(Below you will find our Comrade Aleks’ interview with guitarist Dohrn from the Austrian metal band Guyođ, whose new EP was released late last month.)
The Austrian band Guyođ announced themselves in 2023 with their debut, Heart of Thy Abyss. That furious work, at the intersection of extreme death metal and doom, unpolished and thunderous, was imbued with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Herman Melville, lending the album a special charm. Their up-to-date half-hour-long release, Death Throes of a Drowning God, which another band would list as a full-length album, is considered by Guyođ to be an EP. This mini-album consists of four full-length tracks, each nearly six minutes long, and four noise drone interludes, collectively titled “Signal,” but with a numbered designation.
Regardless, Guyođ, ignoring convention, delivers listeners dark, concentrated, and meaty stuff. According to the band, one of the ideas behind the EP was to create more disturbing and savage material compared to their first album, and they have succeeded in this quest. This time, the celebration of chaos and madness is presented in the form of vigorous, monstrous death metal with a touch of extreme doom and black metal. At times (“Behind the Walls of Ice”), one is tempted to use the adjective “avant-garde,” but that would be pretentious… but why not? This feast of entropy has its share of deceptive calm, as in the track “Hestia Drowning,” but there are also poignant moments.
Guyođ have taken a creative approach to such a relatively short work, and if you’re looking for a little shake-up, check out this EP. And yet I hate to talk about how I see the music, especially when there’s a chance to talk with its author. Another interview with Dohrn (guitars) is here before you.
Hi Dohrn! How are you? What’s Guyođ’s current status?
Greetings, Aleks! Thank you very much for having us again! I’m doing great, thanks for asking, and so is the band. We are currently in the midst of releasing Death Throes of a Drowning God and responses have been very good so far. It truly feels like a high point in our “history” so far!
I’ve checked – we did an interview with you here two years ago, what has Guyođ been doing all this time?
A lot, I would say, at least that’s how it feels to me. Back in 2024, we played live a lot, spreading our music to nine countries in Europe, I think. It was also the year when the idea of releasing an EP was born. I had several songs in my back pocket, so to say, and our plan was to finish arranging four of them and recording and releasing them as fast as possible, to use the momentum we had gained after releasing Heart of Thy Abyss. Well, but then life happened and the process took a bit longer than anticipated.
We had the chance to play live more (for example our first major festival gig at Kaltenbach Open Air and a tour with Woe Unto Me in late 2024), and the whole recording and writing process just required more time and attention than we could give in between gigs. So, we basically took 2025 off to mainly focus on recording and producing the new EP, with only very few live shows. It’s been a bit of a painstaking process, but very, very rewarding. I’m sure I speak for the rest of the band when I say that it paid off to invest as much time and energy into Death Throes of a Drowning God as we did.
You really had a tour? How did you get in touch with Woe Unto Me? They play a slightly different kind of music, although it’s not strange company in the end of the day.
Yeah, we were on the road with them for five shows. So, a small tour, but a great experience. We got in contact over a common friend in the Slovakian band Solipsism (cool band, they just released a new single a while ago, check it out!) He established contacts between me and Artyom, band leader of Woe Unto Me, who was super friendly and easy-going. We booked the shows together with them, so it was a nice DIY-spirit (as in almost everything we do).
As for the music, yes it is different, but I personally enjoy lineups where bands are not too close to each other and where I get to hear different stuff. And for everyone who hasn’t listened to Woe Unto Me, check them out, too. Very challenging music, outstandingly well crafted and great musicians, all of them!
You just released Death Throes of a Drowning God, and you tagged it as an EP, as it’s 30 minutes long. But I received two “full-length” albums of the same duration this month. Why did you choose the “smaller” format? Did it fit your vision of this material?
Yes, absolutely. On the one hand the plan was from the get-go to release something more compact and focused. Especially after Heart of Thy Abyss, which felt rather monolithic (length-wise as well as considering the effort that went into making it). Also, it would have felt weird for us to tag four songs (plus the four interludes) as a full-length release.
You aimed to create a “more disturbing and savage” album, how do you explain this urge? What inspired you this way?
Along the veins of what I just said, I think the debut album with a lot of slower and longer songs made us want to do something different with the next output. We just wanted to show to the listeners that Guyođ is more than just death-doom. Of course, there were faster and more black-metal-ish parts on the album already, but we wanted to highlight these aspects more to create a starker contrast. After all, each release should stand on its own and have its own character. At least that is what we aspire to.
Do you mean that the next Guyođ album will be performed in another vein consciously?
Well, we will see how it develops naturally, but I would be very much surprised if it was going to be just the same all over again.
Foremost, there are four noisy tracks named “Signal 00347”, “Signal 05575”, etc., in the album. How do they bond this material?
Very early during the songwriting process for the EP we contacted Charly Steinpatz, a very talented musician and sound engineer in our hometown Graz who then created a huge amount of drone tracks for us. At first, we had no clear picture of which ones to use, and how. The idea of putting them between (almost) every song, just evolved naturally. I feel like that provides the EP with a clearer structure, and the “signals” highlight each song. At the same time, it creates the effect of the whole EP being connected like one long opus. Especially if you have Death Throes… running in the background, it feels like an organic piece that is over rather quickly.
Nice idea indeed! Dohrn, you said that two of the songs have an anti-religious approach, which ones? Were there specific events in your life that set you against religion?
Most explicitly, “Behind Walls of Ice”, to a lesser extent also “Hestia Drowning”. And of course, the EP title! Since I wrote the largest part of the lyrics for both songs, I will answer the question on a personal level. No specific life events come to mind, but I have become estranged from religion since quite early on in my childhood/youth and it’s just been an organic process to further distance myself from it. I do not presume to impose this view on others, but I just can’t come to terms with most core elements of religion. Namely, there being a creator-god behind the material world, an entity that is interested in how an insignificant life form like us humans lead their lives and punishes or rewards behaviour… it just smells like a very childish view of the world to me, trying to avoid the complexities of human existence and its collision with our surroundings.
However, don’t people need a higher idea to follow? A protest for protest’s sake is meaningless, and as we have seen in practice, society would eagerly degrade without a beacon ahead. And I doubt that people see science, for example, as alternative for religion. I don’t say that people need religion, but there’s nothing offered instead, even healthy and rational atheism is under the ban now as I understand.
I also feel like science is not strictly speaking an alternative of religion. Science is just a way of generating knowledge, knowledge that is very well fallible (but every good scientist knows that). And thus it can help find a way through the world on a rational level.
I agree however with the need to follow a higher idea, or ideals. And I would argue that all of these ideas are, in the end, man-made. Religious, or otherwise. So, we are basically talking about questions of morals and ethics, the ideals we hold up and that determine our day-to-day actions (or at least how we would ideally wish for things to go.) In the end, the worst thing we could end up with is utter moral relativism, as in, nothing matters because everything goes.
The idea that keeps me at a very long safety distance to religion is the claim that their ethics stem from a higher being, and that they are true because God, or whatever, says so. This is what I mean by a childish view of the world. Kids at a young age tend to base their morals on their parents – you gotta act this way or that, ’cause mum/dad says so. And I feel like religions are doing the same, projecting the parents-notion onto a god-figure. You surely can base your own morality this way, but I would strongly argue that it certainly isn’t the only, or even the best way.
But back to the album… There are church organ parts in two songs. Did you include them to underline their connection to the religious topic?
Honestly, I am not sure whether that was the idea all along, or whether it just felt right on the level of sound. But it definitely does fit in neatly. In that context I also want to highlight the choir at the end of “A Thousand Invisible Eyes”, an idea which came up very late in the production process and which further strengthens this contrast between clerical elements and the anti-clerical message behind it.
What are the two other songs about? Just abstract expressions of negativity or something else?
Well, I would claim that all the lyrics on the EP have more layers than just one. What connects all of them, in my opinion, is taking a negative viewpoint on things but gaining something positive from that and sort of owning this negativity.
If I may shortly elaborate on the songs one by one, “A Thousand Invisible Eyes” is a rather introspective song. It deals with the heavy weight that life can sometimes have, with inertia, being trapped in oneself. Somehow counteracted by the rather chaotic songwriting. “Behind Walls of Ice” is based on an idea I stumbled across in the book Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare, where the author mentions an old myth of a paradisaic place where only animals live, and it’s blocked from the rest of the world by a gigantic wall of, you guessed it, ice. I picked up on that, and one way to read the lyrics is that there is no paradise, no eternal glorious afterlife that awaits us humans after death. And that hoping otherwise is folly.
Then again, “Vortex of Infinite Despair” is more focused on some negative phenomena of the human mind, like fear, anxiety, panic, despair, combined with images of a perishing world around oneself. Finally, “Hestia Drowning” evolves around the idea of everything that seemed certain breaking apart. Hestia is the Roman goddess of home and hearthfire and I am using her drowning as a symbol for that.
Last but not least, there are some messages hidden behind the “signals”. We will provide a way of accessing them at some point in the future…
The things you say about “Hestia Drowning” are very interesting. How did you come to this idea?
Just by looking at the world and society around me. I feel we live in a time of very fast developments, and I personally (without going into depth) see a lot of them going in a bad direction. So, “Hestia Drowning” was a way to channel the feelings going alongside that observation.
How do you estimate your level of musicianship in Death Throes of a Drowning God? Do you feel a progress of some kind? And in which direction do you aim to progress?
The new songs definitely were (and still are) a challenge to master. As mentioned earlier, the material is faster, but it’s also more complex at times. So I would say there is definitely progress. Whether one thinks it’s in the right direction, everyone has to decide for themselves. We are certainly proud of it. As for the future, we will see. There is more material in the making and again it is rather challenging already.
What are your plans now that you have the brand-new release at hand? Do you already have an idea what to do next?
We will be more active live again and play some shows this year. Parallel to that, we are already writing and recording new songs. Stay tuned!
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