Of Metal And Steel: An Interview With Weald And Woe
Weald And Woe is an Idaho based black metal band whose image and music incorporate both medieval and fantasy elements while paying homage to the likes of Bathory, Immortal, and the like. It’s not an overstatement to say Weald And Woe are the best at what they do and it won’t surprise me if they become the next big name in the genre of American black metal.
To date the band has released two albums: ‘For The Good Of The Realm’ and ‘The Fate Of Kings And Men.’ In July the band released a newly recorded version of an earlier track “Wings Of Hate” which originally appeared on a split tape release (Weald And Woe and Candlewolf) in 2020. This single is included as a bonus track on Fiadh’s cassette tape reissue of ‘The Fate Of Kings And Men‘ which is available now.
Cosmic Monolith: Let’s start at the very beginning and work our way up. What got you into metal in the first place as a fan, was it a record you bought, a concert you went to, what was it? Do you remember the year?
Weald And Woe: The first instance of rock music that I can remember listening to would have been the Nirvana live album ‘From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah’ and that would have been in the late 90s, if memory serves. I used to pretty religiously watch Total Request Live each day after school, so I had a lot of early exposure to bands like Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, etc. The early 2000s nu-metal/rock radio stuff was very pivotal for me.
My first rock concert was Blink 182 in 2001, and they had ‘fuck’ in giant flaming letters over the stage and I was pretty hooked on being in a band after that. I started playing bass in 2002 and then soon picked up the guitar and have been playing in bands consistently since 2005.
Cosmic Monolith: As a fan, what was your first metal show you attended?
Weald And Woe: I suppose it will depend on what you consider to be metal. I saw Linkin Park with Mudvayne in 2003, and if that doesn’t cut it, then it might be Avenged Sevenfold in 2005. Or some various Warped Tour year in between!
Cosmic Monolith: What about death and black metal? What got you hooked when it comes to this genre?
Weald And Woe: I think my first actual exposure to black metal would have been the track ‘The Ravens’ by Bathory, which I downloaded via Limewire around 2006ish, probably on accident. It’s an acoustic track, so it’s not very ‘black metal’ but I remember being pretty enamored with it. I didn’t dig too much into black/death metal after that beyond some Wikipedia snooping about Mayhem. I didn’t really come around to more extreme metal until I was in my mid-20s.
I have always been a fan of the bigger names like Metallica, Slipknot, etc, which was pretty much all that got played on my small-town rock radio station, and power metal has long been a favorite of mine. My first proper introduction to black metal was Immortal’s ‘At The Heart of Winter’ and I’ve been hooked ever since. I tend to lean towards the more melodic side of things, personally, but I dig pretty much all of it. I’ll amend that: DSBM isn’t really my thing, but the rest is fine!
Cosmic Monolith: Tell us about Weald And Woe. When did it start and what was the concept or impetus behind it?
Weald & Woe: Like so many others, W+W started as a solo project, and I was writing and self-recording in my apartment, mainly just to see if I could. I didn’t have any clear musical goals or even strong aesthetics at that point, I was just writing things that I thought sounded cool. I eventually put out an EP, and was invited to play live shortly after, despite never having any intention of doing so.
I was really focused on my other band, By Fire and Sword, at the time, so Weald & Woe was just something I did in my ‘off time.’ It was really warmly received, so we just kept doing it and eventually became a full band in 2021 and have been going strong ever since! There wasn’t a strong aesthetic direction until we released ‘The Fate of Kings and Men’, and at that point I had really latched onto the medieval aesthetic, and it’s been kind of a calling card since then.
Cosmic Monolith: Let’s circle back to last year when you went on tour. Was this the first tour Weald And Woe did post pandemic? How did it go, was it a success or was it too expensive to hit the road again, any time soon?
Weald And Woe: It was not our first tour, actually! We had done an 8 or 9-day run in August of 2022, and had done several weekender-type stints in between that tour and our tour last October and have toured Canada and done some festival dates since then so we’re no stranger to the road. They’ve all been very successful so far, in my estimation. We’re at a point now where the band is financially solvent and between our door cuts and merch sales we aren’t paying out of our personal pockets to tour or play out of town, which is amazing to us, and we are very grateful to our fans because not everyone has that.
Cosmic Monolith: What’s the word on Weald And Woe right now? Are you in writing / band rehearsal mode right now for a new record?
Weald And Woe: Right now, we are really buckled down to work on our third album, which will be out sometime next year, probably late summer or early fall. The music is written, so we’re just spending the rest of the year refining and honing to ensure it’s something we’re personally proud of and our fans will love.
Cosmic Monolith: Speaking of writing, when it comes to writing in the extreme metal / black genre, how do you get in the mindset to write the songs you do, what gets you there?
Weald And Woe: I spend a lot of my free time listening to pop, classical, new age, Celtic and medieval music, and I often pull a lot of my ideas from there. I think of songwriting as a practical skill, not something that I need to ‘be in the mood’ for, so I actually block out time in my schedule to actively sit down and work on music. Some sessions are more productive than others, but I can always come up with something, even if I might alter it later. I come up with a lot of melody and riff ideas while I’m walking my dog or in the shower and doing other mundane tasks, so I will often hum them into my phone, so I don’t lose them, and then turn them into songs later. A lot of W+W music starts that way!
Cosmic Monolith: What’s the inspiration for the writing behind your songs, where does that come from, is it pop culture, history, books what’s feeding you creatively?
Weald And Woe: As far as thematic inspiration, I read a lot of historical fiction, fantasy and horror books, so I am heavily influenced by those worlds. And by stoic and existentialist philosophy to a lesser extent. I like to take an idea, or a philosophical issue that I’m grappling with and put it in a suit of armor, so-to-speak. The frosting on top is swords and knights and armor and chivalry, because those are very attention grabbing and pleasing to look at, but the substance of the art is the struggle of being.
Cosmic Monolith: I spoke to you about two months ago and you mentioned that Weald & Woe is taken from the Justice of Weald and Woe archetype in D&D. What came first for you, was it metal or was it gaming? And if it was gaming, what game(s) was it and what year was this?
Weald & Woe: I’ve pretty much always been into video games, my family bought a Super Nintendo when I was very young, and I was completely hooked on my Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2, XBOX 360, etc., as I was growing up. Gaming has always been a very valuable escape for me. In that sense, gaming came first. I do think that around the time I got into metal was when I began to play more ‘serious’ games and take it more seriously. Middle school and high school were huge for me in that regard.
I remember many OG XBOX parties where 4 of us each brought our console and had to connect them together to play Halo. That would have been 2004 and onward. Final Fantasy X was the first RPG I remember playing and I was immediately taken with the style and have been a huge RPG fan ever since. That’s probably very apparent in our music and art now that I think back on it! In recent years I’ve mostly been into Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, the Dark Souls series, and I also really like the Pathfinder RPG games that came out in the last 5-6 years.
Cosmic Monolith: What was your introduction to gaming, was it a friend, the hype of D&D, how did it happen and what year was it?
Weald & Woe: I had been very interested in tabletop gaming since high school, and my sister got me a Pathfinder Beginner’s Box for my 26th birthday. I started a small group with some friends that I GM’d for about a year, and then that fizzled out (they got married, had babies, bought houses, various things) so I linked up with another group playing Pathfinder and we’ve been playing consistently for the last 7 years or so. I find that scheduling a D&D session is equally as difficult as scheduling rehearsal. Coordinating 5 adults is a pain in the ass!
Cosmic Monolith: Do you still play and if you do, what “go to” games and how often do you get together with friends to play?
Weald & Woe: We tend to mostly play Pathfinder but are currently on several sessions of Delta Green (like the TTRPG version of X-Files), have played some Mork Borg, and even tried out Starfinder, which we were not overly keen on.
Cosmic Monolith: What about your most recent album, For The Good Of The Realm, tell us about that. How much did fantasy from pop culture (movies, books, TV, etc.) and / or gaming play a role in it? Can you talk to that as well?
Weald & Woe: Remarkably little of it, actually. There are some overt references if you know where to look. “Rite of Thorns” is a phrase taken from Baldur’s Gate 3 but is not about BG3. ‘Trees of Silver and Gold’ is a Tolkien reference, so there’s some stuff sprinkled in there. The actual lyrical content of the album is a man wrestling with the idea of whether or not his life was worth something. Will he be remembered? Did he live a ‘good’ life? Was the world better for him being in it? Those things are addressed through several different situations: the heat of battle, death, etc. But it’s all one big rumination on that concept.
Cosmic Monolith: Fantasy gaming used to be very, very analog: Pen and paper. Now it’s high tech with Twitch, social media, virtual tabletop gaming, where do you fit into this? Are you analog or digital, in this sense?
Weald & Woe: My group is pen and paper. I have used some iPad apps that I have very much enjoyed for leveling up and inventory management, status effects, etc, but we aren’t playing over Roll20 or anything, we’re all seated at the same table.
Cosmic Monolith: Currently, D&D and fantasy gaming in general has gone through a resurgence in popularity becoming “big” again. Do you like this new renaissance of fantasy gaming and how popular it is or is this taking away from fantasy gaming’s charm and niche?
Weald & Woe: I think it’s great! Sure, any newfound popularity in something that has been a gate-kept niche is going to attract its fair share of punishers and weirdos, but overall, I think the enhanced optics only make things better. More people mean more public support for enhancements to the systems, more options for dice, playmats, apps, development across the board. D&D was cool when it was small and it’s cool when it’s big. As much as it pissed off the purists, I got a lot of joy out of that bit where people were playing Magic: The Gathering in the Frozen Soul pit. Not everything in life has to be so serious. I would much rather play Magic in the pit than get spin-kicked in the neck. Life is hard, let people have their little joys.
Cosmic Monolith: Final question and this one is all about the band. What do you want us to know, what lies ahead in 2024 for Weald & Woe, etc. The floor is all yours.
Weald & Woe: After finishing the next album, it’s Castle Metal World Domination 2025! More might, more magic, more riffs! We’re going to go as many places as we can and spread the medieval magic every chance we get!
