Consider the following, admittedly morbid, parlor game: If every prominent musician who died prematurely had lived to the present day, who would have the best discography? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there aren’t any easy answers. Would Jimi Hendrix have continued inventing new ways to play the electric guitar, or would he have settled into a comfortable career of middling, lucrative blues rock, the way Eric Clapton did? Would Kurt Cobain’s cynical songwriting genius have cut through the noise of the post-grunge yarl era, or would he currently be collaborating with Jelly Roll and Post Malone? Would Bon Scott have just sung on all the AC/DC albums that Brian Johnson ended up singing on, most of which are utterly forgettable? There are no guarantees, least of all when it comes to musicians aging gracefully.

Limit the list of names to just metal and the game gets really interesting. Cliff Burton is often thought of as the true metal heartbeat of early Metallica, but we don’t know that he wouldn’t have gladly followed his bandmates down their post-Black Album alt-rock pipeline. Euronymous was murdered shortly after recording the immortal De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, but Mayhem became a weirder, more fascinating band after his death, and his hardline stance on true black metal might not have permitted some of their bolder experiments. I don’t know anyone who believes Randy Rhoads would have saved Ozzy Osbourne from his years in the self-parodic wilderness. But there is one person who I truly, deeply believe would have notched a dozen more masterpieces by now had they lived, and that’s Chuck Schuldiner.

Schuldiner died in 2001, at the age of 34, following a two-year battle with brain cancer. He masterminded just eight albums during his 20-year career — seven with Death and one with Control Denied. Each one, to some degree, redefined metal and changed the course of the genre’s history. 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore codified death metal as a recognizable, identifiable genre. 1988’s Leprosy made it heavier. 1990’s Spiritual Healing transformed it into a viable arena to discuss social issues. 1991’s Human, the biggest leap Death ever made from one album to the next, invented a vocabulary for progressive death metal, a term that would have sounded like an oxymoron just a year earlier. The final three Death albums – Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic, and The Sound Of Perseverance – would find Schuldiner pushing his prog ambitions as far as he thought this band could take them, which led him to launch Control Denied, his frequently misunderstood but cultishly beloved power metal band. Two years after the release of Control Denied’s The Fragile Art Of Existence, Schuldiner was dead, and metal was entering its worst-ever commercial doldrums.

We’ll never know what kind of music Schuldiner would be making today, but thanks to a cottage industry of Death tributes, many including former members of the band, the music he made while he was alive will never die. Death has become more like a classical composer whose works are regularly revived and reinterpreted than a typical metal band. If you like Death’s prog years, you can go see Death To All, led by bassist Steve DiGiorgio (Human, Individual Thought Patterns) and Bobby Koelble (Symbolic). If you’re more partial to the early stuff, there’s Left To Die, featuring Rick Rozz (Leprosy) and Terry Butler (Spiritual Healing). And if you’re interested in hearing new songs written in the style of Death, you can work your way through the discography of Gruesome, the band fronted by Exhumed’s Matt Harvey.

Harvey started Exhumed in San Jose in 1990, when he was 14 years old. Coincidentally, that was the same year he met Chuck Schuldiner for the first and only time. Harvey had sharpened his guitar chops by playing along to the first couple of Death albums, but Exhumed was a more pluralistic blend of his death metal and grindcore influences — early Death, yes, but also Autopsy, Carcass, Repulsion, Impetigo, Terrorizer, and more. As Exhumed became underground legends, releasing classic albums like Gore Metal and All Guts, No Glory, Harvey became prominent enough to be called upon to do vocals for Death To All when they started doing shows, in 2012. Those dates led to the start of Left To Die and Gruesome, both of which Harvey still plays in.

Gruesome’s first album, 2015’s Savage Land, was done almost as a dare. Flanked by a crack lineup rounded out by Derkéta and Castrator bassist Robin Mazen, Possessed guitarist Dan Gonzalez, and ex-Malevolent Creation drummer Gus Rios, Harvey’s intent was to create a direct homage to Scream Bloody Gore and Leprosy so accurate it would sound like a trove of lost Death songs. When Savage Land found an unexpected audience, Gruesome took on the challenge of working their way through the Death discography, paying tribute to Spiritual Healing for 2018’s Twisted Prayers, and now, to Human for Silent Echoes. The quantum leap that Death made in 1991 had to be replicated, making Silent Echoes the most demanding Gruesome release yet. Matt Harvey is one of my favorite metal artists to shoot the shit with on Zoom, so I was happy to have a long chat with him about Exhumed, Silent Echoes, playing alongside Rick Rozz and Terry Butler, and his surprising side gig of keeping Chuck Schuldiner’s legacy alive. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

When did you first hear Death? Were you onboard right from Scream Bloody Gore?

MATT HARVEY: I did hear Scream Bloody Gore first, but it would have been 1988 when I heard it. I would have been either 12 or 13, and when I first heard Scream Bloody Gore, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I liked [Sodom’s] Persecution Mania, and maybe [Kreator’s] Pleasure To Kill and stuff like that. But when I heard Scream Bloody Gore, I was like, “Huh! I don’t know what’s going on here.” I remember that and Under The [Sign Of The] Black Mark by Bathory, two of my favorite records that I got around the same time, and I was kind of just scratching my head.

And then at some point, either in late 1988 or early 1989, a friend of a friend, we went to see his hockey game. We’re all 13, 14, whatever. I was on the younger side of my friend group. He had Leprosy, and I remember being in the locker room, and he passed around the Walkman. and I heard Leprosy. And I was like, “Okay!” Because you can just hear it better. And then it just sort of clicked. So my next week’s allowance, I went and got that tape, and then I went back to Scream Bloody Gore, and I was like, “Okay, I get it now. It’s all making sense, cool.” Scream Bloody Gore, specifically, was one of the records that I spent a lot of time playing along with as a kid. It started with [Metallica’s] Kill ‘Em All, then [Celtic Frost’s] Morbid Tales, and then Scream Bloody Gore. And once I had a handle on that a little bit, then I started playing with Leprosy. And then by the time 1990 rolled around, I was fucking chomping at the bit for Spiritual Healing. That came out in February — it was early, because they were already on tour in March, and I had been listening to the record daily.

Was that when you met Chuck? Early ’90?

HARVEY: I met him when they came back in October. The March show, I remember, was in Oakland. I’m from San Jose. I lived a very sort of suburban upbringing, and my dad took me and the original Exhumed drummer, Col Jones, to the show in Oakland. And he had a buddy that lived not too far away, so he just went to hang out with him for a while, and he was like, “Look, I’m gonna be in the parking lot at midnight, and if you guys aren’t there, I’m gonna fucking leave your ass in Oakland.” And my dad, I mean, he probably wouldn’t have, but I can’t say for certain. “Living Monstrosity” was the first song, and I can’t remember what the second song was, because we had to leave like halfway through it. It was 11:50, and Death hadn’t started, and I was like, “I can’t leave yet!” So yeah, I barely saw Death. But then, when they came back in October, I saw the whole gig with Pestilence and Carcass. And that was a game-changer.

So you hear Spiritual Healing in 1990, and you get it. When Human comes out the next year, that’s their first big step to another thing. Did you get that record right away?

HARVEY: No, I hated it! [laughs] Because by ’91, even by October ’90, we were already knee-deep in Napalm Death and Carcass and Entombed, and the Carnage/Cadaver split, and we were hearing Extreme Noise Terror and Axegrinder and stuff. And so, to me, I was going more underground. This is, again, the thoughts of a 15-year-old. But to my 15-year-old mind, in 1991, Death was trying to go more mainstream and wimpier. I mean, even just the logo change I was horrified by. I was disgusted. So honestly, I didn’t even listen. I just decided I hated it, and I didn’t even listen to it. And then a few years go by, and I saw them. I don’t know if it was a Human tour or Individual [Thought Patterns], but I saw them at some point with Sacrifice. And I remember begrudgingly being like, “OK, some of these songs actually sound like they’re probably pretty good.” You know, because I was just like, “I just want to hear ‘Zombie Ritual’!” And then, when I finally came around to the Human record, I was like, “Oh, shit! This is fucking killer.” It was just a shifting time. Death was sort of the first band that shifted their sound fundamentally. And then in the next couple of years, Entombed did the same, although in a different direction. Carcass did the same, in a different direction. Napalm [Death], the same thing. And so I kind of felt like all my favorite bands were like abandoning me, because I was just like, “I just want to hear the heaviest, most brutal thing.”

You were doing Exhumed by then. Was that also the philosophy behind Exhumed?

HARVEY: Absolutely. It was like a constant friendly competition. You’d get together with your friends: “Have you heard this Xysma 7-inch? Oh, shit!” “Have you heard this Necrony demo?” Have you heard this? Have you heard that? It was always finding something more brutal and heavier. And also, death metal by that point had evolved to a point of popularity where, a lot of these guys in 1990 were thrash guys. They’re now into death metal, but they only bought the stuff that was on Roadrunner, or you could buy at the mall. So that was like, “No, keep it away!” You gotta keep in mind, these are the thoughts of a 16-year-old kid.

Yeah. It’s funny to think about how collapsed the timelines are, because ’87 to ’91 is only four years. Four years now was 2021, and that was yesterday, right?

HARVEY: That’s the thing, too. I think about that a lot as I continue to get older. It’s such a compressed time period. But it just seemed like forever. I mean, waiting a year for a new album was torturous. I remember, after the first Immolation album, we waited so long for the next one that I just gave up. I was like, “It’s just never coming.” It took four years or something. It was just a different world. The climate was different. The experience of buying music was different. My age was radically different, and my attitude towards death metal was a lot different. It wasn’t until ’94, ’95, when there was no more new death metal that was really getting any press or attention, that I sort of realized, “I guess I’m going to have to start listening to other stuff, because there’s not a brutal death metal album coming out every month now.” And I started going back, and Human was one of those records that I rediscovered, and was like, “Oh, fuck! This is actually really good.” And listening to it today, I mean, it’s so clearly in the realm of old-school death metal. It’s charming, I guess, is the most generous assessment I can give to my reaction to it at the time. That was always a big fear, though, because it’s like, first I heard [Slayer’s] Reign In Blood, and then I got South Of Heaven. I was like, “Oh, it’s way slower.”

Yeah, right? The first riff. I mean, it picks up.

HARVEY: Right. And then I remember Celtic Frost got on MTV, and I was like, “Oh my God! Celtic Frost is going to be on MTV!” And then I saw “Cherry Orchards,” and I was like…

Yikes.

HARVEY: It was a big sort of thing in the zeitgeist. Metallica didn’t really bother me, because by the time that happened, I didn’t really care about Metallica anyway. But I know a lot of people, that really upset them. That was just sort of in the zeitgeist, and that’s where my head was at. And you know, I missed out on a lot of good records.

But I don’t think you’re the only one, by a long stretch. It kind of took some balls for Chuck to be like, “OK, people like me for this one thing. Let me do something that’s going to piss off a huge portion of them.”

HARVEY: Yeah, it’s interesting, because playing with Terry and Rick in Left To Die, obviously, it comes up. We’re out there playing Death songs every day, so things will come up. And just hearing some of their recollections, especially Terry was talking about, even by the Spiritual Healing tour, Chuck was like, “God, I’m just tired of growling and screaming. This is kind of immature. How do I do something that is more in line with what I listen to and what I want to do?” And obviously, that’s a very different mindset from the guy in 1987, trying to make the most brutal, heaviest, extreme thing. It’s kind of like, when you start at the end, even if it’s just your perception of the end – obviously there’s heavier, more extreme records than Scream Bloody Gore – then where do you go? You’re kind of in a corner, and you have to figure your own way out of it. I mean, it’s the same thing you see with a lot of bands. Carcass is sort of the most obvious one. Death and Carcass, every album is almost like a mini-genre in and of itself. Or you just do like Repulsion, and you just make the one record and stop. “Well, it’s only going to get wimpier, so we better stop.”

And no one’s mad. They’ll still go play it, and you’re like, “Man. Great album!”

HARVEY: [laughs] Right. A lot of what Chuck was doing in the early days is trying to escape the feeling of being pigeonholed and being directed. Even some of his terrible business decisions, like canceling tours halfway through, you can just see a young guy trying to exert some sort of control over his own life. And obviously, Control Denied—there’s a theme here, and that’s sort of what he did. Each record, with that sort of forced evolution, is part of that. He’s asserting, “No, it’s my music. I’m in charge here.” Also, by ’91, some of the things that made Death stand out in ’87, ’88 were pretty commonplace. You could go to any mall and get a Morbid Angel record, get an Obituary record, get a Death record, get a Carcass record, get a Bolt Thrower record. So it wasn’t enough to just to be brutal and growl. As people were catching up to where he was, he was like, “Well, then I’m going to go somewhere else.” And obviously Paul [Masvidal], Sean [Reinert], and Steve [DiGiorgio] really enabled Chuck to take a bigger leap. Even though every record is a big leap, I think Human is an even bigger leap.

Yeah, for sure. I want to get to the Gruesome stuff more specifically in a second, but I want to ask you about Gore Metal-era Exhumed. Gruesome explicitly is a tribute, is an homage. Exhumed is obviously not. But you were still synthesizing those influences of those bands, like Autopsy and Carcass and Repulsion, who you worshipped back then. Do you think about that as a totally different thing? Were you making a conscious effort to replicate specific things you liked from those bands?

HARVEY: It wasn’t as specific as with Gruesome. I’ve always approached the music that I make from a fan standpoint. I’ve never thought of myself as, “I’m so incredibly brilliant that I have my own ideas, and they just came out of fucking nowhere.” I don’t believe in that, and that’s just not my personality. That feels like a self-reinforcing delusion. So Exhumed was just like, “Well, we like Carcass. We like Autopsy. We like Impetigo. We like early Death. We like Cryptic Slaughter. We like Final Conflict. We like Razor, Sodom, whatever. You just throw it all in a pot, smush it together, and then this is this is us.”

And the thing is, especially in ’98, it was not in vogue to be influenced by any of that. We used to go and play shows, and people would be like, “Oh, that’s such a funny ironic Destruction shirt!” I was like, “What’s ironic about Destruction? It’s fucking awesome.” But it was just completely out of fashion at that time, and our thing was to be like, “Well, we’re playing something that is totally uncool. We’re not philosophical racists like all these fucking black metal whiners. We’re not going to like dress up in a fucking cape. We’re not going to put synthesizers and sing about trees and shit. We’re going to just go as far opposite as we possibly can, and that’s going to be our thing.” It’s like, nobody likes death metal and grindcore anymore? Perfect. We’re going to do that. Nobody likes thrash, at all? Perfect. Let’s put some of that in there. I think that that was the whole synthesis. And because that music was so out of fashion, doing stuff that was directly calling back to it felt less like a lack of originality and more just a “fuck you” to the labels that wouldn’t sign us, the journalists that slagged us off, the people that wouldn’t book us. We’re just like, “OK, fuck off then.” That was our thing.

There’s a couple of generations of death metal kids who came up behind you, who are really inspired by Exhumed. How do you process that?

HARVEY: I mean, I think it’s cool. At the end of the day, you’re just trying to make the best record that you know how to make. When Iron Maiden was fucking making Killers, you think they thought, “We’re going to change the world”? They were just like, “Fuck, hopefully EMI doesn’t drop us, and we can make a good record. We worked really hard on these songs.” Same thing when Metallica’s making Ride The Lightning. “We got a big shot here, guys. Let’s not blow it. Let’s try and make a good record.” And that’s all you can really do. That’s what everybody does. Everybody just goes in like, “Hey, I think these songs are pretty good. Hopefully things are right to give it legs.” Because a lot of the things that give a record legs have nothing to do with the quality of music. It has to do with the label and the marketing and the things behind it, and what the audience at the time is interested in. I mean, you look at when Demilich’s Nespithe came out. Nobody paid attention to it. I mean, I liked it, but I was an underground dork who was like, “I’ve heard of a band you haven’t heard of!” But nobody heard it. And it’s objectively amazing, and now it’s seen as a classic, which is correct. But at the time, nobody paid attention to it. And so there’s all these things that are out of your direct control that contribute to music making an impact, or lasting, or any of that stuff. All you can worry about is just making the music the best you know how to do it.

People will catch up if it’s good.

HARVEY: Yeah, hopefully.

Hopefully. Let’s go to the start of Gruesome, 10 years ago. I’m guessing Savage Land didn’t feel too far out of your comfort zone. You’re pretty comfortable playing that particular era of Death.

HARVEY: Really, everything that we’ve done up until this record was super comfortable. As a kid, I should have been asking girls to high school dances, but instead, I was in my bedroom. So I knew those albums better than I know some of my own songs, because they were some of the formative things that I learned from learning to play guitar. First, I was trying to play Metallica songs, then Celtic Frost, and then Death. Those are the bands I spent the most time learning the material of, so it was just right there in my DNA. It wasn’t that we didn’t work hard on the records or try to make them good, or just crapped out whatever. But it was something that I felt like, “Oh, I’ve got a handle on this. I can do this.”

Did you know right away that you were going to work your way through the Death discography? Was that the idea from the beginning?

HARVEY: No. I didn’t know that there would be a second album. I always thought that the band was kind of a goof. Again, not that we didn’t work hard on the material to make it as good as possible, and we didn’t put time and attention into it. But I just thought, “I don’t see a place in the market for this idea.” It’s a band whose entire mission is to sound like another band. I think it’s weird that we’ve been able to find an audience. I think it’s great — I mean, it’s amazing. But I thought there would be a one and done. In a demonstration of how poor my judgment is, I remember telling my wife, “There’s this thing. There’s gonna be 20 people that love this record, two people that hate it, and maybe we’ll play a festival.” Because she was like, “Really? Another death metal band? This is what you need?” So I have to eat my hat on that one. I think Gus was the person who really saw the potential in what we were doing. And then, when it became clear we should make another record, then it was like, since each Death album is like a mini-genre, we should probably, for the sake of cohesion, and for the sake of making the project something that makes sense, we should just do it where each album is a companion piece to the source material.

So it was fan enthusiasm that made you decide to keep doing Gruesome? You realized people cared?

HARVEY: Yeah. And obviously, we were having fun, too. I just made an offhand comment to Gus the first night I met him that this would be a funny thing to do. I got bored, wrote a couple songs, sent them to him for a laugh, and then he actually made demos of them. He got Robin and Dan involved, who were both already friends. We enjoy hanging out, and people want us to play. So why shouldn’t we continue? People were asking us, “So what’s next? What are you going to do?”

The overarching concept is you’re paying tribute to Death. On a practical level, just how granular does that get? When you guys are talking through songs, are you talking about guitar tone, drum sound, tunings, everything that was on the original records, and then trying to actively pay homage to those aspects?

HARVEY: Yeah, it gets pretty detailed. Luckily, Chuck is always in D standard, so the tuning will never change. That’s kind of nice. I think the first album was fun, because we were like, “We should do it in this font, like on Scream Bloody Gore. We should do the logo like this, and get [cover artist] Ed Repka.” And then every subsequent album has become a little bit more research-intensive. The songwriting process, we don’t really get into that stuff. We just worry about does the song work, and are we happy with it. But then, when it comes time to record, and Jarrett Pritchard enters the picture, that’s when we get into the nitty-gritty. It’s gone as far as Jarett calling [Death producer] Scott Burns and being like, “Hey, what mic did you use on the snare drum? What kind of compressor did you use on the vocals? It sounds like this, is it that?” Really getting into the technical aspect.

And everything from the artwork to the layout, the fonts and typefaces that we use, it gets really detailed, because there’s a tremendous amount of respect and love for the source material, and also for the people that are fans of the source material. I think you can’t half-ass any of it, because then you’re opening yourself up to the criticism that I feared from the beginning of this band, which is that it becomes cheap, it becomes exploitative, it becomes cynical. And that’s the last thing I want, because for me it is a labor of love. Everything we do is done with a lot of respect for the source material, which is a weird thing, because, like I said, Exhumed, it’s kind of the opposite. We’re just like, “Fuck it,” and that’s kind of the fun. This is really on the other end of the spectrum, where there is a reverence for what we’re doing. And I think both emotions are important. You should value what came before, and the building blocks, but it’s also not healthy to get too trapped in that. And so that’s where you need that teenager, “This is all bullshit, fuck it.” But I’ve just sort of compartmentalized them.

Into two different bands, yeah.

HARVEY: Yeah. So it does get it gets very granular, and every record becomes more demanding in the details, because the records are more detailed.

It’s a bit of a trippy idea to be like, “OK, this is not a song that is on Human. But if it had existed in 1991, it probably would have made the cut.” You’re almost thinking, “This song needs to be good enough to be on Human without ripping off a song on Human.”

HARVEY: Right. And because I was so familiar with the first three Death records, I feel like our early material is a little bit more like, “Hey, you know this riff? It’s almost like that other one, because I know this other one like the back of my hand.” So all I gotta do is just play it backwards, or play it upside down, or change this around, or whatever. I feel like there’s a lot less of that on Silent Echoes. There’s fewer Easter eggs on the record, and I think that the record is stronger because of it. Because it’s easy to be excited about how clever one can be, and sometimes that that works against the material having conviction. I feel like this record feels like it has a little bit more conviction. And it’s certainly more ambitious.

Obviously, Sean Reinert was supposed to be involved, and he passed away before you really got into it. Did he get to hear anything before he died? I know “Fragments Of Psyche.”

HARVEY: Yeah, yeah, he definitely heard that one because we recorded it with him. That was a thing that I had written just for fun, and then Gus was like, “Hey, Sean will play on this track.” And I was like, “Oh, well, there’s no reason to hold this in reserve, then, because when Sean Reinert says he wants to play on your song, you say yes.” It was like, “Well, this goes out of sequence with what we’re doing.” And I was like, “Who gives a shit, man. Come on. Reinert wants to play on my track. Yeah, let’s do it.” He might have heard “Frailty.” It’s been around for a while. “Shards” has been around for a while. Half the record was written over five and a half years, and then the other half was written in four months. That’s the stuff that Sean certainly didn’t hear. Sean, I think, would have been a great sounding board, because he’s somebody whose opinion I respect, but he’s also not precious about his own work at all. He was like, “This is great, but why would you do this?” That was his whole response to Gruesome. He’s like, “You guys are idiots. Just make your own band.” I’m like, “Well, we have our own bands, but we’re doing this for fun!” “You have fun like that? All right. Knock yourself out, bud.”

I was going to ask about Sean’s performance on Human, and Paul’s, and Steve’s. It was not just Chuck stepping up. Everybody in Death, across the board, who came into the band at that time stepped up the virtuosity level. Did that drive you guys, in making this record, to step your game up in kind?

HARVEY: 100%. If you really want to get analytical, looking at Human, Chuck certainly made a step up, but he’s gone from being maybe not the best guitarist in the band on Spiritual Healing, but being the best musician in the band, to now, he is objectively the worst musician. Which, having been in similar situations, I’ll tell you that’s the best place to be. Because you’re going to be bringing material that’s going to get elevated by the people around you. You’re going to have endless opportunities to learn from these guys. And so some of the material on Human, if you put a Bill Andrews beat behind it, all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh, I’m back in Spiritual Healing. This isn’t so crazy.” Bill and Terry worked on early versions of “Together As One” and, I think, “Suicide Machine.” I don’t know if this is your idea of fun, but you can listen to those songs, and you can hear how they might sound. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine them with the Spiritual Healing lineup. So I think the role of those guys can’t be overstated in elevating the material.

So we really looked at how are we going to take these more meat and potatoes-y death metal riffs, and then elevate them by surrounding them with clever drumbeats, that are still musical and still serving a song. Because, Sean, as you know, he’s kind of a hotshot on the record, but he still plays very musically, and it’s not just like diarrhea of the fucking drum fill. Steve sometimes veers off into, “I don’t know what he’s doing over there, but it’s cool.” But he can kind of get away with it, with the way that the record’s mixed.

So we were like, how do we take these ideas behind these performances, and then incorporate them in a way that is going to elevate our material? It’s a good combo, because I’m much more of a meat and potatoes, death metal guy, and that’s my writing. And Dan is a super tech guy, so I would send stuff to him, and he would be like, “No, we need to spice this part up,” or “This is too much like something we’ve done before.” Robin’s never really been involved in the writing process, so Gus and Dan and I came to this record with different priorities. Dan wanted it to be technical. I wanted it to be still heavy and brutal, and Gus wanted it to be listenable and catchy, and to be something that was clearly servicing other Death fans. And so somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram of those three priorities is the sweet spot, and it was necessary to do more elaborate bass lines, to do more elaborate drum lines, to have more harmonized guitars and diverging guitar lines and stuff. Hopefully we didn’t go too far off the rails with getting too technical. But it was a real challenge.

No, I think it worked. I think that balance that you’re talking about came through. You brought it up a little bit earlier, but the Left to Die lineup, you’re actually getting to play with guys who played in the band. You have these two selves. There’s the guy who’s writing songs that kind of sound like Death. But then you’re playing Death songs, with members that played on them. Do you conceptualize your role there differently? Are you trying to subsume the Matt Harvey of it, and play as Chuck more?

HARVEY: Really, I feel like I’m more subsumed doing the Gruesome stuff, because there’s songwriting choices and arrangement choices that I wouldn’t make. I’m literally coming at a project thinking of in terms of how somebody else would do it. It’s not that common in rock and metal, but it’s more like when you’re doing a film score, and there’s all this temp music there.

Star Wars is the obvious example, because we know the most about the making of Star Wars, because it’s such a big thing. But there’s a Dvorak piece that [John] Williams reworked into the “Force Theme” and then used it. And you can hear in the beginning, when clearly the temp music was “Kings Row” by Korngold, and Williams worked off that. So it’s more of like an academic thing. Whereas with Left To Die, you know, I don’t want to play a [B.C. Rich] Stealth. I don’t want to dye my hair black and wear a fucking black tank top. I don’t want to do a cosplay Chuck, because that’s just not what I want to do. It’s not something I feel comfortable with. So to me, it’s kind of like I’m in a cover band, but it’s not really a cover band, because Rick and Terry were there, and it’s also not really a cover band because I’m just myself onstage, in the way that I perform and the way I interact with the crowd. Chuck was many things. I don’t think anybody would say he was the greatest frontman, or the most energizing emcee at the gigs. He clearly is a guy who’s like, “I’m a guitar player, and also, I have to talk to the crowd, and that’s not really what I relish.” So I just approach it as myself. But I sing in a different range, and I try to play Chuck solos, you know, pretty close. It’s just super fun to me. It’s the same feeling I had when I was 14, playing in the garage with my buddies. We used to play “Sacrificial” and “Regurgitated Guts” and all that stuff. It’s just now I’m playing with Rick and Terry and Gus, and in front of people, and they pay me for it. It’s pretty good.

I’ve always felt that if somebody passes, and there’s still people who are on those records who want to play stuff from those records, by all means, they should be out there playing it. So if Rick and Terry are excited about it, then I think that’s great.

HARVEY: Yeah, and that’s kind of the barometer that I use. If they’re okay with it, and the people that come to the gigs are happy, then it’s cool. They know I’m not Chuck. I know I’m not Chuck. But we’re just there to play the songs and have a good time. It’s also something I never set out to do. If Rick and Terry say, “Hey, do you want to come do these songs with us?” You say yes. That’s just the right answer. I don’t want my whole career to be about, “I’m a big Death fan.” I am a big Death fan, but I also have my own bands and my own projects and my own stuff that has nothing to do with this. And I think that’s why I feel comfortable doing it. Because if this was all I was doing, I think I’d be a little bit frustrated. On one hand, it feels like a side hustle, but I don’t want to portray it that way, because I do work really hard at it, and take it really seriously.

Do you have any relationship with the guys who do Death To All?

HARVEY: Sure, yeah. We know all those guys.

You’re playing different songs, from different eras, with different guys who were in the band at different times. What’s the relationship between Left To Die and Death To All?

HARVEY: There’s nothing but love. Certainly, those guys are incredible players. I mean, Bobby [Koelble] is one of the best guitar players I’ve ever personally met. There’s him and Dan Mongrain, and a couple other people that I just think of like, “Jesus Christ…” There’s a lot of guys where I’m like, “That guy’s better than me, but I get it.” And then there’s guys like them. And they’re all lovely guys. I think that they do a great job. I did the first nine Death To All shows, when it was kind of just like a mishmash of stuff. And then Gus was out with Death To All, teching for Sean. That’s actually how we met. Exhumed played with Death To All, and we were like, “It’d be really cool if there was a Death To All that had Rick and Terry and Chris Reifert and James Murphy, and focused more on the early stuff.” We had that conversation, and I said, “If that doesn’t come together, you and I will make our own Death band, and that’ll be hilarious.” And that’s how Gruesome started.

Crazy.

HARVEY: Without Death To All, there would be no Gruesome. At the end of the day, I think Chuck has created a pretty big sandbox, musically, and there’s plenty of room for everybody to play in the sandbox and have a good time. Left To Die is something really specific that I think is well-served by being very separate from what DTA is doing. And that’s one of the things that we talked about in the very beginning, because we are friends of all those guys, and we love what they’re doing. I hope that they keep doing it for as long as they want to, and as long as people want them to. We were like, let’s make it very clear this is something totally apart. We have our lane, we’re good here, and then Gruesome has just evolved into its own weird thing. I was never in Death, you know. I met Chuck for five minutes when I was 14. Yet here I am, and I’m happy to be here, and I’ve got nothing but respect for all the guys that made this legacy that I’m somehow now goofing around in.

TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK

JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND

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