By Greg Pratt

Chatting with NILE mainman Karl Sanders is always a positive, life-affirming experience. You’d expect the guy to call you from deep inside the sarcophagi, admonishing you over the phone line in the deepest death metal growl of all time. Instead, he’s always chipper, full of energy and nothing but happy.

“Fuck yeah,” Sanders beams. “Every day above ground is a good day.”

And with the impending release of Nile’s seventh album, At The Gate Of Sethu, the man’s got plenty of reason to be chipper. Mainly because he’s done it again, put out another top-notch death metal album, one that takes the heaviness the band is known for at both blasting and dragging speeds, subtracts the overprocessed production sounds they’ve utilized in the past, and spits out a raw album, one that’s overflowing with energy.

“Yeah, that rings with me,” says Sanders. “(Producer) Neil Kernon said something when he came to pre-production to watch us play the songs in the rehearsal room. He said, ‘Guys, what I want to do is capture this raw fire that I’m hearing right here in the band room. That’s the energy I want to capture on this disc and present it to people.’”

And does Sanders feel that Kernon and the band achieved that sound and feel?

“Absolutely,” he says. “It’s kind of a stripped-down, clean, natural, raw, honest production. It just lets the music speak for itself. There’s not a lot of overproduction on it, it’s really the exact opposite of that. It’s streamlined, stripped down, clean, and clear.”

Like I say, in the past the band has utilized production sounds so processed and so bass-heavy and just overwhelmingly oppressive that it has occasionally got in the way of what matters most: enjoying the great death metal tunes at hand.

“Yeah, I think it’s about listenability,” says Sanders. “Once you get going so fast it gets tough to hear stuff. Especially when you’ve got a super heavy production, it makes it even that much harder to hear stuff once it gets going fast. We really wanted people to hear the actual, actual musicianship on this record and not have it get lost in this big heavy wall of heaviosity. I mean, I love heavy music and I think the album is still heavy; it’s just not as thick. It’s a cleaner, stripped down kind of thing. Like Reign In Blood where it’s just the natural, raw actual fucking thing, and that’s where it gets its bite and viciousness from.”

As me and Sanders chat, he reveals that he’s now 49 years old, no small feat considering the physical endurance test that playing such highly technical extreme music is. But he’s got the love of metal in him, and it makes it all worthwhile.

“It’s what we love,” he says. “Metal is my life. It’s what I do; it’s the thing I love. I get up every day, fucking ready to work hard, because metal is the love of my life. It’s my passion, it’s what drives me. It’s what gives me a reason to get out of bed and kick ass.”

He’s on to something: the real power of metal is giving the listener the strength to face the day, a fact not lost on either him or myself as our chat gets increasingly, and unabashedly, dorky.

“Dude, fuck yeah, I remember being in high school and putting on JUDAS PRIESTto get me to school that day,” he says.

I tell Sanders that I think it’s awesome that he’s soon going to be the 50-year-old death metaller and he chuckles.

“Man, once metal’s in your blood it stays,” he says. “You don’t ever have to give it up. There’s no reason to. I’ve been playing metal since I was a teenager and I still love it. It still gives me that fucking same charge.”