Green Druid Approaches Doom Metal Differently

Denver band Green Druid may have set out to be a more straightforward stoner-doom band nine years ago, but its four members no longer feel the need to wear matching black cloaks and sound like Black Sabbath disciples.

“That was the kind of band we wanted to be when we started,” explains guitarist Graham Zander.

But “there’s more to Green Druid than meets the eye," adds bassist Ryan Skates. "Trust me.”

In that sense, the band name isn’t “necessarily conducive to what kind of band we are anymore or what kind of band we’re trying to be,” says guitarist and vocalist Chris McLaughlin.

Now the goal is to “explore a wide range of emotion” and have a “more inclusive sound with everything,” McLaughlin says.

“I think it very much started as that kind of band where we just wanted to play heavy riffs and not really worry too much about the diversity of it,” he explains. “Now we’re much more interested in making different sections, different sounds and exploring different emotions with it, so it’s not just anger or rage or that kind of thing.”

During a recent rehearsal, the bandmembers are taking a break to discuss their current writing effort and approach to following up 2020’s At the Maw of Ruin, which showcases way more harsh elements than you’d expect from a typical “stoner” band, complete with gnarly cover art of a dead king decomposing into his throne.

“We leaned into the heavier, black [metal] elements and playing some blast beats, tremolo stuff and faster moments at times,” on the sophomore album, says drummer Mikey Honiotes, who joined Green Druid in 2018.

At the Maw of Ruin showed that Green Druid won't fall into pot-smoking tropes, but still don’t expect the new record to be more of the same. “All of us are in agreement that we don’t just want to write a rehash of the last album, so I think we’re really pushing ourselves to take our music into new directions,” Zander says. “I think there’s a lot of experimentation that’s involved in that. We actually just had a really cool writing session where we took a song that’s half written, then recomposed it into a completely new style.”

Still buzzing from the jam, the musicians cite the bands that they’re into, including Massive Attack, Portishead (there’s a ten-plus-minute cover of “Threads” on At the Maw of Ruin), Death Grips, Nails, Nirvana, Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. And, of course, Sabbath and Electric Wizard — two pillars of stoner and doom metal.

“Radiohead came up three times today in rehearsal," says Honiotes, "but we’re never going to sound like Radiohead."

Green Druid doesn't want to sound like any of those bands anyway, says McLaughlin, who loves the vocal style of Pixies frontman Frank Black, even though “I sound nothing like him.”

“Influences don’t necessarily determine what the overall end sound is going to be,” he adds. The question he poses is: “How do we make an album that doesn’t just sound like a weird mess of songs?

“The trouble is making this all consistent. We want to have all these different influences, such as big, chunky Nails-style riffs and super-subtle atmospheric parts as well,” McLaughlin explains.

Whatever the final product sounds like, Green Druid is going to release new music sooner rather than later at this point. You can get a little sneak peek at the latest material live, when the band opens for Bongzilla on Tuesday, August 22, at the hi-dive. Kadabra is also on the bill.

“We bring a really good atmosphere. It’s always fun to blast the fog machines and have some spooky green lighting,” Zander says, adding that the upcoming show is one of only a handful the band is playing during such a writing-heavy year.

Coming up with the longer, complex compositions that Green Druid does best naturally just takes more time, Zander admits, but the group is consciously trying to go shorter this time around.

“It’s easy for us to write long-form songs now just because we have a lot of permutations that we naturally gravitate toward that end up taking a lot of time,” he adds. “It’s a challenge to write shorter. Can we say what we want to say and have no filler in these songs and write really good songs that don’t feel too short if it’s five minutes?”

“A lot of that is like, ‘Let’s write a short song,’ and it still ends up being ten minutes,” Honiotes shares. “And maybe there’s a theme that comes back from the beginning, but a lot of them almost could be split up into smaller pieces.”

There is way more to Green Druid nowadays than meets the eye, and the band clearly isn’t done expanding upon and adding to its definition of stoner-doom metal.

“One of my favorite parts about writing new music is finding genres that you like but may not necessarily fit into the doom mold, and seeing what you can pull from those different styles in order to make it fit your sound," McLaughlin concludes.

Green Druid, 8 p.m. Tuesday, August 22, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $20-$22.