While, in these days of instant social media reaction, a lot of bands almost feel media-trained during interview, one of the great things about talking with Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne is that it always feels entirely natural. Hit the right chord and he’ll happily wax lyrical about whatever topic you place in front of him. Hit a bum note, and he’ll like leave it hanging there until you come back with something better.
He’s also incredibly gracious, asking about where we are in the world and what we do before digging into the interview, which makes for a far more authentic and interesting discussion than simply throwing questions and answers at one another.
At any event, I find myself sat at my computer on a hot, sultry evening, to discuss the amazing Thunderball – the third record to be released under the Melvins 1983 banner and a blisteringly intense, five-track album that finds Melvins at their brutal best.
Hey!
Hey, how are you?
I’m great thank you, how are you doing?
I’m doing OK.
Thank you so much for taking the time to check in today, I do appreciate it.
Sure, where are you?
I’m in Leicester.
Whereabouts in England is that?
About an hour-and-a-half north of London.
OK, so London area.
Close enough, yes!
You’re closer to, where would it be, Birmingham.
Yeah, that’s closer. We’re in the heart of the Midlands. You’re coming this way very soon – you have a handful of dates still to go with the wonderful Red Kross…
Well, they’re one of our favourites and I’ve liked Red Kross since the early 80s, probably. They’re great! They’re a great band, it’s great to have Steven in our band, we’ve toured with him in Europe before, so we’re very excited about it. Then, when we get done with that tour, we’re doing a big tour in the US – six more weeks with Red Kross in the US. Then we’re done for the year and that will have been 116 shows!
You never seem to stop – it’s amazing.
Well, we’ve just had a month off, so… We did 52 shows with Napalm Death here in the US – a big US tour. And we did six on our own before that. That was a European tour. Then the tour we’re going to do with Red Kross will be about 116 shows in 2025.
The Napalm Death tour sounded so cool They’re a wonderful band and you obviously have a great history with them as well.
Oh, it was really, really fun. We’ve got a record with them that came out – it was a compilation – a true collaboration we did with them. It came out during the tour. I think Ipecac is going to put that out as well, but not until next year.
They’re one of those bands who are really interesting, and they have a much more diverse sound palette than they get credit for.
I think they’re not a metal band. They’re something else. A weird conglomeration of people and a strange conglomeration of sound.
It is strange that they get lumped in with metal – they straddle a lot more and Shane, of course, has all the electronic stuff going off as well.
He’s great. We’ve been big fans of, and friends with, those guys for a long time. So, we’re excited about it. It was really fun to do. I think we might like to do something like that with them in Europe, but I don’t know when.
That would be really wonderful.
Yeah, we had a great time with them.
When I was reading around this album – Thunderball – it was really cool to read that, when you connected with Mike, back when you were at school, it was over music and you talked about how you used to send off for record based on how they look; and I remember doing something very, very similar in those pre-internet days where you didn’t get to “try before you buy”.
Did you learn your lesson on that one?
I don’t think I ever got anything bad.
You never got burned?
No! And you?
[Laughs] Ummmmmmm! Not that I can remember. I was pretty good at figuring that kind of thing out form the way that the bands looked. A couple of times I had a little trouble with like, Gang of Four where I was like “Oh, they don’t look like they sound!” After I heard them, I was in love with it. Or there were some other bands. The Jam didn’t exactly look like weirdos! [Laughs] I love that stuff as well.
But it was easy for me to buy Sex Pistols records or The Clash or something like that, back in ’77 / ’78 because of how they looked. They looked so different to anything else.
I’ve always enjoyed that – there was the anticipation as well and, of course, I had to ask my mum to write a cheque for me as well, because there was no way to pay otherwise…
That’s what I did!
And then it was the wait… sometimes 6 – 8 weeks for this parcel to come.
How old are you?
44.
Yeah, that was the way it was when I was a kid. There was no overnight delivery. You waited, and waited, and waited. So, yeah, people now have no idea about that.
I still do find myself – less so – but, because I prefer to go to physical stores, I still buy records that have amazing artwork, even though I’ve never heard the artist.
No, I don’t buy vinyl. If I want music, I buy CDs of it – it’s a better thing. But I rarely ever go to record stores at this point because record stores kind of give me a headache. So do musical instrument stores! They give me a headache [laughs]. But I’m kind of around it too much. But I still – it’s not hurt my ability to enjoy music by any means. You know. But record stores, oh god! I’d much rather spend time in an antiquarian bookstore.
Well, we have a couple of those in Leicester – you’ll have to add it to your itinerary.
Exactly! There’s one in Brighton, where we’re playing. I can’t remember the name of it, but I know where it is.
There’s so much cool stuff in Brighton. It’s like a strange little alternative universe. It’s full of emporiums, which is fun.
Oh, it’s wonderful – the last time I was there, I found a bread shop that was amazing too.
Obviously, Thunderball is the third album you’ve done as Melvins 1983. With this one it’s just you and Mike so, how did you arrange the tracking of this one?
Um, I did the demos, so we knew what it would sound like. He came down, we tracked half the record in one day with scratch tracks. And then, the next day, I did all of the overdubs for those songs. I mean all of them. All the bass, the guitar, the vocals. And then added in the Void Manes and In Maîtres stuff, added that in. And then the next day, we tracked the second half of the record on drums with scratch track guitars. And then, I spent the rest of that day doing all the guitar and vocals and adding in all the noise stuff from those two guys, and by the second day we had the record done.
Then we mixed it!
Wow!
When I’m doing all of it myself except for the drums, I don’t have to teach anybody anything. So, it was really easy to do.
It’s one of those records that you would swear was recorded live – the dynamic between the two of you, it really feels like you were in the same room throughout.
Well, the drums are tracked live and then I just redid the guitars, so it definitely was live. I just redid the backing tracks.
The last one you did was Working with God, I think. It feels like this one is a little more psychedelic – a little harder edged.
Um, maybe. I guess I wasn’t really thinking that. I just wanted to do something that was, like I’ve said, bombastic. But it wasn’t a conscious effort to take out the Beach Boys elements or anything, that’s for sure. The playful side, it’s all just as important as anything else.
The electronic elements are really interesting as well, because it gives the album a really different flow…
Yeah, I love it. I’m a big fan of that kind of stuff anyway, so it was great to work with those guys. I’ve wanted to do stuff with them for a long time and they’re both super talented. They sent me a huge amount of stuff, both of them, and I stuck it on the record where I thought it would work.
Is it something, do you think, that you’ll explore a bit more because obviously you did your solo album, a few years ago, which was acoustic guitar and synths – which is really unusual. Do you want to go down this path a little more?
I might do. That record had stand-up bass guitar on it too. It was stand-up bass, acoustic, and noise. I don’t think anyone’s really made a record like that. Not to my knowledge. But I think I’d like to do something else like that, I just don’t know exactly what.
It’s not necessarily the most obvious connection…
No…
Electronic music and Melvins, because you always feel so organic… but then synths are so much fun and, especially analogue synths, you can really make them sound broken and interesting.
Yeah. I’m a big fan of that stuff. I’m a big fan of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse. A bunch of bands of that nature. I’m not afraid of it. Not in the least.
Is it something that adds to the challenge of playing live, or is that not a side you’d think about form a stage perspective?
No, live we do a lot of noisy stuff… we just do it with guitars and drums and bass!
And, on this tour, you’ve got two drummers?
Yep! That is true.
It’s rare that you see bands with two drums. There’s something about it that really opens up the sound.
Yeah, I mean that it’s a treat. It’s one of my favourite things to do. Having two drummers adds a lot and you can do a lot more dynamically than you could without it. We’re in the process now of dreaming up a new album with two drummers. We’ve done three in the past – four, I think – yeah, four. And a live album. So, maybe it’s time to do a new live album… it’s definitely time to do a new double drummer album, yeah.
It needs to be filmed – there’s something about seeing two drummers hammering away at the back there, it’s really exciting to see from an audience perspective.
I think so. It adds a lot, so I’m super excited about it.
It feels like Melvins – you’ve always been prolific, but it feels like the last few years you’ve been super-prolific and always with slightly different line ups, right?
Not completely always. But yeah, definitely the last ten years we’ve done a lot of different kinds of things. But I’m not afraid of that. It’s OK. And who knows what the future holds? There are a lot of things I’d like to try; we just have to figure out what those are! [Laughs]
I think one of the things that you do is that you’re always writing and then storing things and pulling them back out from the cassette archives and hard drives at the right time – so, I guess your bank of material is always growing and evolving.
Yeah, no doubt about it. The songs come from lots of different eras, all the time.
From that perspective, when you’re collaborating with different musicians, do you ever change your approach, or is it just that there’s a change in the interpretation of your writing?
Yeah, that’s more correct. I don’t really change the way I write songs. There’s really only one way I can do it; well, there are a couple of different ways, but it all involves wading through a lot of garbage to try to find the good stuff.
One of the nice things about having archives like that is that you find stuff that you previously wrote off and then, with just a little tweak, it becomes something really interesting.
That’s how it always works. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire career. There are songs… sometimes you get about halfway through and you just don’t know what else to do with it. And it can sit there for years before you finally figure out what you need to do. Or I can’t figure out an arrangement – that always happens. Then, you go back through it. If you revisit it enough times and, especially, if enough time has passed, things will pop up, no doubt about it.
But I haven’t figured out a way to do it any faster. There’s no way for me to hurry up the process, I’ve never been able to do that – so. I don’t know!
I’m kind of in awe at how quickly you work. It’s so easy to get bogged down in minutiae and end up tweaking something that only you can hear.
Um, yeah – sometimes that happens. Sometimes nothing ever happens, it just dies in the line. It’s how it goes. I mean, I don’t know! I don’t have an answer for that. It’s just… part of the process is knowing when it’s done – knowing when you have something good, but sometimes it’s difficult when you’re that close to it.
I remember speaking to someone about this and they said, “sometimes you just have to have a punk rock perspective and let other people get on with it at that point”.
Yeah, I mean that can happen, I’ve done it so many times. I mean I’ve written and recorded hundreds of songs and there’s not one set way of doing it other than you just have to slog through, you know.
When it comes to finishing the album – you’ve got Toshi, whom you’ve worked with for a long time. Do you shuffle everything over to him and leave him to it, or do you have a sketch mix that gives an idea of what you’re aiming for?
If I sit there and listen to a snare drum or a bass drum for too long, it all just ends up sounding bad to me. So, the best thing to do is let him get some semblance of a drum mix, and then listen to that, and then do a rough mix of everything. So, what I’ll have him do, prior to mixing, is we get down to the day’s recording, I’ll get him to make a rough mix of everything. So, what I want him to rough mix is… I Want to hear everything that we recorded, so it’s almost don’t worry about the mix, I just want to hear everything.
And then, every single thing has been tracked, so I’ll listen to that for the night. I’ll take it home, maybe listen in the car on the way home, I’ll listen to it in the morning and then I’ll go back to the studio and, if the world is in the right place and all the planets are aligned, I’ll be brimming with ideas, when I walk through the door in the morning, of how I want to do it.
And then, when we do start mixing it, then I’ll have him mix it and, if he’s not done it on that day, I’ll have him rough mix it, I’ll listen to it and maybe give him some ideas. But I have to step away from it because if I listen to any one instrument on its own for too long, it’s almost like my ears get fatigued and I can’t decide at that point if it’s OK or not. It just sounds like shit, all of it does, so I need to hear it with fresh ears. I need to have him get through that. He’s capable of doing that, which is why I’d never make it as an engineer – I just don’t have the patience for that sort of thing. I don’t want to be an engineer either, so. It’s better to let someone get in close and then, of course, I’ll have my views about whether the guitars should be louder here, or I don’t like that vocal effect – you know, on, and on, and on. Things like that, you know.
I totally get it – mixing is a dark art, I think, and it’s amazing how difficult it is to hear your own stuff properly.
I’ve never taken months, but I’ve definitely taken time. With him, if he has to do things for too long, then I think we’re on the wrong track. It has to go pretty quickly. I think he can usually do one or two songs a day, get it pretty close, and then we tweak it a little bit. But that record, the newest album, I played my last show on tour with Trevor Dunn on Halloween night in London. The next day, I flew to Los Angeles, I think that was on a Saturday. On Tuesday, we started tracking the record. On Thursday we were done! [laughs]. I wasn’t even home a week, and we had the whole record done.
And, on the 16th of November… so, we started, it would have been around the 2nd, or maybe the 3rd, we started tracking and, on the 16th of November, it was mastered. [Laughs] So, you know, barely two weeks from having nothing recorded to having it mastered.
That is unbelievable.
And the record was out in April. Yeah! But I had had all the stuff demos. Although, I don’t spend a lot of time on demos. I don’t really believe in putting too much work into a demo. Like, demos are so somebody can kind of get an idea of what you’re doing. The other thing you don’t want to do is start getting used to how your demos sound, because that ends up being how you want your record to sound and it’s probably a mistake! You know, by and large, a big mistake actually.
One of the things I absolutely love, of course, is that you have the amazing designs from your wife, Mackie, and this one, in particular, felt a bit more expansive because there’s a multi-page booklet, with detailed liner notes as well, which is always very cool. With the designs and stuff, and I think I may have asked this before, does Mackie listen to the record as an inspiration, or does she have lyrics or anything like that?
Um, she’ll hear it of course – we live together, so it’s difficult for her not to hear stuff I’m working on. Then, a lot of times, when I’m working on stuff, I’ll listen in the car while we’re driving. So, she’s well aware of the kind of things we’re doing. But, with people creative like that – highly creative (especially visual) people, you just let them… I’m a firm believer in letting them do their job. She does a good job, interpreting what it is we’re doing. I know that if I mess with it too much, then I’ll probably get a better product. Let the professionals do their work, you know.
It’s just cool that the band has this really strong visual identity, and every album looks really different, but there’s also this consistency that comes from having the same artist. But how does Mackie produce her work. Is anything digital, or is it all hand drawn?
A bit of both. Some of it is drawn on the computer, some of it is straight computer; some of it is hand drawn and scanned in. There’s no one set way that she does stuff. She also does a lot of letter press stuff and silk screening. We’ve done a lot of that kind of thing, and that goes on record covers as well – especially for limited edition stuff – so, we have it all! All of it. From the simplest hand way to print something to total digital. It all has its place and it’s all good.
I sort of have a mental picture of your house being full of records and random pieces of art!
Ummm… believe it or not, I’m very particular about how things are laid out. We have a lot of stuff, but I like things in a specific order. I’m almost anal about that. I like things to be done and fixed and clean and all those sorts of things. I don’t like a messy anything. [Laughs]
The one song, obviously, that you didn’t write was Vomit of Clarity, was that something that these guys submitted to you before they heard your work – a sort of “this is what we’re doing” – or was it always designed as a standalone piece.
I took some of each of their stuff. I put that song together. I didn’t write it, but I arranged it. I figured out the order I wanted it all to be in and I turned it into a song and, honestly, I don’t know on that who’s doing what! At this point, I have no idea. I don’t know if they do either!
I have to ask about the hand gestures – is that using a theremin, or is it even more abstract than that?
[Suddenly coy] It might be a theremin! [Laughs]
But you didn’t record in the same place – they sent their stuff to you?
Yes, that’s exactly it. And we took it from there. That’s how we did it.
That’s an exciting way to record, that collaborative thing when you let people have their head and then bring it all together under your guidance.
Yeah, Void Manes came out and stayed at my house for a few days and we worked out some demo stuff. So, he had heard some of the stuff. But there was not… he didn’t send me anything stuck to a song. He was familiar with it, at least.
My final question comes back to your tour – is the focus more on Thunderball and Tarantula Heart, or will you be exploring the whole catalogue on this run?
We’re actually not doing anything from Thunderball! We haven’t had time to work it out, because the record didn’t come out until we already on tour. But we are doing Tarantula Heart stuff as well as a whole load of old and new stuff. I mean it’s impossible to do all of it, but we do about 65 – 70 minutes, so we can add a lot in there.
To me, it’s about as much as all bands should play.
There is a case of overdoing it, right?
Live, I only really like bands playing for about 20 minutes. [Laughs] But we can’t get away with playing that short. People would get a better show if they would allow that but, oh well! I’ll do an hour – a little over an hour. That’s fine. That’s enough. it’s enough for anyone. I don’t know how these bands do these three-hour sets, it’s like Jesus Christ, nobody’s that good! It’s fucking crazy! Who wants to sit there for three hours, you know?! Not me.
Thank you so much for taking some time to speak to me.
We’re excited to be coming over – thank you so much.
