(On April 24th Testimony Records released the long-awaited and quite crushing eighth full-length by the German death metal band Resurrected, and that provided a timely reason for our contributor Zoltar to arrange an interview with the band’s sole remaining original member, Thomas Granzow. It was a very good discussion, as you can now see for yourselves.)
Thanks Satan for Germany. Let’s face it: back in the mid-’90s when listening to death metal became as fashionable as eating rusty nails for breakfast, they seemingly were the only ones to care – next to Poland and the Czech Republic to be fair, but a whole different level.
Since the hey days of MORGOTH, they may have failed to produce A-list contenders (and don’t get me started on what ATROCITY turned into post-Hallucinations will ya?) but the underground scene was nevertheless striving with blue collar defenders of the faith who had no problem whatsoever doing songs about zombies and serial-killers while covering early DEATH, like OBSCENITY, ANASARCA, MANGLED TORSOS, BLOOD, TORCHURE, PURGATORY…
Many were quite derivative, most of them lasted an album or two before drifting away without anybody noticing, but on this desolate battlefield, surrounded by many of their fallen comrades, RESURRECTED – or more precisely their guitarist and main songwriter Thomas Granzow – soldiered on, no matter what.
If you’re familiar with the German ’90s death metal scene, you must at least own one of their early albums, but that doesn’t say their latter stuffs – a personal fave being 2009’s Fierce – isn’t worth your time, especially when you like your death metal unapologetically, well, death metal, sometimes verging on grindcore.
Their just-released seventh album Perpetual though is a difference case: Not only is it their first in nine years and first for Testimony Records but it also proves that thanks to a now solidified and rejuvenated line-up and Soundlodge studio’s massive production, RESURRECTED aren’t as ‘stuck’ in the ’90s as one could think they would be. Just a good excuse to shoot the fish with Thomas, talking about the past, present, but also future of the band.
Extra kudos to the man who usually don’t do that much video interviews anymore for reasons explained below but agreed to make an exception for NCS.
RESURRECTED started off in 1993. To more or less quote SAINT VITUS, weren’t you born too late? I mean, just a few years shy of being part of the original wave of European death metal… Plus some would say that after 1993, that’s when the whole movement started to decline isn’t it?
I don’t know. The guys in the band were already playing as EVOCATION but nothing really came out of it, I think they were just rehearsing for fun and shit. When I jumped in, I managed to convince them to push it a bit further and that’s when we became RESURRECTED. We didn’t really overthink the whole thing, we just wanted to play music. I mean, I was just nineteen years old back then, you know. All we knew was that we wanted to play it fast and brutal!
You can easily tell on our first two or three albums that we were very influenced by CANNIBAL CORPSE and DEICIDE with a pinch of classic DEATH whom our original led guitar player was really into as well. The funny thing is that if you compare our early stuff to what we do today, we’re much, much faster now!
PROFANITY, OBSCENITY, APOPHIS, OBSCENITY… From an outsider point of view, it seemed that the mid/late ’90s German death metal scene was all but one, with everybody helping out everybody. Was it really the case?
Yes and no. We were all spread all over the country so it wasn’t as united as one would believe it’d be. I guess everybody did their best trying to make it in their own region. We met each other at festivals or gigs but that was mainly it. Usually, you would end up being closer to the bands living in the same area, and in our case, it meant we were good friends with the OBSCENITY, PROFANITY, FLESHCRAWL and PURGATORY guys; the latter we were label mates at one point, but that was pretty much it.
I recently listened to some podcast where former CANNIBAL CORPSE and current SIX FEET UNDER axeman Jack Owen admits that back in the end, the Floridian death metal scene wasn’t as tight as one could have expected. He said obviously that everybody knew everybody as well but that apart from the random ‘hello’ or ‘what’s up’, each band was doing their thing, on their own, and that’s the way it kind was back in the day in Germany as well I would say.
Had it to do with the fact that although death metal was very popular there, there weren’t that many labels in Germany back then, or mostly very underground things?
You’re right, there wasn’t that many. MORBID RECORDS (cult label which put out cult CSSO, HAEMORRHAGE and OBSCENITY albums among many others) was the place to go to, but besides them, there were MMI who were more grindcore oriented, PERVERTED TASTE to which we were early signed to, and that was it.
For better and for worse, for a long time you were remembered for your second album, 1999’s Faireless To The Flesh because of its blatant HR Giger rip-off cover artwork and horrendous snare drums sound… Was it a tough heritage to have? I have to confess I love that album for EXACTLY those two reasons…
Well, if you have the, let’s say, Giger-inspired cover, hold on to it because it is now quite a collector item! I’ll take the blame for the shitty sound as I thought I could play the big producer role on this album. I loved SIX FEET UNDER’s third album Maximum Carnage and especially how it was mixed, with that snappy snare drum sound and really-upfront-in-the-mix vocals and I naively thought I could do the same by myself. That’s obviously proved to be a huge mistake and that’s why I tried to correct my wrongs and re-recorded some parts in 2022 so it could be reissued as Faireless To The Flesh II.
The funny thing is that the very same reasons why some people hated the album when it was originally released back in 1999 are the same why some now love it! I guess it has to do with the fact that nowadays, everybody sounds the same, using the same preamps, the same drum sound, and so on. Faireless To The Flesh may sound shitty but at least it sounds unique!
Regarding the Giger cover, we didn’t know at the time. Through PERVERTED TASTE, we got in touch with this south-American artist who sold us this painting, saying that it was indeed influenced by Giger but that it was all his nevertheless. Next thing you know, once the album is out we get contacted by Giger’s office, saying we had stolen this painting without any permission. That’s when we discovered this was, indeed, an original Giger painting and that the south-American basically ripped us off.
I didn’t know what to do, we had this awful-sounding album, a potential lawsuit, and so on… Then Giger himself called me up as he obviously wanted to understand what the hell had happened. I was honest and told him the whole story and he sincerely sounded sorry for me. So in the end, he asked me to pull out the original CD with his artwork, make another one with a new cover, and if we obliged, he promised not to sue us. So we did and he kept his word. True gentleman.
In 2006, you joined then labelmates GRIND INC. on bass. What would you say are the musical differences between, as they more or less both play death metal don’t they?
Well, for a start, it’s not the same state of mind. And as the name states it pretty well, it has way more grindcore influences than RESURRECTED ever had. Initially, they were just friends of mine and we ended up quite often on the same bill a lot with our respective bands. After the release of their debut album in 2005, their guitar player had to live in the Netherlands for professional reasons for six months so he did ask me to replace him for the few gigs happening during that period, which I gladly did. And when he came back, their bass player left, and they offered me his position — and to make sure I wouldn’t say no, they threatened me to split the band if I dared refusing. So I had no choice but to say ‘yes’… (laughters)
GRIND INC. hasn’t officially split up or anything but let’s say the band is ‘on ice’ as we speak, as some people in the band are too busy with work, family life, and so on. The funny thing is that at some point, you had no less than three RESURRECTED members in the line-up: me, our singer since 2012 Christoph, and one of our former drummers, Adriano.
You are the sole more or less original member left in the band. Is that a burden?
What is weird is that I was the youngest when I joined back in 1993. But now I’m the oldest! But the cool thing about our drummer Dennis (who also now plays in PROSTITUTE DISFIGUREMENT) and Christoph joining in 2012 was that it truly ignited some kind of rebirth. Those guys are now my family and, in a way, I don’t truly feel like the only original member left, as somehow, RESURRECTED was reborn in 2012 thanks to those two.
It nevertheless took you guys nine years to come up with a new album. What happened?
It is due to a combination of things. Right after the release of our eponymous album in 2017, I was diagnosed with tongue cancer. They actually had to remove part of it so that’s why I don’t do that much video interviews… When I came out of the hospital, I looked like a cyborg! I had a tube in my throat and bindings on my arm and leg because they took parts of both to reconstruct my tongue. I was like a walking puzzle.
This was June and with RESURRECTED we had one of the biggest shows we ever had scheduled the following month at the Nord Open Air Festival in Bausendorf with an estimated crowd of 8,000 so I just couldn’t miss that, even more so as this was the unofficial release show of our latest album. The other guys tried to prevent me from doing it as I had lost about twelve kilos, really felt like shit, and had an open arm still recovering from the operation where you could actually see the nerves and tendons. But there was no way I could cancel it so we did it anyway, but it took me about a year to recover… Then COVID hit and the whole world was shut down for six months. That’s when I decided to partly re-record Faireness To The Flesh.
By the time the world opened up again, I believe we had only three new songs done, despite the fact that Resurrected was almost four years old by now. At one point, I almost had to threaten the guys, so to speak, and decided to book the studio in 2025 without asking their permission. Then I delivered them the news, saying that no matter what happened we were now due to record our new album in six months time.
Thankfully, that’s when Christoph Zeller joined on lead guitar and he really brought on the table a whole new energy, contributing with the music to three of the songs on the new album. His approach to groove is slightly different compared to mine and I can’t help but love coming up with very fast parts, but we complement each other very well.
If I’m not misunderstood, you guys haven’t properly toured in a long time haven’t you? Maybe now would be a good time wouldn’t it?
We are mostly playing locally as we speak but we’re working with our booker on getting shows outside of Germany. We’ve never played France for instance, which is weird as it’s a neighboring country. I’d love to tour with IMMOLATION for instance, who have got a new record too. I mean, the last proper tour we did was way back in 2010, and when I mean tour, I mean with more than ten dates…
We’d love to come back to the US too. We for instance did the Milwaukee Metal Fest in 2000 with five different stages and an estimated crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 people. The day before the show, we also had a small club show with DEEDS OF FLESH and FLESHGRIND. This was insane!
https://www.facebook.com/resurrected.brutaldeath/
https://spkr.store/collections/resurrected
https://resurrectedbrutality.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/testimonyrecords