet About It REVIEWS: ALPHA WOLF: a quiet place to die // MARILYN MANSON: We Are Chaos // KING PARROT: Holed Up In The Lair // MOVEMENTS: No Good Left To Give // ENSLAVED: Utgard // DEFTONES: Ohms // TOUCHE AMORE: Lament

Deeply immersed in a four-day recording stint at the Nodferatus Lair in Louisiana, they laid out just as many tracks, and promptly shoved them in their suitcases. Now, in the strange times of October 2020, these lair-inspired tracks have resurfaced in a punchy EP suitably titled Holed Up In The Lair. Although it has some twists in the tale, Holed Up In The Lair is as hectic as we might expect from King Parrot.

“We don’t do anything other than hectic,” says King Parrot’s vocalist Matt ‘Youngy’ Young, as he thinks back to recording the tracks in 2017. “I think the focus was that we weren’t second guessing anything, not spending too much time squabbling over how long a part should go for here or there, there wasn’t time to second guess the vocals, or the lyrics or anything like that. It was more of an opportunity to take part in an exercise where we wanted to write and record and come up with a close to finished product in as little time as possible. We didn’t really have any intention of doing anything with it, it was just ‘let’s do as much as we can, in as little time as possible’, and try to get it done as best as we can, that was it. The fact that we’re sitting here two or three years later releasing it is actually pretty cool. It gives us a little bit of hope that we can get a reasonable amount of work done in a short time.”

So the four tracks of Holed Up In The Lair emerged from a very different creative space for King Parrot, and the experience was bound to produce some new elements, as Youngy says, “I like the songs, I like the ideas, I like what we came up with and especially the one we released the other day with Phil Anselmo singing on it [Banished, Flawed, then Docile], it’s pretty different to anything we’ve done, it’s still pretty hectic and brutal and all that sort of stuff, but it’s a bit different to anything we’ve done in the past and it brings a different element to what we can actually do.”

It’s nice to have a band with no limitations on what we can chuck in there. I think that one of the benefits of King Parrot is that we stumbled across our sound early on, people know what we sound like, so we can experiment with different styles and we’ve got the comfort of knowing whatever we do put out there will always sound like King Parrot.
[ Youngy ]

There’s certainly a lot of suggestive diversity on the EP, which provides intriguing directions in King Parrot’s sound for the future. “We’re starting to get some ideas together for a new record now,” Young says, “and we’ve got a lot of ideas there and a lot of scope to try and develop our sound a bit more. We’ve never put any limitations on what we can or can’t do, but we know what we want to sound like, we have influences ranging all the way from AC/DC to stuff as extreme as Impaled Nazarene or a band like that where it’s like crazy, and everything in between, lots of old hardcore stuff, punk hardcore stuff we really like. It’s nice to have a band with no limitations on what we can chuck in there. I think that one of the benefits of King Parrot is that we stumbled across our sound early on, people know what we sound like, so we can experiment with different styles and we’ve got the comfort of knowing whatever we do put out there will always sound like King Parrot.”

King Parrot are a band renowned for their wild live shows and almost relentless touring, and Holed Up In The Lair is the product of a brief spell in their travels. Does it conjure up any memories of the tour during which it was recorded? According to Young, it certainly does. “It’s actually interesting,” he begins, “because we were in the States, we’d just finished a tour with Superjoint Ritual and Devildriver, and we were about to head over to Europe to do a tour with a band called Decapitated, and they had a whole bunch of stuff happen. We were both touring America on different tours at the same time and we were both going to leave the America at the same time and go to Europe to this tour, then the guy ended up in jail and all this crazy stuff, so our entire European tour got cancelled and we basically got stuck in America, we had no tour to go onto, but luckily we had some good friends and we were able to do the EP which was something really positive that came out of it, we also had a little holiday in Florida and we wound up flying to the UK a few weeks later, did a twelve-show UK tour, play lots of scummy little dive bars which ended up being really fun, and then we ended up going to Japan as well. It was a massive headache when it happened but it ended up working out quite well.”

Things have this way of not going to plan, as we all know especially in 2020, but for King Parrot the future is ready and waiting. “You know,” Youngy says, “just before all the lockdowns happened, we had started rehearsing already, had started getting things underway, we were jamming, we had ideas, we got a whole bunch of demos that we just recorded, it’s already sounding really cool, sounding really mature, more like a band that’s been around for ten years. That’s what we are, and it’s nice to have that feeling of being a bit more comfortable with each other and kind of know what we’re going to bring to the table. We’re planning some stuff over summer, if all goes to plan, hopefully touring next year, and a new album late next year. We’ll have to see how we go but it’s exciting, there’s some good stuff there. This is the most time since we’ve been a band that we haven’t played, or seen each other, or been around each other, we’ve been really busy as a band since we started. It’s a strange time for us all. As soon as we get the opportunity to get on the road and play, we’ll be making the most of it.”