Among all the acts gracing the Red Eagle Campground this past July for Fire in the Mountains, Full of Hell stuck out. The leading name in powerviolence-meets-noise (a critically and commercially lauded pool) is seemingly better suited for a benefit show under a highway or a warehouse without AC or washrooms, not a festival as in tune with nature and spiritual healing as Fire in the Mountains. And yet, they were of the weekend’s marquee acts, promoted as “The Firekeeper’s Alliance Presents: Full of Hell.”
Throughout the weekend, the festival facilitated discussions about suicide, mental illness, and isolation. The deeper these discussions went, the more Full of Hell’s appearance started making sense, like a tricky crossword clue that’s obvious when the puzzle is complete. Of course the embodiment of America’s cultural waste belonged at a retreat from dystopian forces. Vocalist Dylan Walker uses less poetic terms: “It's just a perspective on the human experience. It’s universal and unremarkable in that way.” Full of Hell, through their gritty and noisy set, were the act at Fire in the Mountains who reminded everyone what they were taking solace from. They laid the corpse of overreaching capital cortisol on the festival grounds and encouraged it to be flailed.
Though Full of Hell had a surprisingly quiet 2026, Walker still found time to chat with us at Fire in the Mountains and discuss their collaborations with Nothing, Andrew Nolan, and their interest in noise.
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In your mind, how does Full of Hell fit into Fire in the Mountains?
That's an easy. It’s an A and B thing, I think, as much on the promoters as us. We always knew about Fire in the Mountains and admired it because we got lots of friends that play more in the circle. We're friends with of the Wayfarer guys, we get the vibe of the fest, but I got the feeling the fest was kind of like Roadburn or Gilead Fest or Migration Fest. It fits a lot of the more experimental metal genres. I think we mainly got asked because of Neurosis asking. Steve Von Till and Charlie Speicher were the who asked us. of play, but I think it was also because of Converge. Charlie told me that he had to push to get Converge on the lineup, and it worked out really well because they're more hardcore.
You guys are the next step up from them. You're noisy, you're more avant-garde, and your meanings are a bit harder to decipher.
Right, definitely. We'll play anywhere we're asked to play pretty much. Within reason. I mean, like, if it seems like it'll be an outright disaster, we wouldn't do it. I can't think of too many instances. This's easy though.
We've spoken to the Fire in the Mountains people before over the years about stuff, and the mission statement's beautiful. Like, we weren't gonna do anything this year because we're taking a break to be at home and recharge and write a record and chill. When we got the call, it just seemed like if we're gonna do anything and waste our energy on anything this year, why not do something that has an important meaning.
You guys are under the Firekeeper Alliance Presents label here. What does that entail for you? How is that different from just being a band on the bill?
I don't know. We said yes to doing anything Charlie asked. So Dave Bland and I, the drummer and I, are speaking on panels tomorrow, and we're doing a shirt with them where everything goes to the charity. I think the term was like we were personally curated by the Firekeeper Alliance. I don't exactly know the difference. It's a pretty intimate lineup. It's not like there are 100 bands playing, and it seems very curated top to bottom anyway. Maybe it's because of all the things we signed on to do as well.
It is that whole circle of friends. That's the reason we're here. It's like the Neurosis-Converge — that's just the scene we like. Neurosis spans everything. They're all over the place themselves sonically. I think it all checks out, honestly. I think it's just about creative approaches to extreme music. It's just a tastemaker festival. It's just like whatever they like, they put on it.
What do you think are some works of your own through Full of Hell that carry the suicide prevention themes?
There's always an introspective element to it and a cerebral element. There are definitely recurring themes that align with what the fest is about, like the suicide prevention and all the depression and everything. Obviously, that's something a lot of bands dive into constantly. We're no exception. We’re like an existential crisis band. Off the stage, we're pretty compassionate, easygoing people that want to help as well. And the scene we're in—I always called it the Roadburn scene—everybody is a good person. Like Thou and The Body and all those people, their community, any community work that's put in front of us we should be open to doing.
I don't think thematically our writing is very alien comparatively to, like, what Neurosis is singing about. It's just a perspective on the human experience. It’s universal and unremarkable in that way. We’re all probably writing about almost the same things.
If you look at it from a distance, we nitpick and we can tell the differences between bands, like us and Wayfarer or something. If you boil it down to what we're both singing about, it's a cry for empathy overall. So I think.
Last year you put out the Broken Sword, Rotten Shield EP. It followed the Andrew Nolan collab and the Nothing collab, which were both a lot weirder. What led to Broken Sword, Rotten Shield?
Spencer Hazard, the guitar player who's no longer with the band, he just had riffs that he had for another band that he was just like, “Why don't we just do a 10-inch?” There wasn't much to it. He had lost a pet. That was pretty catastrophic for him, and we can all relate to that experience that he was going through. So I found it to be pretty fucking easy to write lyrics in that theme. And he'd found a painter who was down to do that painting that we had for the art, which it all just tied together. It's really, really easy for me to tap into the idea that your animal companion would be a shield for you against a cruel world. It's just easy to write about. It's a universal experience we all had, like losing pets and all that stuff.
But it was a-off. I don't even think we'll repress it. 10” is like the most obtuse format. We just wanted to do it because all the bands that we loved when we were younger that were in the screamo, '90s emotional hardcore, and lighter grindcore scene did 10“. I just thought it was funny.
It's expensive though. Yeah, it's more expensive to press than an LP. I think for them to utilize a plate that they don't use for anybody at the plant, like the big steel plates that they have to make, it's just a whole separate thing and not something they do very often because it's not a practical format at all.
Returning to your collaboration with Nothing, When No Birds Sang, what was the shared link that prompted the album?
We were friends anyway, and that's usually what happens when we're friends with a band that we like and admire. The question comes up eventually, but it came up pretty quickly with Nothing. That was a little different though, just because Nicky Palermo, the lead guy in Nothing, he's very forward with his ideas. When you get into a room and you do those collabs, it's important to try and strike a balance where everybody's voice is heard, you know? But it's a different experience every time you do it though, depending on who it's with. But this was like— Nicky had a vision. It was really cool for us. The big idea was very 50/50. From our end, we were like, “Let’s channel a wall of sound shoegaze thing.” It's got to have really heavy peaks and really soft valleys. We wanted a Harvey Milk vibe to the riffs too. You can tell if you're familiar with Harvey Milk which riffs Spencer brought to the table because they're totally lumbering-ass, like loud Harvey Milk riffs. And obviously, the more post-rocky stuff is coming from the shoegazers.
It seems like you guys pulled stuff out of each other that, on your own, you hadn't done.
Oh yeah, I was pretty psyched, man, because I actually listen to way more post-rock than I do any other kind of guitar music. I'm a huge Godspeed fan and all the Montreal stuff. Silver Mount Zion's of my favorite bands of all time. I never had an opportunity to write something like that. So, you know, to utilize some soft synth tones and to actually sing on the record, which is pretty cool.
How do you keep in mind if something works for Full of Hell? How do you know if a sound is still Full of Hell and not another project?
I think it's less intentional and more like, “Why does a dog chase a car? Through habit.” 'Cause we never started the band thinking we're gonna do 100 collabs at all. We didn't even know that. There were a couple collabs that we were listening to, but we didn't think that was what was for us.
We got thrust into it by chance and had to learn along the way. And it wasn't until we were doing stuff with The Body really that we were picking up some idea of how to go roll in raw with nothing and be secure with that idea and make it come up from the ground up. We like to be really dialled in when we do LPs. It's very tight, very focused. When we hit the studio, it's ready to roll, pretty much. But with a band like The Body, they don't do anything. They just show up to the studio and make shit. Yeah, and it happens on the spot. It's like exercising a different set of muscles. So when we got in with Nothing, I mean, that's probably the most alien to me that maybe someone would be like, “That doesn't make sense.”
But we don't really care anymore either. To me, it made sense. If you really want to objectively analyze it too, there were so many angles to it where I was like, “Duh, this makes sense, even in a dumb way.” That's honestly the cool part, and that's probably why I don't really have a coherent perspective on this, is because we never ever tried to be anything. So at this point, I feel really grateful that I don't have to act like a cool person.
There was never a uniform, there was never trying to be anything. We always just did what we wanted, and then people happen to like it. That's pretty cool that they're out there and gives you confidence at a certain point. To this point they followed along, like they're down for whatever.
We'll just see. It's not that big of a deal if it doesn't work out.
They have faith in you and what you guys do, without it necessarily being attached to thing.
Plus, honestly, man, we're going to fail. Every band here is going to fucking implode. Like, who cares? I also thought—and still think— Nothing are cool. Like, they're like cool big brothers to me. My compass is like, “Those guys are cool, I don't care, I'll do the record. They're music heads, they're into really cool shit, this will be fun.” And then, it's a 9/11-themed record too.
Is it?
The whole thing. Every little bit of that layout is 9/11-themed. The lyric liner book in the LP is an identical typeface to the restaurant at the top of the Twin Towers. The whole record is about the jumping man— the falling man— jumping man, sorry. You know that iconic photo of the guy? Nicky researched that guy's whole life and where he worked and what he did in the World Trade Center and what kind of family he had and everything. We wrote the entire record about his last day on earth and that feeling he had as he was jumping. It's a mourning record. We make fun of shit all the time, including 9/11, but that's a very serious record, a very sad record.
There's a lot of detail in there that's pretty crazy. Even the barcode on the back of the CD is the New York City skyline.
Did that all come from Nicky?
Nicky was born on September 11th, so there's always been a running joke where we're just always talking about 9/11 anyway. And he just kind of popped the question because nobody he plays with is usually down for his harebrained ideas. And I was immediately like, “I could write about that all day.”
I also thought it was like, I wouldn't say provocative whatsoever, but I thought it was an intriguing idea because it's like a very culturally American record. But not in a douchey way that I hate, which is like any American propaganda, any nationalism. There's not a stance or something.
Like you said, it's a uniquely American event that happened, 9/11, but it doesn't have to be wrapped up in this weird Americana, pro-whatever bullshit.
We're more on the other side, actually. At the record release shows, we did an awesome shirt that had of the Al-Qaeda pamphlets that they were like, “Al-Qaeda was dropping into Baghdad to recruit during around that time.” It was a really cool shirt.
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Something I've always really liked about Full of Hell is your guys' textures, especially with the Andrew Nolan album Scraping the Divine. That's mostly you who handles it, right?
I mean, it depends on the project. Spencer would do a lot of stuff in the studio. It's just something he preferred doing, and I handled a lot of the live stuff. And I would source a lot of the sounds for the records beforehand too. The noise stuff is something everybody's into, and it's not particularly hard. And when these guys are all musical, they have good ideas about where to put things, we can vocalize to each other what we’re looking for. If they can give me the dumbest description of what they want underneath this guitar part, like what frequency or whatever, what they want it to feel like, I can kind of figure it out.
So on the Nolan though, a lot of that noise was Andrew Nolan. He's like a pretty OG dude from Toronto. He was in this band called The Endless Blockade that was like of our favorite bands of all time. On paper, it reads like a Full of Hell band. They would call it a hardcore band. but they're like all old-school power violence guys, so it has a lot of blasting and a noise element.
They did a record with Bastard Noise and all this stuff that mattered a lot to us. And he's my big brother mentor, almost and he'd been talking about wanting to produce a dub record, for lack of a better word.
He doesn't even play in a heavy band right now. He's been doing just like house stuff and dub. Yeah, mixing hip-hop records. But he did all the noise on Scraping the Divine.
How did the interest in textures come to you?
I mean, I always wanted the most extreme sonics; I was just looking for the endpoints of all of it. And I didn't know that noise was out there until I was late in high school and had a Hydrohead record sampler and heard Merzbow for the first time. Spencer, really early on in the band when I joined, he was like, “Why don't we have noise in the band?” And I thought it was a beautiful thing because it took the framework away from what would normally be the rock band format. When I talked about peaks and valleys, you can hit the absolute extreme of what the human ear can even hear. Realistically, it probably just boils down to like a lack of attention span and just wanting the most of everything. I want maximalist vibes.
We've gotten better at recognizing it shouldn't be like that the whole time. Giving it some flow. But when it peaks, I want it to be like a sound bath. I like the idea of bathing in it and floating in it. That's why I like ambient music so much too. It's just like a less harsh frequency on your ears. Like, Merzbow's long-form stuff, you could totally conflate and argue that it's just like ambient music or whatever and drone and all that stuff. It's all the same beast. But it's nice to have all the tools and the full sonic thing in front of you. To use anything at your disposal. I always thought that was interesting.
Justin Broderick, all of his side projects, and the way he was interested in sampling, I always thought that was inspiring because he could take the smallest piece of anything and turn it into whatever he wanted, you know? And I loved the idea of field recording in general too, and having this unique stuff in your board that no else in the universe has. These are so unique to you, and you can impart so much of yourself in what you choose to curate into your stuff.
I always thought that was unique. Like Chip King in The Body, who does a lot of the noise stuff in that band, he has this really brutal, basically just a harsh noise wall. It's so heavy-sounding that he feeds through this MicroBrute synthesizer, and it's just a waterfall. It’s his favorite waterfall in Oregon. He just recorded it and then he feeds that into his shit. He just has it locked on his sampler. I think that adds some personality to it. Sampling's so exciting.
How do you feel about Spencer’s departure and Full of Hell going forward?
I think we're all on the same page and we just want him to be happy and healthy as well. And like, that's about it. That's what I want for those guys too. It is life.
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