CEREBRAL REVIEWMENT: Pestilectomy Interview 2024

I am honored and excited to bring you some Q and A with the one-and-only Pestilectomy.

They had one of 2022's best slam records with "From Vulnerable To Funeral" and just dropped a brand new insane EP on RealityFade. If you don't know this band, you are fucking up. Enjoy the interview below!

Thank you so much for taking to time to do this! Can we just start with who we are speaking

to and your role in the band? And of course anything about you!

Dustin: I’m Dustin and do guitars/bass and

songwriting

Len: I'm Len, I perform the vocalizations

Felix: I play drums

As soon as I was able to listen to "Soundtrack To An Embalming Room" the entire way

through, I knew I had to talk to you guys. The EP is bursting at its disgusting seams with

unique riffs and slams and song structures that take us on a ride. I love it!

I am admittedly a newer fan, and I wasn't familiar with any of the band's back catalogue. I

have since familiarized myself and, I'm sure, my neighbors. For our readers who may be

discovering you now, could you talk a little about where it all started and how we ended up

here? Was the name always Pestilectomy? What does that mean? How did you all meet?

How would you try and sum up the last 7 or so years? Tell us anything!

Len: Name was originally Pestilent, but like some crazy shit happened with all that. It's a weird story. I don't know how that name got chosen because I wasn't a member when Pestilent was founded.

I got on board for vocals because the original singer died in a motorcycle crash.

We did a EP and album with that name, then later we got threatened with legal bullshit by someone who owned a clothing brand or something called Pestilent who even harassed our fans so we just decided to change the name to Pestilectomy so we could sell merch again andavoid being sued. A lot of people see our name and think "the fuck? another -ectomy band??"but they're unaware that the name is basically a joke. We just took the old name and suffixed it with "ectomy" for the trope. Some fans have come up with their own interpretations of what "pestilectomy" as a word means but to us it doesn't mean anything. Just sounds cool.

Where would you rate "Soundtrack To An Embalming Room" among your other releases? Has each one surpassed the last?

How has this recent EP been received by your fans?

Dustin: Definitely our most thought through material to date

Len: Best we've ever done. Cool to see the reactions

Alongside the amazing chops on your guitarist and drummer, these vocals straight up melt my

face. So many different sounds and all disgusting! Len, how long have you been at it? Did

you or do you practice a lot or does this just kinda come natural and you mess around with it?

Len: I started the vocals thing when I was like 15, I just remember first hearing bands like

Cradle of Filth or Job for a Cowboy back then and I became I utterly obsessed with how the

human voice can sound so inhuman so I knew I had to find out how to do that somehow. I'm

almost entirely self taught, nobody ever tutored me and YouTube tutorials didn't really help

either.

How about Dustin and Felix? How long have you each been at it? Have there been other bands?

Dustin: I’ve been playing guitar on and off since 2011 but really started digging into it around 2018ish. I had several other projects but the most noteworthy would be my deathcore project “Cogitations” that also released its debut album earlier this year

Felix: I started paying drum in the age of 14 and open my first band a few months after. My

first group was a metalcore project called „Maleachi“.

We released 2 EPs and played some gigs. Things starting to get more serious, when a friend and me founded the deathcore

unit "I Watched Myself Sleep".

After releasing a bonecrushing LP I joined slamdown titans

"Chamber of Malice" and toured different countries around the globe.

We played a backyard

show in Las Vegas where I met Len, and from that I joined Pestilectomy in 2018.

How has working with Reality Fade been? What other labels have you worked with?

Len: Amputated Vein reissued our EP from when we were Pestilent. Masakatsu is such a

wonderful person, but we haven't spoke in years.

Dustin: Working with RealityFade has been nothing but an awesome experience

with both Pestilectomy and my other project. Dimitri handles stuff as professional as it can be

How would you describe Pestilectomy's fan-base?

Dustin: Weird, like us.

What did you guys grow up listening to?

Dustin: I grew up listening to the metal stuff my parents listened to. Basically early Metallica,

Slayer, Rammstein which eventually got me into Slipknot and Death Metal like Cannibal

Corpse, Six Feet Under etc when I was like 11ish. The rest is history haha

Len: When I was in middle school I liked a lot of rap that was popular at the time like Lil Wayne

and DJ Khaled. Also, alternative music like Flobots, Apocalyptica, 30 Seconds to Mars. At

some point I found Slipknot thanks to MTV2, and I just found more brutal stuff from there. My

family doesn't listen to extreme metal so I never got into it from them

When it's not brutal extreme music, what are you listening to these days?

Dustin: For me its all across the board like US hip hop/trap, cheesy power metal like

Dragonforce, Rhapsody etc, black metal all the way to Japanese music like vkei, j-goth/rock,

some Eurobeat and all that other weeb shit ha ha. As long as it’s catchy, I dig it

Len:

I've been a fan of soundcloud rap like Bones or Bladee and the like for over a decade.

Currently I'm obsessed with Playboi Carti and everyone else a part of Opium.

In fact Carti's Whole Lotta Red record that we paid homage to via making that album art into a Pestilectomy shirt was my idea.

!!PRE-ORDER HERE!!

I do like a lot of lofi indie rock/emo stuff too like Teen Suicide and Elliott.

Also lately i've been loving witch house such as Salem and White Ring, I kind of want to start a

lofi witch house project because it's just so flame. I'm not even an electronic music sort of

person but the atmosphere of the genre is

impeccable, if not black metal-reminiscent even.

Just this month I visited Louisiana so I took an addiction to sludge metal back home with me;

I'm so hooked on Acid Bath and Iron Monkey right now.

What are your hobbies/favorite things to do?

Len: hang out with homies, play old PlayStation 2 games in my shed, shoot some pool, make

money.

Dustin: Being goofy with friends, making music/practicing guitar, hitting the gym and some

video games, mostly oldschool RuneScape atm haha

Can you tell us the story of how you came up with the title "Soundtrack To An Embalming

Room"?

Len: I just randomly come up with titles that sound fire and I keep them in my notes.

Sometimes it'll be many months or years til they get used

Who did the artwork?

Dustin: Aziz @BLCXSTRY.ART (@aziz_blcxstry)

Can you tell us a little about the writing and recording process for Pestilectomy?

Dustin: I mostly start with demoing random riff ideas along with basic drums, sometimes

more sometimes less in one session. Eventually some of these get scrapped or reworked

and put together, the drums get more detail to form the song how I imagine it. When the

song base is done it gets sent over to Felix who revises the drums. When the revised

drums are done I sometimes do some fine-tuning to some sections/riffs or add another

idea that fits Felix drums ideas. When the instrumental is done we send it over to Lennon

who records vocals over it.

What can we expect from Pestilectomy in the near future?

Dustin; Hopefully get STAER on vinyl, and some visuals. As well as promo for our 2 cover

songs we released on our “Ministry of Molested Necrophiles” single in 2020!

Who are some bands you guys really take influence from?

Felix: I started to play drums because of Slipknot. Rings of Saturn influenced my playing style

back in 2017

Len: for gutturals the Japanese band Disconformity has always been my main inspiration, but

for this new EP I also did a new scream style that was very inspired by Embalmer, Cryptopsy

and especially Damonacy.

Dustin: When songwriting I write what I personally dig and that’s a combination of the stuff I grew to love over the past 15+ years so it’s hard to pinpoint specific bands for me

Can you name any up-and-coming bands that we should check out?

Len: I'm not a huge fan of newer bands, at least not in the slam genre these days, but Insect

Inside and Torture are exceptions. They're both so flame.