“It’s pretty obvious that the world is fucked up,” says Tribal Gaze frontman McKenna Holland. “There’s unnecessary violence and hatred — and we feel the world would be a better place if humanity was extinct.”
Holland is discussing the rationale behind the chillingly apocalyptic visions cast throughout the Texas death-metal outfit’s oppressive sophomore full-length, Inveighing Brilliance. “We don’t even feel bad about it,” he adds. “Since it’s death metal, it kind of goes with the theme.”
Above his bandmates’ destructive blasts and bone-sawing riffs, the vocalist unleashes a caustic barrage of subterranean growls about our dying planet.
On the gruesome single “Beyond Recognition,” an unknown outside force has entered the ecosystem, dead-set on destroying everything through an “unending bombardment” that stacks the corpses miles high. Inspired by the Fallout video game series, “Ruling in a Land with No God” similarly describes atomized plains littered with bloated, irradiated bodies.
Holland says he and the rest of the rising quintet are ecstatic to crush the metal population with the brutal, old-school sounds of their new album — a feverishly anticipated release that dropped late last year following tours with fellow Lone Star menaces Creeping Death and Frozen Soul.
Along the way, they’ve also made fans and tourmates out of veteran death-makers including Obituary, Brujeria and the Acacia Strain. But as their first release through iconic metal label Nuclear Blast, Inveighing Brilliance has the potential to propel Tribal Gaze’s career into the next phase of domination.
Revolver is catching up with Holland a couple of weeks ahead of the album’s release, and likewise just before a fall North American tour supporting tech-death greats Cattle Decapitation. He’s seated at home in Dallas, flanked by the hundreds of vinyl copies of Inveighing Brilliance they’ll be hauling on the road. It blows his mind that the band have come this far.
Holland was raised in Mineola, Texas, a rural city of fewer than 5,000 that he says wasn’t exactly tapped into youth culture. “Pretty much everyone has their ongoing joke calling Mineola ‘the retirement home of East Texas,’” he says, “because there’s just so many old people there.”
Sydney Stauts
As a teenager, Holland found his fountain of youth through the heavy sounds of Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus and Hatebreed. And he knew he wanted to hear more. Soon he was going to shows in nearby Longview — his mom often dropping him off at underground gigs in warehouses and DIY spaces.
It was at these shows that he met and forged friendships with guitarists Quintin Stauts and Ian Kilmer and bassist Zachary Denton. By 2020, the foursome officially teamed up to form Tribal Gaze — though they still needed a drummer. Holland hit Instagram to find a killer local skinsman, which is how they connected with Cesar De Los Santos.
Tribal Gaze delivered their debut EP, Godless Voyage, in 2021. That project’s furious, early-death-metal-inspired aesthetic immediately earned acclaim in the Texan underground alongside likeminded peers including Creeping Death — who took Tribal Gaze on their first North American tour in 2022 — and cave-stompers Frozen Soul, who booked them for their community-building Wrecking Ball festival. Tribal Gaze then signed to cult heavy hub Maggot Stomp to release their debut full-length, The Nine Choirs, in 2022.
For Inveighing Brilliance, they left Texas to record at Twitching Tongues guitarist-vocalist Taylor Young’s The Pit Studio in Sunland California. (The LP also follows a 2024 split release with Young’s Deadbody project).
While Inveighing Brilliance builds on the foundation of The Nine Choirs, new songs like “Smiling From Their Chariots” and “The Irreversible Sequence” trim the debut’s most epic riff-farming tendencies to deliver hyper-concentrated, ass-whipping death-thrash — something Holland hopes inspires “insane moshing, stage diving and headbanging.” Putting people in motion makes sense to the vocalist, who says some of his best ideas come while he’s on the move.
“I have to be doing something while I’m writing — I have to go on a walk or get on the StairMaster at the gym,” he says. “When I came up with the lyrics for ‘Draped in Piercing Radiance,’ I was actually working at a Walmart warehouse. It’s such a mindless job that I was thinking of a bunch of other things and I started using that time to write lyrics… and [hoping] my boss didn’t catch me writing ideas down in my phone.”
One idea that ultimately didn’t make it onto the record was a tense sample of a preacher they’d planned to use on “To the Spoils of Faith,” which they ended up dropping after discovering Kanye West had already used it on his 2021 track “Come to Life.” Instead, they filled the void with a vein-popping guest sermon from Ingrown guitarist-vocalist Ross Hansen — who they’d met on tour with Creeping Death, and whom Holland praises for having “a mean-ass voice.”
Now armed with their leanest, meanest death-metal release yet, Tribal Gaze are poised to punish the globe one show at a time. “We imagine playing each of these songs live and it being absolute chaos in the crowd,” Holland says proudly.
In other words, humanity beware — these Tribal Gaze songs are going to kill.