What’s up everyone! It’s me again, doing another interview, surprise. I had the chance to sit down and talk with Alex Bacey, the guitarist of Ominous Ruin, this past week and talk about their newest album, Requiem, which came out May 9. Alex was an awesome dude to talk with, and he gave a lot of great insight into how he went about with songwriting and producing the band’s second album. If y’all haven’t checked out Ominous Ruin, definitely give Requiem a spin if you’re a fan of some fun, guitar-focused death metal. But enough about my rambling at the beginning, let’s just right into the interview. You know the drill, click below to listen to the interview, but if you don’t feel like hearing our voices, scroll down and keep reading!

Before we jump into all things Requiem, can you tell a little bit about the band, how you guys started, and how you ended up where you are today?

If you’ve been following us, you probably know it’s not a secret that we’ve been around for a while, but that’s just kind of a product of most of us have never really wanted to be like full time musicians, like full time touring musicians, and really, we care more about like the product; the product is the music more so than it is us. I’ll try to keep it kind of short. I’m technically the only original member left in the band, but our original bass player, his name was Will, moved to Columbia, Bogota and decided that was his dream and opened up a brewery down there. He’s still one of my best friends. I love that guy, and I still actually get to see him, at least once a year, so that’s pretty cool. If you’ve been following us, you know that we’ve been through a few drummers over the years. We had Andrew Baird from Fallujah record our last album Amidst Voices that Echo In Stone, and he was just hired on for session work, and we never really talked about doing anything past that, except for playing a couple shows. So then eventually Harley stepped up and was like, this is awesome. And Harley’s from a couple other local bands, one of them being Enigma. They’re Bay Area, they just have been inactive for a while, but they’re friends of ours. Then Adam, unfortunately we had to part ways with our previous vocalist, Adam. It was a pretty messy situation, and it just kind of had been dragging on since we released Exiled, which was our EP in like 2016. We somehow put Amidst Voices out, and that was just kind of a whole fucking process on its own. I say that because I recorded everything except for the drums and mix and mastered everything, which I did for this last one too. But it just, I guess, without trying to go into too much detail, it wasn’t a good fit for all of us. None of us were really happy, and that’s just another reason why this album kind of took a little bit longer to come out. So now we have Crystal, and Crystal, we announced her on her birthday last year. She did a guest spot on one of our previous tracks, “Deception”, for Amidst Voices, and I recorded her for that, too. At the time that I recorded her, I was like, fuck, she’s hella good, and I mean, because basically, she had no previous history being in other projects except for that band Enigma. Her boyfriend was also the vocalist for that band, so we had local Bay Area ties. For the most part, if there’s a Bay Area death metal band, we all know each other. Now here we are, right, and she’s on a full-length album, and we’re a full lineup again. Mitch and Joel … those two, those two dorks, live in Santa Cruz, so sometimes we gotta get them over the hill, and it’s, it’s kind of a pain in the ass sometimes, because the traffic going each way sucks, but they’re they’re awesome. Mitch is like one of the most creative bass players I’ve ever met, and Joel is one of the most creative guitar players I’ve ever met. So to have them and their input on this album was pretty awesome. Amidst Voices, it was a lot, I would say, like 95% me. I wrote and programmed all the guitar, drums and everything, structure wise, all the lyrics and bass was still Adam and Mitch. At least for this album, they had a lot more input. I still did most of it, and then for the future stuff, they’re going to be a lot more involved.

Since you’ve been the primary songwriter since the beginning, what are some of your biggest influences and styles that you go after when writing and performing for Ominous Ruin?

I’m 35, I’ve been playing guitar since I was 11, so it’s like 24 years of just this weird thing. It just feels like it’s just an extension, it’s speaking a language. Influence wise, I think mattered more when I was younger, so, like, those formative years that everyone talks about being like a teenager. Whatever bands you listen to around that time for me was like Origin, Severed Savior, Decrepit Birth, Nile, Behemoth. The bands that were super popular in the mid 2000s to 2010s, kind of and then, even before that, bands that I still listen to like Children of Bodom, Metallica, kind of goes all over. I listen to Korn still, you know, like it’s all over the place, and it’s mostly these days, not even metal. But when it comes to how I’ve really written these last two albums. They do kind of tie together a lot, because there’s a lot of the same guitar technique or guitar kind of structure that I use. But in general, it’s more like feeling like what was I feeling in that moment. When I wrote Amidst, I was just still kind of like in a chaotic place in life, and part of Requiem was the same thing. So that’s why it’s hectic, fast. Requiem is faster than Amidst. And, like, it wasn’t to prove a point or anything. Some of the reviews of people online just saying it sounds like 100 other tech bands. I’m just kind of like, okay, but I don’t think that, and I also don’t think it’s that technical either. I think it’s just fast and has its own thing in my mind. I’m not trying to say that to brag, I just feel like it’s just an emotional output, as opposed to I can out shred you

When you look at where you guys started back in 2015 with Exiled to where you are today with Requiem, how do you think that you have grown, not just as a guitarist, but as a songwriter in general?

It takes a lot of effort to sit down and write, especially songs like this, right? It takes a lot of focus. I kind of was relating it the other day to, we used to just go back and play video games and sit there and do it mindlessly for hours, and the same was kind of with guitar. I used to just be able to sit there and, like, just come up with shit and just tinker and be a little bit more ignorant to whatever the end product was. But now it’s like a lot more intense and very time consuming and very brain consuming. I guess going back to Exiled, I had Will to bounce a lot of ideas off of, and then Will moved and left the band. Actually, he left the band shortly before that. But a lot of those songs were like, partially him, partially me, and so after he left, I kind of took on the majority writing role. It was just like a necessity to just push it out. It was just kind of like the natural path forward, you know. We got used to writing songs in Guitar Pro, and I think a lot of people do, you know, and it’s just these days now, I just try to make sure I if I’m writing something in Guitar Pro, I at least want to make sure that I’m recording it first in Pro Tools or something, and just have a more fully flushed out idea. Sometimes in Guitar Pro, you can write something you can’t play very easily, or it just doesn’t end up sounding good, because you don’t actually get to hear it played back. You hear these stupid MIDI notes played back or something, and I think a lot of bands fall into that trap where it’s like, on paper, it sounds great, but in reality, it’s not right. That’s where the real progression has come. A lot of that happened for this album Requiem, where I was actually just trying to focus on what I would play naturally, as opposed to just trying to piece shit together.

Going back to when you had Crystal on that track on Amidst, what stood out to you back then? What made you guys come back to the idea of having her as the vocalist moving forward with Requiem?

It was funny, because when I did record her, it was our practice studio in San Jose, and we had heard her practicing in a room next door. Like I said, her boyfriend from a band called Enigma, and they were practicing a few rooms down from us, and I’d heard her do live vocals before but through a PA and with backing tracks and stuff. She really liked Shadow of Intent, so she was screaming her head off to Shadow of Intent. It sounded sick, but, I mean, it was harder to tell, because when I actually recorded her, she was sick, like, physically sick. She was like, this sounds terrible, and I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If this is terrible to you, this is like gold to me. The hardest thing about being in a band is obviously personalities have to match, and like, work styles and workflow, everyone has to get along. When we had to part ways with Adam, my first thought was like, I don’t even want to do this anymore. Without going into too much detail, I actually quit behind the scenes. I was like, you guys can handle the rest of it, because it was not a fun time for any of us, really. And there’s a few reasons why I had to get brought back into it. Ultimately, me and Mitch kind of got together, and we’re just like, why don’t we just move forward with something else and just see what happens? And long story short, the first person that came to mind was I always thought it’d be sick if Crystal was going to be the vocalist. She’s got the talent, she’s got the drive, she’s pretty high up in her career. If we’re not doing this to be full time touring musicians, she could probably handle whatever piece of the pie that she needs to and she has, and she’s been great ever since, and it’s been a great fit. I think that her own critiques of herself, she’s only going to get better regardless. But I think she put her best foot forward. A little bit about the recording process this time around. If you notice in the credits, it does say lyrical concepts were by Adam, and we ended up just coming to an agreement. We tried very hard to have Adam on this record for a long time, and if he ever hears this, I’m just saying it how it is, we try really hard so, and if he gets mad, he gets mad, but I don’t think he will. But, you know, it just didn’t work out. We just had to stop delaying everything. It was just like, why are we not doing, it’s been almost three years at this point. We had basically a list of lyrics from Adam to go through and just kind of lay out over all the tracks that I had already written. That was a task in its own, especially for somebody who has never recorded an album before, who’s never really played a show before, never been in a band before. Her boyfriend helped us out, help her get recorded and everything, get set up, and just talk to her, helped her through the whole process. I still had my hands in it here and there just to help out and but, I mean, the final product is mostly them, like they kind of figured it all out. Figured it all out together and laid out the lyrics and or mapped out the lyrics together. She killed it.

You talked about a bit about the recording process with Requiem, but specifically what was the biggest goal for Ominous Ruin with this album, and what was your motivation to put the album out in the first place?

Part of that is just I didn’t want to live with the regret of not doing it, that would have sucked equally as hard, if not worse, probably worse. Like I said, it’s an emotional output, right? So it kind of embodies a lot of things that I was going through. If I listen back to it, I still remember certain things that were going on during specific parts of songs, right? Which for me is sometimes, it’s harder to listen back to it. I’m just kind of like… even just the band situation aside, we all kind of had some real shit, personal situations happening, and part of the reason why I moved to San Diego two and a half years ago, or whatever. That was the ultimate driving factor, was that I just, I’d rather it be out than not. People can judge it however they want to judge it, but so far, it’s gotten great response. People online are stoked about it; I’m glad people are stoked about it. I have a hard time self-promoting it and trying to shove it down people’s throats, so I’m just, I’m happy that it’s kind of like circulating and doing its own thing.

How does it feel to finally have Requiem out after putting all that time and effort into it, especially considering it almost didn’t even happen?

It is a closing of a chapter really, you know. And that’s kind of like the cool thing about the two albums being tied together. It is kind of like the closing of a chapter. I’m always playing guitar, writing here and there, writing new stuff, and have a lot of other stuff that I’ve been working on. So it’s nice to just say this whole book of Ominous is done. Not to say that the band is going to change drastically. I mean, who knows, we’ve all talked about specific things and ideas that we all want to kind of work toward. But, it feels good. Not only is it a relief, but again, people are enjoying it. Like I said, it just brings back a lot of weird memories sometimes, but I’m stoked again. I’m stoked everyone is enjoying it, and to the people that aren’t, I’m sorry.

Yeah, like you said, it’s an emotional output at the end of the day. It might not be what everyone likes, but it’s an emotional output for yourself for people to listen to.

To all those people, if they hear this, just come say, what’s up! I I’m stoked. I’m glad you like it. This album cycle, it makes me really appreciate those bands that do it full time. I mean, they are doing the constant promotion, if it’s Patreon, just like, doing whatever they can to just fight their way through and tour and do all that stuff. More power to you. You know, doing a full-time job, and doing this is, I am not a fan of social media, and I think that’s pretty widely known, but it’s tough like so more power to them. Now that the album’s out, and we don’t have to like do as much of that. But that, in itself, is a relief.

Like you said before, guitar and songwriting has become a second language at this point, and this “muscle memory” finds its way into your style of writing. Looking back at the recording process, are there any specific songs or section that have really stood out to you as something that you are very proud of?

I could think of a few I really like. “Architect of Undoing,” how it kind of like navigates from an acoustic part into a slam part. I mean, within that song too, it has like an overdrive section that I really enjoyed., There’s at least three parts of the album where Crystal is doing like a more of like a yelling part and not so much of like a death metal part. One of them is in “Architect of Undoing,” which is right after the overdrive part, where she does like these, like yelling parts. I can’t remember exactly what she says off the top my head, but it’s not like the typical death metal, like constant growl, scream kind of thing. I’ve been trying to get into more of that. Clean singing is not my thing for death metal, per se. But there are other things you can do to be creative, and I learned that from Adam, too. I owe a lot of things like thinking outside of the box but trying to keep it like unique and original. For somebody like Crystal, this is her first project, she only knows what she’s heard on albums, essentially, right? For her to grow into her instrument and, same thing with guitar or bass, essentially it becomes your second language. You have this tool or this instrument you can just dick around with and kind of make it unique to however you want it to. I really enjoyed some of those parts. The reason why I brought up those parts is that within them, she says things that are kind of like relevant to what we were all going through. One of the other ones, was in a song called “Fractal Abhorrence,” which, at the end of it kind of has this weird… we’ll call it a talk-y part. I think it’s what we called it. It’s not really like fluid and melodic and within the structure, it doesn’t follow a specific eighth note or quarter note pattern. But she basically is talking about how there’s like an alternate entity controlling us and just kind of like pulling the strings and just kind of fucking with your reality. That’s the kind of shit that I like. What these last two albums have been about is something in the alternate reality is kind of fucking with your timeline. I mean, there’s a lot of things that these albums are about, but essentially kind of causing chaos and havoc within your within what you think is reality turning out to be that nothing was true all along. It’s hard to explain also, because each song kind of has its own motive, right? It’s very deep with the lyrics that Adam wrote, and he was really good at that kind of stuff. He was really good at writing intense lyrics that probably don’t make sense. Some of them didn’t make sense to us either, but that’s how the first album got called Amidst Voices that Echo In Stone. Other parts that I’m super happy with, I mean the whole album structurally is very guitar forward, right? The songs follow the guitar mostly. So you know, if that’s not your thing, I’m sorry. If you can let the guitars kind of do some of the talking, I think you get involved into the album and it becomes a different experience, right? Some of those guitar parts are, like “Eternal,” the way it starts is meant to be dissonant and it’s supposed to make you unhinged a little bit, and then erupt. The same thing happens later, after the clean section, it goes dissonant, and it kind of is supposed to be a little unhinged, and then goes into a super heavy tech part. I do that stuff on purpose because I like Necrophagist-y riffs too, but I think a lot of it, I really tried to lean into the chaos of all of our lives.

A lot of the album shows a balance of melodic acoustic sections with the heavier riffs, and each part leans into that chaos like you mentioned. How did you balance those two sides, where you get an unhinged sound in both the clean and chaotic sections for Requiem?

It really just kind of happens. It’s kind of hard to explain sometimes, but I will give credit to some of the people that I’ve worked with over the years. Will being one of them, our former bass player and Adam, you know, kind of always pushing some weird boundaries. Like I said, we have a bunch of homie bands that we just always listen to, talk to and nerd out with. A lot of people have also kind of like portrayed their influences on me in a lot of ways, and just made me more of an open book in terms of writing as well. The other way about going about that is just literally sitting here and messing with guitar tones and just tweaking stuff and just making some shit. If you’ve wrote something super heavy and mean, one day you’re like, it sounds great, the next day you come at it, you’re like, it sounds like shit. It’s just kind of like this weird game of whatever mood you’re in, try to capture it there in the moment, and then eventually, hopefully it works.

Going back to what we talked about initially with the story of the album, was there any motivation behind calling this album Requiem?

At first we were just perusing the lyrics, just to see what of all of it could we name it. We kind of went through a few, and I think that was even before we parted ways with Adam. But I think it became Requiem because we it made the most sense based out of everything. So how many albums out there are called Requiem? Fuck? I don’t even want to look, you know, but it was one of the things that kind of made sense to envelop the rest of the album into one word or one phrase. I think that is one of those things that we all get super picky about. Maybe there are probably, like, 10 albums out there called Requiem, but word choice and word usage, and especially when it comes to song titles, band names, albums, whatever, we’re all super picky. We found it really kind of suited the album. We all agreed upon it and, as opposed to having a six word album title like Amidst was, we have a one.

Now, for you personally, what does Requiem mean to you?

There was a lot of things going on that I felt like, why is someone or something picking on me? I’m not a religious person by any means. I’m just kind of agnostic, where I really enjoy things that are like basically alternate reality stuff. It was just like in that specific time in history, especially like, given the situation with this project, a personal relationship that was stupid, grandma passing away and a couple other family members also passing away, just not having a solid time in life, especially after just coming out of the pandemic. Then just everyone acting strange and weird and a few friendships, like dissolving old friendships that were decades old with people that I thought I really trusted no longer being a part of it, eventually moving to San Diego was a whole fucking story in its own. Then Requiem really just kind of, it’s basically just saying my ode to whatever the hell just happened. It all kind of ties into that. It all just basically says, what are these alternate forces that are causing all this chaos to happen in your life? And for you to think about it, come out as a different person, or accept your fate. The album is geared toward actually losing your sanity. But in reality, it’s not. The music is supposed to help avoid that. The reality is if you let all those factors kind of bring you down and stop looking out for yourself, then people will ultimately take advantage of it.

Looking back at Exiled and seeing you guys now with Requiem, how do you feel that you have grown, not only as a musician, but as a person during those years?

I think anybody in their early to mid 20s has higher testosterone, you know more of a go getter. I think we’re all gung-ho back then in the day and everything, and I’m a lot more like calm and relaxed now. Nothing really phases me anymore, especially after all the experiences, right? After all that stuff, you couldn’t really do anything to hurt me. Being in a band is exactly that, and that’s kind of why we’ve all been like, let’s just do this for fun, or at least try to and take it as far as it can go while we’re all still on the same page of we have to work full-time jobs to support ourselves, families and everything. It’s taught me a lot of patience. It’s taught everyone’s different. You just always learn personalities, even to this day, you still learn different personality types and how people work and whatnot. The one thing I think the most is patience. Patience. After Amidst I would say learning how to take criticism was different, because in work, you’re just like, I can fix this, do that, move on, whatever it’s not as personal as an album that you, spend a lot of time on and really enjoy. When somebody critiques it weird, you’re just kind of like, that sucks, but maybe you didn’t listen to it like I did or something like that. Just learning that everyone has an opinion, and that’s okay.

Now I know that you said that you all are doing this with the intention of having fun with the music, but what is next for Ominous Ruin?

We still want to do tours and stuff without trying to drain the PTO bank. The difference is if we’re going to play shows and whatnot, it’s got to be just a little bit more precise about how we get out and do those kind of things. Maybe that’s not what the industry wants, but sorry, it is what it is, right? So we can’t go out and play Tuesday night shows to 10 people. That’s just not going to happen, you know. I mean, where the goal is to play some shows, get out there, get Crystal on stage for her first ever full show. I still always just kind of tinker away in my whole studio in my little 10×10 room. This is just the lab, and I think, we’ve discussed a lot of like, what do we want to do? For me, for sure, I know I can write another album. I just call it Cali-death, it’s like all the bands that I used to listen to are basically like California death metal bands. I can pump out another one of those, and I intend to, it’s just gonna be a while, and then we’re gonna do some other stuff in between. So stay tuned!

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Once again, huge thanks to Alex! It was great being able to talk with him a bit about the band and the new album. Please, go show some support to Ominous Ruin and check out their music, definitely a lot of fun. Hope you all enjoyed listening to or reading the interview, and I’ll see you all in the next one!