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I recently shared a delightful series of e-mails with members of the Bostonian stoney metal quartet The Proselyte. This interview is a highly personal look into the lives of these four mega furious musicians:

So being that you’re located in Boston what would you say are some of the best facets your city has to offer to you as a self proclaimed “post-grunge” band?

“post grunge” was something we were described as by a kid at a show.  We all liked it.  There’s a strange obsession with various eras of music from the pacific northwest within our camp so we let it stick.  Albums like Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff really helped me decide what a guitar should sound like.  In Boston I’d say we benefit from the presence of an enormous quantity of talented heavy bands, and that’s not a recent development either.

Hah! Looks like you’ve pioneered your own last.fm tag. What heavy bands would you say are the most pivotal to the scene in Boston today?

That totally depends on one’s definition of pivotal.  What’s pivotal to me in the local bands I admire is that they are making something new.  I’m into locals like Western Syndrome, Furnace, Razormaze, Ramming Speed, Finisher, Lunglust, and Riff Cannon, as well as the staples like Converge, Cave In and Jonah Jenkins is doing some really cool stuff with Rawradarwar.

That’s quite the diverse list. I recently noticed that you guys entitled your newest release Sunshine. What’s the significance behind the title? Is it the cause of death for the flies stuck to that 400 year old fly paper on the cover?

After shows, folks would mention that they dug the accapella part in the song “Slaw”, which is where the album title is taken from.  That just always stuck in my mind. Plus, the subject matter of most of the songs is fairly dark. So we figured, juxtapositioning and all that, name the album Sunshine. Oooooo irony.

Literary devices in metal, just how I like it! Going on lyrical content are their any major influences, either lyrical or literary, that your content stems from or is it mostly stoned introspection?

Definitely a great deal of literary influences.  This was the first time we all sat down with many of the instrumental demos and wrote as a band.  It ended up a convergence of everything we had been reading and reading about.  Stuff like Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, books about whaling. Really whatever had been on our coffee tables at the time.

Would any of you consider yourselves professional whalers? If not, what types of recreation to you all enjoy? Smoking pot and watching Jerry Springer counts as recreation.

No whalers unfortunately.  All of us really enjoy cooking.  In fact on tour we often cook for the folks that put us up.  Brad has always been the tech guy in the camp.  He fixes everything for me and the majority of my pedals are his creations.  Smoking pot is definitely up there as well.  Haha!

Now that you’ve mentioned food you’ve got me wondering. What is the signature Proselyte dish? Also, if you guys were to have a burger at Kuma’s Corner what would it consist of?

A signature dish would be hard to pull off.  We’ve got Brad who is a veggie and Mitch who won’t eat anything but lean rare meat and protein shakes.  I guess if we were to have a burger made in our honor it would be a veggie burger with a regular burger on top of it.  Alec would like rice and beans while I would like lots of fried things.  We would then have to pick off what we don’t like.

All of that sounds delectable. I’m out of questions, so is there anything else you’d like published with the interview? A declaration of war perhaps?

We are preparing a split 7″ with Flyingsnakes and will hopefully be hitting the road with them late spring.

Click here to check out The Proselyte on Facebook.

Click here to hear/download the Sunshine LP on Bandcamp.

- Jared Oates Haggard