Moodring’s new album death fetish landed on March 27th, and it doesn’t feel like a reset so much as a sharpening of everything they’ve been circling for years.
Built out of isolation, health struggles, and a refusal to stop creating, the record leans deeper into industrial textures, nu metal grit, and something colder sitting underneath it all, it’s not trying to chase a scene, it’s pulling threads from one.
We caught up with frontman Hunter Young to unpack the creative inspirations behind death fetish, from Orgy and Spineshank to anime and films that linger longer than they should.
Creative Inspirations Behind New Album death fetish
A lot of people have been saying lately about Moodring, “oh, it sounds like Motionless in White”. I know they might be a millennial or a Zoomer and they’ve probably never heard Orgy before, but we’re just pulling from the same influences! I’ve shown so many people that band over the past couple of weeks. The easiest song to get people into Orgy is Stitches. I tried to write Stitches three times on this album and it didn’t work out once. So we ended up with completely different stuff, but it turned out cool. I try my best not to listen to music when I’m writing because I don’t want things to impact me too much. But obviously Orgy’s album Candyass was a huge inspiration for this record because I’d been listening to it a lot and I’d become such a big fan of Jay Gordon’s voice. I wanted to figure out how to do what he did, but weaponise it and make it my own. It’s almost like this goth thing over industrial music which I thought was really cool. I’ve always been into industrial metal and rock a lot, so I wanted to bleed those influences more without just stamping Nine Inch Nails on it like everyone else does. Having said that, Nine Inch Nails is top five all-time for me.
Half Life
Outside of Orgy, the first two Spineshank albums, Strictly Diesel and The Height of Callousness, were huge, I think those are pretty fucking obvious when you listen to this record. If you know you know, and I think they’re a super underrated band. A lot of foreign nu metal stuff inspired me too. There used to be this K-pop singer named Seo Taiji who eventually became a nu metal artist. And the stuff he put out is fucking amazing, it was a big influence. And also the French nu metal band Pleymo. They ended up becoming a rock band, but their first two albums are fucking unreal. When I got shown Pleymo for the first time, I was like, “can we just delete the album and go do this?! I’ve been sad long enough, can we party now please?”. It’s all killer, no filler, it’s so good.
Cannibal
A big thing for us is that we would work on a song, and then to stop thinking about music we’d go upstairs and watch a film, and then we’d go back downstairs and keep going to try to garner influence. The problem is, I don’t remember what we watched, which is crazy because I watch so much film. But I don’t retain anything. I don’t watch slashy horror movies, I watch more of the Cronenberg weird shit. Anything that makes you think about subtext is kind of what I’m into. And I know it sounds fake intelligent, but I like a movie with a lot of subtext to it, especially if I can’t figure it out and someone else who is more intelligent than me can explain their theory on it. I very much enjoy that, it’s almost like I get a movie and a book. Sometimes it’ll check your intelligence, you’ll be like, “damn it, I’m not as smart as I thought I was”. I also don’t care about names at all, even as someone who reads manga and watches anime, I’ll be having conversations about it and someone will be like, “oh, that’s so-and-so”. And I’ll go, “who the fuck is that?!”. I’m name blind. But I’m not face blind, I can recognise anyone.
Masochist Machine
On the topic of anime, I forced our producer Austin [Coupe] to watch all of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the entire original with the actual good dub on it. He’s not an anime guy so the only choice was to have him watch the dub. And then I had him watch The End of Evangelion, I put him on a plane at five o’clock in the morning to go back to LA, and he just texted me and said, “what the fuck did you do to me?”. So that was definitely a big influence. We stopped watching movies at one point and I said, “you know what, man? This is what you need”. He was already familiar with Satoshi Khan, Perfect Blue and Paprika, stuff like that. So I said, “this is the next step up”. For the first three to four episodes, it’s like, “oh, okay, cool. Robots fighting”. But then it becomes a lot more than that. For myself with all of that stuff, I can’t pinpoint someone showing me anything specific back in the day, I think it just happened organically. Toonami would’ve probably helped me get into baseline anime, or mainstream anime. And then if I liked something aesthetically, I would go seeking other things out that matched that aesthetic. And that kind of goes with music and sound too, I’ll be like, “I like this, how can I go further down this rabbit hole to something that might be even more in my wheelhouse?”.
Anywhere But Here
Moodring death fetish track list
- 01. Half-Life
- 02. Cannibal
- 03. Masochist Machine
- 04. Gunplay (Suicidal 3way)
- 05. Ketamine
- 06. Anywhere By Here
- 07. STFA
- 08. Oxidiezed
- 09. Bleed Enough
- 10. Sickf_ck
- 11. Die Slow
- 12. ColdMetalKiss
Pick up your copy/stream here.
death fetish feels like Moodring tightening their grip on what they are, rather than trying to prove anything to anyone else.
You can hear the lineage in it if you know where to look, but it never settles into imitation, it’s too restless for that.
And if Young’s approach says anything, it’s that Moodring aren’t chasing trends, they’re digging deeper into the ones that shaped them, then twisting them into something that fits now.
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