Warbringer frontman John Kevill wants to harness the world’s most malevolent forces and channel them into thrash metal tunes.
“I’m in a metal band called Warbringer,” said Kevill in a Zoom interview. “We’re fast, vicious, and have a spiky logo, so we’re obviously trying to sound evil. What is the evilest thing that is wrong, wretched, and awful? Everything related to large-scale human-led institutions, such as a state, an army, or a police force.”
The thrash metal outfit’s seventh studio album, “Wrath and Ruin,” released on March 14 by Napalm Records, is a razor-sharp indictment of humanity’s past, present, and future woes. Warbringer will perform new music from the release at their hometown show, scheduled for Saturday, April 12, at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, alongside Allegaeon, Skeletal Remains, and Summoning the Lich.
While Warbringer began mostly singing about war, the group’s subject matter has evolved over the past couple of albums, including their latest, which takes on themes of class power and dystopian techno-feudalism.
“It’s a lot less battles and military war, which do represent a catastrophic waste of life, but it’s also the socioeconomic conditions and the effect they have on the inner psyche,” Kevill said. “I was trying to hit that angle because it’s a relevant one to the lives of people today and underexplored, or at least not discussed in the ways that I think it should be.”
The group’s prior album, “Weapons of Tomorrow,” was released in April 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Kevill, like many others during that period, struggled with his mental health as everyday life came to a halt. He began outlining themes of class, power, and dystopia, which became the driving inspiration for “Wrath and Ruin.”
The album’s opening track, “The Sword and The Cross,” is an epic tale of a medieval lord professing how he earned his status through violence and legitimized himself using religious ideology. The follow-up, “A Better World,” is led by a melodic death metal riff and pounding drums that create an anxious, doom-laden spiral, as it follows a person being crushed by societal insecurities.
Among the anxieties explored in the album is the threat posed by artificial intelligence. The album features the song “Neuromancer,” named directly after William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, whose lyrics are sung from the point of view of the AI character in the book, Wintermute, as it works to destroy humanity by manipulating their minds and achieving cybernetic transcendence.
Part of Kevill’s affinity for cyberpunk is how it addresses socioeconomic tensions caused by the widespread adoption of AI, which is then reinforced by a governing force. He believes that other dystopian works, such as George Orwell’s “1984,” focus too much on portraying big government as evil and oppressive while missing other brewing threats.
According to Kevill, the Orwellian framing often hijacks the spotlight from what a stronger government can do at its best, such as providing an eight-hour workday, job protections, and food regulations for everyday people. Along with concerns about AI, he believes the rollback of these protections could pave the way for the cyberpunk foretold in “Wrath and Ruin.”
“A cyberpunk future is always corporately dominated,” he said. “That’s very much the Western world and what the United States is becoming, where the government right now is openly captured by the oligarchs. It’s as if we’re doing a weird, vast economic blood ritual to birth a trillionaire or something.
“Everyone is going to have to run faster on the wheel, and you’re going to have less around the margins. It’s going to be three grand, not two, to rent a closet in one of the big cities. You’ll never retire or have affordable healthcare, and that’s very profitable. Many things that people call the failure of our system are actually its intended success.”
While the metal community is sometimes divided on whether the genre should address politics, Warbringer has typically addressed that subject head-on. In a 2017 interview with Loudwire, Kevill said he believes metal can be more than a “Beavis and Butthead” caricature of the genre and that if he’s channeling anger, it should be with purpose and intellect.
One of the group’s heaviest songs in their catalog, both musically and in terms of social commentary, is “Remain Violent,” from their 2017 album “Woe to the Vanquished.” The song criticizes a police force’s rising presence in neighborhoods and the brutality that follows, with Kevill singing, “City streets that I called my home/Are starting to look like a combat zone.”
Warbringer’s approach to being a consistent thrash metal group has earned them their stripes in the genre. Kevill credits the metal bands that came before, more specifically, the ’80s metal acts who played loud, heavy, and fast. Listeners can easily detect influences in their sound from bands such as Exodus, Slayer, Megadeth, Kreator, Demolition Hammer, and Morbid Saint, among others.
The band’s aggressive riffs and headbanging anthems stood out during the late 2000s and early 2010s when they rose to prominence amid the dominance of other metal subgenres, such as deathcore and grindcore, which combine aspects of hardcore—a subgenre of punk.
As the frontman who helped found the Los Angeles band (fresh out of high school) in 2004, he looks back over two decades and thinks the band may have achieved notoriety just a few years too early. But for better or worse, he’s content with how it’s worked out.
“Warbringer has a seven-album run right now, and none of them suck,” Kevill said. “Most bands, even great ones, can’t say that.”
Warbringer
Where: The Teragram Ballroom, 1234 W 7th St., Los Angeles.
When: 5 p.m. Saturday, April 12.
Tickets: $29.70 at Ticketmaster.com.