Q&A: Pittsburgh's M.E.L.T. on new album 'Innervate/Obliterate'

For M.E.L.T.’s release show celebrating their “Innervate/Obliterate” record earlier this month, guitarist/vocalist Joey Troupe came up with an apt description of the night.

“I was teasing somebody after the show that it felt like what I assumed people feel like after they get married, that they plan this thing for months and months and months and then a few hours go by and it’s over,” he said. “But I do feel like we achieved what we were aiming for.”

The band’s production — their most complicated ever — included extra lighting, dancers and supplemental singers, but future performances will be a little more stripped down.

“I can’t imagine any show will be as bombastic as that, given all that we put into it, but we’ve also committed that – not that there’s anything wrong with this – but we have always endeavored to be more than the three guys you know in flannels and jeans playing their guitars,” Troupe said. “We want it to be more than that and a multi-sensory visual audio experience, and all our shows will be that to some degree. But I think we’re gonna have a few less bells and whistles.”

Added drummer/vocalist JJ Young: “I won’t have a full-size gong next time.”

The next show for the Pittsburgh psychedelic/doom band, which also includes bassist/vocalist James May, comes Saturday at Spirit’s 10th annual Halloween party in Lawrenceville.

M.E.L.T.’s heavy album, their third, gives nods to acts like Black Sabbath, Primus and Ty Segall, with all three bandmates taking turns on lead vocals.

“We put a lot into it. I think we all three feel as though it’s our best to date, not discrediting the first and second records,” May said. “They’re each great in their own right, but this one feels like it all came together more. JJ was with us for the whole thing. He was there for the whole thing of ‘Replica of Man,’ but we did the touring last summer and then writing more of ‘Innervate/Obliterate,’ this record, together with each other. There’s a lot to behold with this one for sure.

“And listen to it in order, please,” he added with a laugh.

In a Zoom conversation, May, Troupe and Young spoke with TribLive about the album, the band’s mission, their song “Mass Grave” and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

What were the original intentions for this album and did it turn out the way that you thought it would at the beginning?

Troupe: I think that every time we go to make new music, the goal is to remain within the established universe of what we’ve created without repeating something we’ve already done. I think that’s really hard for bands to do. They often get stuck either in the trap of doing more of the same because they know people like it or pushing beyond the boundaries of what they’re truly good at. To walk the line in between that of expanding upon what you’ve already done while honing in on your greatest strengths is tough. But I really think we did that. We wrote songs that don’t feel at all out of place right next to, in a live show, any of the songs we’ve previously written, but also feel like a new flavor and have new textures and elements that I think will even springboard us to the next set that we write. But I think our goal is always to achieve that – and that’s easier said than done – but we feel pretty good that we did that this time.

James, you said to listen to it in order. Does that apply to the live show too or does it get broken up live?

May: For the release show, we played it in order for sure. Now going forward, we’ll just mix everything together. We have a tendency more recently to combine songs. At the release show, we combined “Sword or the Scepter” and “Hive Mind” as one song just to get them all in because now we have three records worth of tunes, and a lot of times you only have 30 minutes or 45 minutes. We honestly make set lists pretty much either day before, day of right there, figure out what we want to start with, what we want to end with, but no, maybe certain songs we’ll find go better back and forth. We also try to give each other singing breaks. But no, just for the record, I’m an album listener. I personally listen to the albums only. I don’t have playlists on my Spotify or whatever. I listen to albums, and I just don’t understand why people would listen to a record for the first time on shuffle, but some people do. And it’s intentional. We put it in order for a reason. It’s double sided. Innervate is Side A and Obliterate is Side B. It’s not necessarily a concept, but it is themed, sort of.

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How do you think that title, “Innervate/Obliterate,” helps to evoke the album’s atmosphere then, the two different sides?

Troupe: We can and have dove into that from a very granular level, from a very macro level, from a more abstract level, to touch on those briefly. It’s more granular, the first side. Innervate means to, when a nerve in the human body, or not necessarily human, any organism, provides a signal to something, a muscle, an organ, another nerve, innervate is that connection and sending a signal or a sensory experience or an action, but moving something into action. That first side is about, broadly speaking, that it could be taking specific action in the world. It could be connection. It could be a sensory experience or a sensory escape. But those first five songs very thematically align with that general concept.

The second side, Obliterate, is more about destruction and putting your foot down and acknowledging the harsh realities of the world and they in a sequence kind of illustrate that on a broader level. It very much expresses the dual nature of any human existence, but perhaps more specifically the modern human existence of connecting, but also feeling isolated or escaping or defending or that binary that we have as people. I feel like with the challenges of the modern world, sometimes you feel like you have to connect to be informed. And sometimes you feel like you have to disconnect to be sane. And sometimes you feel like you have to stand up to be righteous. And other times you have to disappear to be sane. And this addresses all of that.

This was just somewhat of a happy coincidence or maybe just the cosmic energy in the songs, but we discovered later that “Innervate/Obliterate,” shortened to IO, looked like the one and zero in the digital binary that our whole world is constructed around too. It’s everywhere, and it’s in the music, and it seemed like a logical extension from our last album, which was vaguely about the impending mechanical, technological apocalypse, emotional overtake. This was more of just like, how do we exist within that? It just so happened that these songs lined up to fit relatively nicely into two themes that we could split across two sides.

Obviously it gets into some heady material. Are you OK with people who just want to rock out to the music or who don’t go to that deeper level?

Troupe: I think that is the vast majority of our fans, operatives, supporters, and even us. The mission statement of M.E.L.T. is to provide an escape from the reality of the world. And if you want to look in a little deeper and get something that resonates with you on more of a personal, emotional, conceptual level, maybe you’ll get that too. But the biggest thing is it’s hard out there. And this is how we escape and we transcend and we have these interesting rhythms and interesting melodies and heavy volume and moving riffs. And you combine all that together and we elevate above all this (bullcrap). In the midst of that, if you want to dive in deeper, it’s there, but you’ll get out of it what you want. That could be as simple as get me out of here.

What would you say the musical inspirations are for the band, for this album in whole? When I listened to it, I heard definitely some Black Sabbath influences and some grunge stuff in there. Does that sound about right?

Young: Yeah, the three of us are very eclectic, but we all bond over heavy stuff like Sabbath and riffs and things like that. I think we all go off in our different directions and take little musical journeys. For example, I’ve been really hyper-fixated on Paul McCartney now for a really long time. That somehow permeates its way into the music that I play, but it’s not necessarily stuff we’re trying to make. I’m sure Joey and James go on similar journeys with stuff that they’re super into, but I know commonly amongst the three of us, we all really like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Ty Segall, Led Zeppelin, so a mix of classic rock and modern influences that really, if we are in the van shooting the (breeze) or whatever, we all can really get down with Jack White or whatever, stuff like that, and also introduce each other to a lot of different stuff as well.

With the song, “Mass Grave,” since that was the first single, what was the inspiration behind that song?

May: I can’t fully recall. JJ, I think, said maybe we should name the record “Mass Grave.” The song wasn’t even written, or we didn’t have a song called “Mass Grave.” It’s weird. I don’t always write a full song. I write riffs that then I take to those guys. Sometimes there are things that have transitions and whatnot. But it’s a really kind of happy tune for the subject matter of what it is about. But it’s more so, that one came together really quickly. We’ve been playing it for a long time. It was written right at the end of “Replica of Man.” We played it all summer on tour. It’s just a very comfortable song at this point. But I think we forget that it is on the new record sometimes because we’ve been playing it for so long.

Troupe: I was traveling and we had either just released or were about to release the previous record, and somehow “mass grave” the phrase came across me. I remember I texted you guys, “this is the name of the next album,” and it just seemed like the right thing after the content of “Replica of Man,” like the earth is a mass grave. Then it just so happened that this first song we wrote, which we were performing it before the last record was even out, took that name and it seemed right, just given where the world is at. This was definitely a James and JJ more than me composition, but I think you’d have to almost not be paying attention to not think there’s some trajectory we’re on from a political, sociological, cultural, moral, environmental level that we’re headed towards that reality, and it is a little bleak, but I do think it’s nice that the tonal nature of the actual song musically kind of counterweights that. So yeah, we’re headed there, it’s not good, but it kind of feels good, like we’re on the way there. (laughs)

Young: The name I think we were shooting texts back and forth, or we were just working on some tune at some time and one of us said, man, we’re gonna leave audiences in a mass grave when they hear this.

Troupe: Oh yeah, that sounds right.

Young: I think that’s where it stemmed from, and then we named the song that, but that song’s been around for ages. It feels like it was a part of the previous album even though it wasn’t on it, so when we recorded it, it was kind of liberating because it had been so long.

May: The lyrical content, which is to circle back to your question on what if people just want to jam, I don’t know half the words to most of my favorite bands’ songs, truly.

Young: Me too.

Troupe: I don’t know half the words to our songs, and I wrote half of them.

May: (laughs) Exactly. But that one’s lyrical content is more of a we’re in this together, welcome to our mass grave. I’m not putting you in one, we’re not putting you in one, we’re in it together. And it’s (crappy), but we’re here.

Troupe: That’s really the M.E.L.T. mission. We really want people to feel something. Now a lot of people say that, you could go to a really aggressive metal show and feel a mosh pit or feel intense volume, or you could go to some singer-songwriter and feel sadness or melancholy. Ours is more, we are a heavy band, but it’s more this visceral rhythm and riff and just this groove that we want to get people on and use that groove to transcend into a nicer experience. And we definitely want to bring people along with us. We don’t want to be exclusionary. We want everyone to come. And like James said, if you’re listening to the lyrics really close — if you don’t listen close, you’re just going to feel a good song that happens to be called “Mass Grave” but feels good — if you look a little closer, it does say our and it’s like we’re all doing this together.