Neurosis has shared how the band recruited Sumac and ISIS frontman Aaron Turner in an all-new interview with Bandcamp.
It’s been a week since Neurosis announced their long-awaited return by surprise dropping their twelfth studio album, An Undying Love For A Burning World.
Along with the news of their return, the band also announced that SUMAC and ISIS vocalist and guitarist, Aaron Turner has taken over frontman duties, following the ousting of the group’s former vocalist, Scott Kelly.
It’s a pairing that sounded destined to happen, and after listening to the album, there’s no denying the new material is as excellent as previous outings from the group.
Now, the band have sat down in a new Interview with Bandcamp to talk about the making of the new album, and how they recruited Turner into band.
“We were thinking about how we could reinvent ourselves with the same energy that we reinvented ourselves with when I first joined,” shared guitarist and vocalist Steve Von Till. ” But we’re no longer young men. What kind of puzzles could we put in front of us to create that level of reinvention when time doesn’t move the same way it used to? It came down to finding the right energy.”
“Honestly, the only hesitation about Aaron at first was that it seemed so obvious. And we weren’t convinced that he wasn’t too busy with his own work to just want to drop everything and join our dysfunctional old man band.”
Turner would then recount his thought process upon receiving the call to join the group.
“It’s not like Steve and I had never spoken, and he all of a sudden asked me to join. Our paths became interwoven a long time ago. Numerous projects of mine released stuff on [Neurosis’s label] Neurot. I did some artwork for Neurosis. Neurosis took my old band [ISIS] on tour. I don’t know if Steve remembers this, but in the early 2000s, he proposed that I come up to the Bay Area and do some stuff with him and one of the guys from Enablers.”
“This is a relationship of community where everybody is doing stuff with each other constantly, and there are always ideas flowing back and forth. In that way, it wasn’t surprising to me. I’d had an open dialogue with Steve for many years. At the same time, it was definitely a what-the-fuck moment for me because this is a band that I had been deeply influenced by in many ways, both musically and ideologically.”
Von Till further clarified that they were always looking for a collaborator who could bounce off the other members in the band.
“We’ve always been a collective, and we need the energy. As much as people may think they understand what happens behind the scenes in certain bands, Neurosis has always been collaborative. This album being a reinvention, we didn’t want the same old shit. We wanted somebody to come up with new ideas and a fresh approach – to make not only the old stuff their own, but to bring new stuff.”
“All ‘Neur-Isis’ jokes aside, it’s really been what Aaron has done with SUMAC, the really unhinged sonic dynamics and mastery of raw emotion, and his unique approach to guitar, that we felt was really going to click with our energy.”
Neurosis is set to play their first concert in seven years, as well as their first show with Turner at Fire in the Mountains, which will be taking place in Blackfeet Nation, Montana in June.
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