Wind & Ice blow through Hexvessel’s "Polar Veil" (Interview)

Tracing the path of Mat ‘Kvohst’ McNerney’s musical and spiritual life-quest in his long standing project Hexvessel has always required an observer’s full attention. The band makes change look easy, pulsing through folk, psych rock and Americana like an author adding chapters to a novel.

With their new album Polar Veil, McNerney retreats deep into the Finnish landscape he calls home, summoning a blizzard of black metal texture to serve as a foundation for the band’s odes to place and belonging. Ahead of its release this Friday, we spoke with Mat at length about living a life in awe of nature, the black metal at the heart of Hexvessel, and popping 'round to Fenriz’s house.

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The sound, the art and the language around Polar Veil is very cold and frostbitten, what prompted that?

I think it was timing: writing the album, putting it together, it was all during the winter. And the winters here are obviously quite isolating and heavy. It started with getting this feeling from the climate, and though we've always been a sort of nature based band, the climate itself isn't something that I've really delved into before as being part of the nature mystic or pagan mindset and worldview, but it's a key aspect of why the North is my spiritual home. I wanted to explore that musically on this record, to get to the heart of what it means to have that kind of outlook.

Your singing is the one contrast stylistically, even whilst the subjects you're discussing relate to the theme, there is like a warmth in your voice that acts like a counterpoint to everything else. I'm wondering if that was deliberate?

Yeah, everything on the record is very thoroughly thought through. So the relationship that I wanted to convey with the black metal sound, the cold sound, was quite specific. But this is a Hexvessel record, so the heart of it comes from the same place that it always has, and I wanted to use my voice to get to a very honest place with the music as well. Some of the 'rules' around what black metal has become, for me, isn't what black metal is about, so I also wanted to show that and to create something that is closer to the feeling of black metal than I can hear in a lot of current music. So there are lots of reasons that I wanted the vocals to be strong and to be sung in an honest way, instead of putting on a monster voice or doing a scary thing. That's not to put down black metal vocals, they have their place, it's just that I feel we've gotten so far from what it meant to me back in the day that I wanted to do an honest version of what I think it should be. And then also, it's a Hexvessel record, you can hear that and should hear that I didn't want to get so far away from where we started that it gets ridiculous, there needs to be a common thread running through it. I've done the black metal stuff in my past to death as well, so I didn't really feel like I had anything to prove.

Using black metal as a design template in 2023, it's actually more shocking and surprising to have something that's so open and honest than it is to hear all those traditional layers of artifice.

The shock value, or impact if you like, just isn't there from hearing things that are done by the rulebook. And for me, it was never a genre that that that should play by the rules, and so I think that you need to be able to mix things in the right way, but it's all about how it's done, and whether it's done with heart, so I just came from came from a real place rather than trying to tick boxes to be this or that I think that will make the record a little bit confusing in a way, but we'll see.

Stylistically the black metal elements on the album are very fuzzy and overdriven. You've said it still had to be a Hexvessel record at heart, did it take any discipline not to add bright black metal leads that could have changed the atmosphere?

[Laughs] It wasn't hard to resist doing that. Musically it's purposefully minimal and repetitive with certain riffs and things like that. But if you took a song like "Ring", for example: there was a space for a solo. And I really had to think about the kind of solo that I wanted, something like a Nocturno Culto solo in Darkthrone, where you play with feeling rather than showing off your guitar skills. So I thought hard about who in an active band has that very unique style. And of course, Nameless Void from Negative Plane was one of my first thoughts, because he has his own style, and also doesn't only solo for the sake of it. He's a very skillful guitarist, but in a unique way. It felt like making a statement to say that, okay, we're going to have one guitar solo on the album, but it's going to be the most non-typical solo you could imagine, and I like that. It should always be music first, skill second. The big part of it for me is thinking about the craft, and the experience the album is giving you, rather than whether an artist is an extremely good player or not.

Looking at the collaborators you worked with on the album, Nameless Void definitely jumps out, do you have some shared history?

Yeah, we met while I was doing another one of my bands and was recording in the States, and I met up with him through another friend in New York. We hung out and of course, the scene in America is quite spread out so it's quite rare to bump into black metal artists you really respect, but he was there doing Occultation, and it was really nice to hit it off with a like minded musician whose work I really enjoy, a kind of fan and friend moment. We kept in touch over the years, now and again, and so that was it. I wanted people that were also friends on the album, we didn't want to get someone involved in the album that we hadn't met just because I liked their music. It had to be someone I'd connected with because that's a running theme with the music and with Hexvessel - it's a personal thing. People can sense that, so I didn't want to be name dropping some random person from a cool band.

Is there anything more about the narrative or mythological component of the album that we should know about?

A long time ago I felt the call of the North, if you like, and I've never really understood until quite recently, why exactly it was, and why I strived for it. But of all of the themes in black metal for me, the pinnacle of all of that is nature worship, which is sort of synonymous with black metal. So albums like the first Burzum record and Darkthrone's Under A Funeral Moon–albums like that are real for me, and the hearts of those records have these nature worship themes. And then of course, I went to Norway and spent time there and I shared this same feeling with Fenriz from Darkthrone, so back in the '90s that crystallised everything for me, and I was very interested in settling in a Nordic country as well. It's really easy to talk about forests and going out into nature and everything like that, but the climate is a fundamental part of why you will love or hate this part of the world. Like I said, it's isolating, but that's part of it, you can't just 'enjoy' heading into the isolation of nature, occasionally you have to fully embrace it, it has to be part of your daily being to really get to this place where you're you're living in good harmony with it. And the lifestyle you're faced with includes elements of survivalism, the fact that when it's minus temperatures, if you don't wear the right clothing, you're going to be in trouble. If you want to do something outdoors, you really need to know what you're doing, you need to be aware of the pitfalls and dangers of daily life. So I think it's no mistake, and not a silly gimmick to have the icy themes that run through bands like Immortal, it's probably funny to people who don't really think about the depths of that, but for me it's a very serious thing, it's a serious aspect of getting to the heart of why black metal began as this very isolationist, very kind of elitist movement, it's all part and parcel of that.

Given that contemporary (Western) existence can be in part defined by the level of convenience we each have access to, self consciously taking a side step away from convenience and making life more difficult for yourself is quite a statement.

Yeah, and I think a lot of the sort of music community will sort of dip into themes just like that, wearing it on a shirt rather than actually living it. So it was a conscious thing for me to embrace that and realise that it is very much part of my life and my love of life, to embrace that, and it all comes into this record. At its heart the record is about finding your spiritual home not just in place and theory, but also utterly and entirely saying that I'm giving myself to this environment. Of course there's a lot of people that like to take pretty pictures on Instagram in the forest but then they go back to their convenient lifestyle and the local kebab shop and stuff like that, which is all fine because, you know, certain things work for some people and not others. Having been part of that scene, during that particular time, it will never leave me.

Hexvessel has always had those elements under the surface, it's always been bubbling under, it's always been one of the key influences. And I think that's why we've drawn a lot of black metal people to our music, even when we're playing psych rock. It's like, no matter how hard I try, I can't get that out of my blood and bones, it's just, it's just part of how I see the world, if you get to the skeleton of it, that's what it is. And it's been folk music, but with black metal chords, or black metal kind of melodies, so the sensibility has always been there. And I think that's why it sounds quite familiar. So some people have listened to the record and said oh, it's really surprising, because if you told me that you made a black metal record, I kind of think of something else. But when I listen to it, I just hear Hexvessel, it's just showing another side of the band that's always been there.

I've read about, but not seen the huge twelve page booklet of Thomas Hooper art that comes with the record. I'm interested to hear a little bit about that collaboration and how it kind of extends the concept of Polar Veil.

Thomas has been my tattoo artist for a really long time, since the late '90s or early 2000s. I started going to see him in London, so he became an acquaintance and then a friend. He's seen me through my progression in life, and he's seen the music progress. So we've both been doing stuff creatively, but never really worked on an entire project together. And with Polar Veil he was one of the first people to hear the record, I was having a tattoo done and I played him the record and we talked about it, and he had some really great ideas about using symbols and referencing work in his book. I'd seen some of these things that he'd done that he hadn't fully developed for any band or himself or anything like that, and I said I'd be really interested in him following that kind of way of working, which was less tattoo based, and more of his painting and things like that. So we found a common inspiration around the music and he's a very musical person, I was getting to new music through him as well. We talked about having these sort of ritual symbols which were about the north and about Finland and incorporating some of these traditional ancient markings, there were some things I sent him from books, images of wooden tools in old folk buildings in Finland and the things that people had carved into their tools, sort of home markings. We ended up with these images of a polar moon with winds made from these home marking symbols. I like it when albums have things to discover, and I think these days most people presume it's going to end up online and that's the most important thing so they concentrate on putting a hard cover on the record or do something elaborate with the actual vinyl itself, but no one really puts that much effort into into booklets, but I I like it when they do because I think that it's nice that the album is an experience.

What is it about Hexvessel, of all the bands that you're active in, that makes it more of a malleable tool for stylistic change?

I think when I started doing it, it was a kind of reaction to being in bands. So I'd done Dødheimsgard and Code and I'd always been a part of somebody else's band. So I sat down, thinking about what it would be like to write my own music, and I thought that it would be a great thing to have a solo project, which is still a band, but the band itself is a description of me, and that I would use that as a kind of milestone marker on my journey through life, marking different periods on a sort of spiritual journey. So a Hexvessel is a spell carrier or vessel, a pot for carrying something magical. That was the idea, I would try to get to this place where I'm exploring the magical, the divine through music. So it's not a set genre, and I never wanted it to be one, I like bands like Current 93, and Swans, where the act is kind of its own genre. The idea with Hexvessel has always been like, no pressure, we didn't come from a scene, I didn't have a really big name for myself as an underground artist. So I just wanted to have free rein with it, and have an exploratory vehicle. I appreciate artists that never stand still with their music, that are always progressing, that's the kind of stuff I like to listen to. And I know that it goes against what you should do to make it, but it's never really been about that, it's just about doing what I think is of real value at that particular time. I don't feel like all the albums are successful with that, but that's just natural, you know, some songs on some records I think are good, and I did all right, I think the first record, and then this record, are ones where I feel like, okay, I really nailed that, I really did what I wanted to do there.

The first thing I ever heard of Hexvessel's was “Transparent Eyeball”, and it was a gift and a curse at the same time, because then you bounce around the existing catalogue at the time and try to work out how things relate to one another, and there's a real evasiveness and unpredictability to it.

That particular time and album was very fun. It's very inspired by the lineup we had brought together. I don't know if that was the most honest record, or something like an exploration of where we wanted to go with the sound and trying to discover where the heaviness or extremity or power in the music comes from. I think this record is much more honest in that sense, which seems strange to say that as we talked at the very beginning about how black metal isn't in an honest place. When we say that Hexvessel is making black metal it immediately sounds very 'hip' or deliberate, but I think that actually maybe “Transparent Eyeball” was more like that, not a misstep, but I would have done that differently now. It definitely had shock value at the time, a band that you know as a folk band suddenly doing this rock stuff, like with Dylan when he went electric, maybe that was the thinking at the time, but as an exploration vehicle. I'm a different person at every point of our release catalogue, so some of it relates to me still, and some of it relates to me at that time.

You've spoken of your motivations for exploring other cities and places to live following your time in London, and your feeling that around the time you left London it was somewhat inhospitable to artists and creatives. What have your travels shown you about how other cities and other nations view artists differently?

I think that England has changed so much since I left. And it's changed so much since the music scene that I was trying to be part of at the time. I think that it's a lot better now. There's a lot more community around the gigs, the festivals, and the people involved. I think it's a nicer bunch of people than it was in the '90s. But the '90s was a hard time to be into metal because style wise, you were kind of scum. Then also, just being a musician was still kind of frowned upon, now you go to England and everyone has tattoos, everyone's an artist, everyone's doing creative stuff. And that's really cool, I love it. It's easy to generalise because when you're younger, you feel very much like your world is the only world, so I may have said that with a totally different view on things, but I do think that Finland is very good, because it supports artists, they have funding, there's a lot of bands per square mile here, supposedly the most in the world, music is really big here, it's easier to get rehearsal space, there's a lot of drummers here maybe because there's space to drum and not annoy your neighbours like in England, so that that makes it easier to get a band together. You're very far away from anything though so that makes it a bit more difficult to travel. It was easier for me to stand out at the time being an English guy making music here, I think there's a lot more English people living in the Nordics now making music so I'm not the only English guy in the village anymore, but I was sort of lucky when I made my mark here whereas it was very difficult to make to stand out where I was growing up, or at least it felt that way.

It's interesting to hear you cite the '90s in those specific terms, particularly the pre internet era when the scene in London was small and 'gatekeeping' was physical and designed to keep people out of scenes.

It really was just begrudgingly practical: people sitting on being the only booker in that era, you had to deal with that guy, you knew he was corrupt, you knew he ripped bands off, but you had to go with him, there was no way to out the guy because what do you do you just tell people? Now obviously, if you're a bad booker, you're known as a bad person, and you don't get anywhere, but then it was very much a case of the booker's were all a bit shady, the venues were places that you maybe didn't want to be at, you know, you'd get your arse kicked at your own gig [laughs]. There's so many stories of stuff like that happening, bands would turn up and think oh shit, what are we doing, we're trying to play a gig at this pub, and the people who are there don't really want us to be there.

It was difficult because the death metal scene was so short lived, by the mid 90s it was already over, so even those big sort of 'day of death' festivals from the early 90s weren't happening, and there were people like me, who would have liked to take over and get involved, but it was sort of dying out. And then you had nu metal which wasn't really an underground movement. So it felt like the underground was very difficult to break out of and get any attention. And of course, some English bands at that point weren't the most appealing in the world. You had Cradle of Filth in their probably least interesting period, representing the only black metal scene there was, then in the underground you had Thus Defiled or something like that.

I went to Norway to try to discover what was going on over there and got into that scene. And through that scene, I got into all kinds of other kinds of music, it was my music discovery era. I went to Norway expecting the black metal musicians to be listening to black metal, and they were listening to techno and psytrance and stuff, and of course then I end up getting into it, and then to jazz, because they were real music aficionados, and that was something very cool that I hadn't experienced in England, in the metal scene there it was very much like: go to the pub, listen to metal [laughs] if you listen to anything else, people will say, 'what? Fuck off, not techno'. So it was nice for me to break out of that. London is so much better now, I love going to gigs at [Camden Venue] The Black Heart now when I go over, it's just great, there's all these festivals taking place, even in London itself. There's so many black metal festivals and things like that. So it's totally on its head now.

When you do come back is there anything in particular that you like to do as a bit of a nostalgia trip?

I guess it was always [famous former metal pub] The Crowbar, and that's gone! I quite like to go out for cocktails so I will seek out cocktail bars. Last time I went to the east end because I lived for several years up in Stoke Newington. And I wanted to go back to check out Jaguar Shoes but it was weird outside there were all these guys dressed like The Strokes and I was like what is happening? And then I I heard that it's like this revival movement, they're dressing sort of like Scandinavians back in the naughties. It's funny the way scenes go in cycles, but I think my London is not really there anymore. I used to go to Garlic and Shots and drink in the bar downstairs and stuff like that, but I have no idea if anybody goes there anymore.

Your creative output extends beyond the bands that you've been in, you've put on shows, you've run club nights, and you've worked as a graphic designer. Do you see these things as separate disciplines that fulfil separate needs, or are they tributaries that all flow back into making music and performing?

I worked in the textile industry for over ten years. And then slowly got out of that, I was one of the first people to to use Photoshop in that business, so it was very much in demand when that was in its infancy. And then obviously, a lot of truly great artists started working in that business and collaborating, so there was less demand as the years went on, and you ended up churning out all these graphic shirts when that was a big trend. The business however is really bad, and attracts a lot of very weird people. I really felt bad about how much I was contributing to the death of the environment through this business. I still do a lot of graphic design for Svart Records. The club night was when I first moved to Finland. We put on a club night when there weren't a lot of people putting on shows, so we had an offer from a bar and could just start putting on shows and doing these DJ nights. 

So we did, we were bringing over underground bands, it was a 200 capacity venue which they just didn't have anyone running. So everything I've done since I moved to Finland, it's really just been about music. I've been doing my own label on the side and then working with Svart. And now I'm working in a management capacity with some bands and I really want to work in helping other people do music and give back to the thing that's given me so much of my life's enjoyment. We never took any money even at the club nights we just put the bands on and then they took all the ticket money, it was always about helping the bands, I like the underground spirit, supporting artists and so on.

With your broad view of all these aspects of music creation, distribution and promotion, do you see the world of underground music as being in distinct pockets, or is it more interconnected?

I think it's become really interconnected, underground and overground are very blurred, which is a really good thing, given the costs involved and the kind of support that's required. And also the shared knowledge of the pitfalls of the digital age, everyone understands that Spotify doesn't pay enough that it's a broken thing, but nobody knows how to solve that problem, and that's music wide. You have labels like Svart offering deals that are designed to be a lot more band friendly, I think that helps to change the industry. But then, it's also up to the bigger bands to support the business and not bleed it dry. Luckily there are a lot of people, some quite big rock stars who are very switched on to what's going on in the underground, because it's an ageing scene, it's an older crowd at festivals now. Genre wise, there's a lot more people who were into hardcore that are now also listening to black metal, maybe because there are more bands to listen to that blur the genre a bit. So that's all really interesting. I did say that black metal is in a bad state - I don't think it is in the underground.

When people come out to see Hexvessel playing songs from <em>Polar Veil</em> how do you want them to feel, given they’re likely to be some of the noisiest shows that you've played?

We played one song last time we toured for those Converge and Chelsea Wolfe Blood Moon gigs, and it got a really good reaction, which just speaks to the fact that we have a lot of heavy music fans listening to our music. We've traditionally played at all these black metal festivals, playing folk and Americana and a bit of psych rock–I've never understood why they put up with us, but they hear those things in the music, so I think that the audience that we have is pretty much gonna get it. The reactions I've been getting so far have been 'Oh, this made my day, this is exactly what I wanted to hear from you guys. I'm so glad you've gone there'. So that's kind of what I hope will happen, that people come and get what they've always wanted from us, and maybe either never knew it or never imagined it. I have a lot of people that have followed me since the black metal days, so in a way I feel like this record will be a kind of reward for them you know.

It's a bit like when I would go to Fenriz's place and we’d listen to techno music all night, at some point in the night you'd have these guys from Germany who only listen to black metal they've been waiting all night just for him to play one black metal track, and he'd play one black metal track exactly and say that's it, go to bed, it reminds me somehow of that. I've had friends from back in the day say I just checked out your new track! I'm like I've been making music all this time [laughs]. But they all raise their head out of the sand when it's a black metal song.

I feel like hearing you went to listen to techno at Fenriz' house is going to blow people's minds. It sounds like a great time.

[Laughs] It was.

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