When your vocalist sounds like a young Martin Van Drunen and you ask legendary designer Dan Seagrave to do the artwork for your debut album, the message is pretty clear, isn’t it? Try to tickle Rude’s guitarist and frontman Yusef Wallace by stating that their debut album ‘Soul Recall’ is “a classic death metal sounding record stuck in 1991” and he’ll answer: “I guess that’s a compliment. I’d have to say most anything from 1995 onward, until the last couple of years, sounds like crap, so I’d rather be on the good side of things.”
Formed in 2008, initially Rude had a thrashier vibe and even switched monikers to suit their more straight-forward and primitive sound, calling themselves Forsaker. But after one self-titled demo, they turned back to both their initial name and a more death metal direction. “We still have that thrash aspect in our music but with a different second guitar player and we’re now tuned down half a step,” Yusef admits. “I like that genre still, not the corny stuff though, but I don’t think it’s what makes us different. I’m leaning more towards us playing death metal in E flat. I do like listening to bands in C, but it is too easy to make stuff heavy when you downtune. Bands like Morbid Angel and Pestilence were in E flat and D. Their first few albums still take dumps on stuff like Incantation and what not.” Never mind that, Rude won’t sound very menacing to most. “We don’t care,” they say. “Besides, why do some bands use names like Goat Penis Sodomizer when they’re 40-year-old men wearing leather and spikes? That’s pretty silly if you ask me!”
Having just released ‘Soul Recall’ and completed a small run of dates on the US West Coast with France’s Skelethal, they now have their eyes firmly on the old continent: “There’s no point touring the US nowadays unless you are with a big band, it’s just a barren wasteland. But if somebody will fly us out to Europe, we will eat garbage and ride in a horse drawn carriage if we have to. Make it happen!”
