The plan was perfect. Undeath's new album is called It's Time… To Rise From the Grave, its art pictures a fiendish boneyard, and the tracklist even boasts a song titled "Trampled Headstones," so vocalist Alexander Jones and I were set to link up at Rochester, New York's Mount Hope Cemetery and use the United States' first municipal graveyard as our backdrop while we got into the gory details. Then, the plague came a-knockin', so the most death-metal interview of all time became a rather un-death-metal Zoom call.
The bungled outcome was somehow even more fitting, especially considering Undeath's swift ascent to becoming their genre's hottest new band is the exact opposite outcome that the 27-year-old had in mind. Just three years ago, he swore that he was finished pursuing his lifelong passion.
By his early high school years in Rochester, Jones had become an extreme-metal fanatic frequenting local hardcore and metal shows. After cutting his teeth as a spectator, he eventually conned his way into a band who were looking for a guitarist. "I 100 percent could not play guitar," he clarifies with a laugh. He faked it till he made it, and by the end of high school, he was fronting a grindcore outfit and putting all his energy into heavy music. Then, he had to make an age-old choice.
"I could tell that [my parents] were going to be devastated if I didn't go to college," Jones recalls. He had no idea what he wanted to major in, so he chose writing and took off to Wagner College in Staten Island, assuming that its proximity to Manhattan would grant him easy access to shows. It wasn't until he moved in that he realized how isolated the island is from the big city's metal hotspots. "I have to take a fucking boat to get to Manhattan every day? What is this?" he remembers thinking.
His utopian vision of becoming a NYC scenester was shattered and he hated everything else about Wagner, so after a year and a half, he transferred back home and put all his free time into fronting a new screamo group called Druse. The group would give him both his first taste of musical success and also a crushing dose of failure.
"I knew that my No. 1 prerogative in life was to be in a band and make it work," he recalls.
Druse quickly picked up a strong local following and could draw upward of 200 people, an uncommon feat in a scene the size of Rochester's. Frustratingly, they'd frequently lose money playing to nobody outside of the city limits, and the debut album they spent two years laboring over was met with a brief shrug.
On top of his bottomed-out morale, Jones had also realized that his total lack of screaming technique was destroying his vocal cords. After Druse's 100th show, the frontman pledged to himself that he was done. "I was pretty defeated," Jones says of that time. "I was done with music at the end of Druse."
"And it was funny," he adds. "Because I had that realization right at the same time that Kyle [Beam, Undeath guitarist] hit me up and asked me to start Undeath."
Jones went into the project with zero expectations. "I was like, this is not going to be a serious band," he recalls. "We were writing songs about killing people and going on serial murder sprees … And then things just spiraled out of control so fast."
Undeath's 2019 demo unexpectedly sold through four pressings of tapes, and their next songs picked up even more steam. Four months into their career, they had dozens of fans coming to out-of-town shows. Then, the Black Dahlia Murder's Trevor Strnad became not just a vocal supporter, but also lent his growls to the title track of their 2020 debut, Lesions of a Different Kind.
The pressure was on, but It's Time… To Rise From the Grave is an even greater filthy death-metal record in every regard — better written songs, tighter performances and bigger-sounding production. Jones credits the latter to the new gear they were able to afford with their COVID-19 relief money. "That helped a lot," Jones says. "In the earliest Undeath shows, we were so broke that Kyle couldn't even afford a tuner."
The upgraded equipment gave them the confidence to swing hard and write songs like the triumphant "Rise From the Grave" that channel their own sense of victory. "What does a death-metal song with a huge chorus that makes you want to inhale 300 beers sound like? That was the north star when it came to writing a lot of the new record," Jones enthuses.
When Undeath started, Jones knew he needed to find a new technique to avoid the damage he had caused to his voice in Druse, so he started by impersonating idols like Cannibal Corpse's George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher and Dying Fetus' John Gallagher. If a specific growl didn't hurt, then he adopted it into his repertoire. On Rise, Jones forged a style of his own, and now he's peers with the very musicians who made him the vocalist he is today. A few days before our call, Jones guested on a death-metal panel discussion alongside Corpsegrinder himself.
"I need to constantly remind myself to be present in the moment and feel gratitude for everything that we have," Jones says, reflecting on Undeath's rapid ascent. "Because it's all I've ever wanted."
