Culture
WOUB Culture interviews Zachary Ezrin of Imperial Triumphant
By: Nicholas Kobe
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – New York City-based extreme metal band Imperial Triumphant fuses elements of black metal with the fluid and progressive tone of avant garde jazz to create a kind of calculated chaos which demands to be experienced first hand. The group’s haunting, art deco-styled gold masks set the tone for their identity and aesthetic, which is rooted deeply in NYC and draws freely on the more sinister visual motifs associated with the Jazz Age.
The band has released five studio albums, with their most recent LP, 2022’s Spirit of Ecstasy, once again pushing boundaries further than one could imagine.
Imperial Triumphant is currently touring in support of Behemoth. WOUB Culture spoke to vocalist and founding member Zachary Ezrin about the aesthetic impact NYC has had on their music; the band’s last full-length, Spirit of Ecstasy; and Ezrin’s ambitious hopes for the group.
Read a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below. The conversation contains language which may be offensive to some readers.
If you had to describe Imperial Triumphant in one sentence, to someone who has never heard of the band, what would you say?
Zachary Ezrin:
Here’s my elevator pitch. I would say Imperial Triumphant sounds like ‘70s Miles Davis started a death metal band, something like that. Something to entice people to go, “Ooh, that sounds insane. I got to check that out.” it’s definitely good, get your foot in the door pitch, get people excited about it. And we are inspired by Bitches Brew and all that stuff. So why not?
Nicholas Kobe:
So far as your newest record, Spirit of Ecstasy, what’s a particularly fond memory you have from the creative process of making that album?
Zachary Ezrin:
That’s a good question. We wrote a lot of that album together. A track like Chump Change, the opening track. That entire song was written in the studio together, rocking out, hashing it out, figuring it out. There’s something very different about that sort of writing experience. We write music in all sorts of ways, but I think there’s something really special about creating something out of nothing with other people. Any artist will testify to that. That is a completely different experience than painting on your own or dancing on your own, or writing a film score on your own. That record was a lot of writing together in the studio. There wasn’t any touring at the time. Everything was locked down, so we were just meeting two, three times a week working on music, and it got us really tight and connected.
Nicholas Kobe:
Is that something that you guys didn’t do for past records?
Zachary Ezrin:
We have, but because there was no touring in 2020 and 2021, we had unlimited time to meet. So it was just like, ‘let’s meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday,’ whatever, and we’ll just work on stuff. See what works and mess around. Spirit of Ecstasy is definitely the most aggressive album we’ve done.
Nicholas Kobe:
Speaking kind of in that regard, what’s something that you guys did musically on that record that was really exciting?
Zachary Ezrin:
Good question. Musically, on this whole album, we’re trying to create the most aggressive music while still making it listenable. That’s challenging because anyone can make chaos, even people who don’t know how to play music can do that. But how do you make structured chaos, ordered chaos and stuff that draws people in and makes them go, ‘wow, that was really intense?’ There’s a lot of hidden things in the music.
Nicholas Kobe:
Absolutely. One thing I’m also curious about is – over the years, how have you expanded the band’s visual aesthetic?
Zachary Ezrin:
Truthfully, the visual aesthetic of Imperial Triumphant is always meant to match the musical interpretations of it all. So whatever we look like is a representation of what we sound like. It’s very inspired by New York City Art Deco, the ‘20s, American mid-century sh*t. We were thinking, ‘how do we represent that?’ It’s a part of the creative process. To me it’s not just a musical project, but an art piece. The whole experience, everything about Imperial Triumphant is thought about and meant to serve a purpose, from the album artwork, the costumes, the stage performance, and obviously the music. Everything is an artistic expression. I like creatively flexing my brain into all these different areas that are not just music. Imperial Triumphant has such a unique angle, this whole New York Art Deco, atomic age, mid-century retro futurist sh*t that we do. There’s so many different ways that go about that, it’s worth exploring to me.
Nicholas Kobe:
What was it like blending that kind of art deco stuff with specifically the pre-established aesthetics of metal?
Zachary Ezrin:
I had a conversation with this guy, a manager for a band. I told him about Imperial Triumphant, and he asked, ‘what’s your band about?’ and I didn’t have an answer for him, and it kind of upset me. I was like, geez ‘how do you answer that?’ I thought about it a lot, and I’ve always wanted to do something different. I don’t want to have the same color bike as everyone or whatever it’s got to be. I want it to be different. So, I wanted to do something different with my music. Then it dawned on me, I think I was walking across 57th Street, 59th Street, and looking at those crazy buildings like the Essex Hotel and all that stuff. I looked up and I just saw all this lush, I didn’t even know what it was called at the time, but I found out later – art deco architecture. It’s this style of art and architecture that blossomed particularly New York City.
It started dawning on me. ‘I’m from New York City, I should just sing and write about what I know, that’ll be the most authentic, that’ll be the realest.’ I don’t really worship the devil. I don’t really have anything to say about that. So anything I do will be inauthentic. So I just started
learning about this and I realize there’s so much. The history of New York is so dark and so multifaceted, and there’s an intense musical pedigree and there’s an intense architectural pedigree and all this stuff that I’m getting interested in. There’s an art deco font, and I’m like, ‘oh, that’s different from using the traditional black metal medieval font.’ There’s so many worlds of metal to explore. So it’s just a matter of figuring that out. I really enjoyed that creative process, and I still do.
Nicholas Kobe:
Absolutely. When it comes to the masks in particular, how’d you specifically pick the design that you were going to wear?
Zachary Ezrin:
Took time, man. It wasn’t an overnight decision. They’re still evolving. They will always evolve. You look at any band that wears masks, they’re always changing. New York is always changing, it’s never static. They’re always rebuilding, tearing it down, rebuilding. I think that’s cool. And it’s something that I will always try to do.
Nicholas Kobe:
Keep it changing with the times or whatever music you got.
Zachary Ezrin:
Yeah. Every album, whatever it must be, you need to grow, otherwise there’s no point in still doing the band. The next album won’t sound like Spirit of Ecstasy because we just did Spirit of Ecstasy. Why would I give you another one when you can just go listen to the original? There’s no point. I admire bands that take those risks, even if it doesn’t work out.
Nicholas Kobe:
You’d rather swing for the fences and completely miss than just play it safe?
Zachary Ezrin:
Yeah, if you play it safe, then it becomes a job. It’s not art anymore. If you make a beautiful painting of a sunset and you sell it for a million dollars, you could paint another sunset for a million dollars, but that’s not maybe what you want to do. So you could maybe paint a forest or whatever. I don’t know. This is a terrible analogy, but you know what I’m saying.
Nicholas Kobe:
Yeah. Doing art because you feel obligated to do art, kind of takes the meaning out of it.
Zachary Ezrin:
Yeah, I think so.
Nicholas Kobe:
Yeah. Recently you guys released cover of A Night In Tunisia [Dizzy Gillespie] and Paranoid Android [Radiohead]. How did you guys select those songs to cover?
Zachary Ezrin:
Well, we wanted to do a covers record. So we’ve just been working on just a list of songs to cover. What is important to us is to be able to properly harmonize songs and do them in a way that’s our fashion. So there won’t be that many metal songs because that’s kind of boring. We’re already a metal band. Unless you’re playing live, then I can understand why you do a cover of a metal song. That’s a different story. But I think for a recorded piece, do a metal version of something no one’s heard. See what you can do. Learn the music and then figure out a way to make it your own. I think that’s more exciting. That’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s been a really, really fun process, I mean, the Radiohead cover sounds nothing like the Radiohead song, but it’s still kind of a cool tune.
Nicholas Kobe:
It’s definitely very much an Imperial Triumphant cover.
Zachary Ezrin:
Exactly, exactly. It sounds like Imperial Triumphant, but we didn’t write the song. You know what I mean? That’s kind of our goal with that sort of stuff. Metallica did that record of just a hundred artists covering their songs from The Black Album [a common alternate name for Metallica’s self-titled fifth album]. I listened to the entire thing, and the bands and artists that did harmonized parts, I was like ‘oh, this is way cooler.’
Nicholas Kobe:
Another question, obviously you guys are very heavily influenced by jazz. What’s something about incorporating jazz into metal that kind of surprised you?
Zachary Ezrin:
Well, my rhythm section comes from a long amount of time in the jazz scene. They’ve each played over 20 years in the jazz scene in New York, and they’re the rhythm section. They’re f*cking tight. They’re together. What it is really is that when we play the music we don’t play it like a traditional metal band. We play it more like a jazz trio in the sense that there’s no click tracks, there’s no counts. We just start and whatever the tempo is or whatever is what it’s going to be for the night, and that can change every night. It can change every take. And I think there’s something magical about that. Then you’re really capturing the essence of the moment and not just trying to nail a part.
That’s something that’s more exciting. It works better for us because we have been playing together for almost 10 years, so we’re pretty locked in. When we play together, it’s one unit with three components. It’s very freeing to play that way. I don’t think it would be as fun to do the music that we do if we all had in ear monitors. That works for other bands and that’s fine. I’m not trying to bring anyone down, but for what we do, it’s just so freeing to play this way and create it truly from scratch.
Nicholas Kobe:
And especially considering so much of jazz is free flowing and improv based, it makes a lot of sense considering you guys are from that background
Zachary Ezrin:
Yeah. I mean, when you’re at a jazz gig, you’re just calling tunes and you’re playing off of each other. It’s much more of a conversation than it is, alright, ‘now we go to this, then we go to this. Now you go, then now I go.’ It has a little more freedom to it, which I really enjoy.
Nicholas Kobe:
When you open for a lot of other metal acts or play at metal festivals, how does that kind of crowd react to your jazzier style?
Zachary Ezrin:
It’s different every time. It depends on the crowd, where we are in the world and the headliner. If we’re opening for a more straight up death metal band or straight up black metal band, there’s always going to be people that are like, ‘this is too much. I’m not into it.’ Then it becomes a bit of a fun little challenge for us. Can we win these people over? There’s always our people that are like, ‘wow, I had no idea who you were. That f*cking rocks. I’m into it.’ There’s bands like Behemoth and Zeal and Ardor who we’ve opened for and those fans for whatever reason, they’re much more into our shit. It’s a lot easier to get them into our music for whatever reason. It is fun to do that stuff when you are not playing for your fans and it’s almost like a sales pitch, but all you have to do is be yourself.
Nicholas Kobe:
What do you think it is about a band like Behemoth that makes those fans like you guys more?
Zachary Ezrin:
I don’t really know. I think there’s definitely the fact that we both have strong theatrical elements and strong visual concepts. Us and Behemoth, we’re both putting on a show, it’s not just three or four guys on stage in their t-shirts playing the music that you came to hear, you’re getting a show. I think maybe if you came to see Behemoth and you saw us you’re going to go ‘oh f*ck, that was kind of cool.’
Because you’re already in that head space, as opposed to some people that come to a show and they’re like, ‘I don’t really care. I just want to go berserk. I want to just get in the pit. I want to mosh.’ We’re not so much of a mosh band, so maybe that’s an example of where, if that’s what you came to the show for, which is totally fine, you might find what we do to be not your thing.
Nicholas Kobe:
One more question to bring us home here. What do you and your band see as your vision for the future? What’s next for Imperial Triumphant?
Zachary Ezrin:
We’re working on a new album that’s going to be wildly different from the previous stuff, and the goal is to grow. We want to grow. We want to be able to play bigger shows to more people and with a bigger stage production and be able to put on a wilder performance and perform in different ways as well. Not just metal concerts, but maybe burlesque shows or tiny jazz clubs or huge festivals, everything. I’d like to grow beyond music, working in the realms of film and television and video games. It’s all creatively inspiring to me and I’d like to participate in that world.