Khemmis – interview met Ben Hutcherson (harsh vocals, guitars)
Ben Hutcherson: “Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, just make the wheel that you love!”
Geïnspireerd door traditionele doom en heavy metal, brachten de Amerikanen van Khemmis onlangs hun vijfde studioalbum uit met als zelfbewuste titel ‘Khemmis’. We hebben goede herinneringen aan ons vorig gesprek met gitarist Ben Hutcherson en dus kozen we hem om ons eloquent bij te praten. Het werd een bijzonder hartelijk gesprek met heel wat interessante details.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 29 juli 2026
How are you doing in general?
Well, the world is a crazy, scary place now, perhaps more than in a long time, so with that in mind, I think I am doing okay. We have this new album that we are excited about, we are playing a show with the recently reunited Acid Bath this weekend – so we have that to look forward to – so the world is scary, but we got rock-‘n-roll in our hearts, so that is something.
It has been five years since we talked and ‘Deceiver’ came out. Of course at that time we were still suffering from the pandemic. Could you finally tour and play enough shows for the album?
Yeah, we had the busiest tour cycle of our career behind ‘Deceiver’. We did one European run and three US, North America, whatever tours and then various one off festival appearances and things like that. Touring with Trivium, Opeth as well as doing our own headlining tours. It was a very exciting, a very successful tour cycle and then around early 2024 we started writing new material. Because we put out our first two albums so close to each other, people asked us: ‘why does it take so long to put out albums now?’ and the answer is the same reason every other band take years between records, because you cannot write an album while you are on tour in my experience. You have to take time to sip in those new ideas, you got to find time to work on them collectively. I know there are some bands that write on the road, but that does not work for us, it certainly does not work for me. When I am on tour I want my heart and mind to be completely focused on playing these songs and doing that job – because it is a job – and I think it doesn’t serve the fans if I am only halfway there, if I am really thinking about that new riff that we wrote during rehearsal that day.
I can understand, you can only focus on one thing…
Exactly and after all that touring, we were really feeling that we had pushed and supported that record, taking our music to so many places, on that last European run we got to play at some of the biggest metal festivals. We played Graspop, we played HellFest, and once it was time to start writing again, truthfully all that touring was still in front of our minds. We wanted to write an album full of songs that we knew we could take any of those tracks and put them in the set list live and have them just absolutely bring the energy, bring the power, get people headbanging and moshing and just really feeling it.
It seems that you have found again the joy of playing together and also respect that a lot more because you realize that this is still a constant thing in your life, something that remained…
Absolutely. We discovered the joy that we first felt when starting this band and we had no expectations, no limitations placed on us. This is for anyone, in every kind of creative pursuit, that the longer that you do it, and the more it becomes a job, the easier it is to loose sight of why you started doing it in the first place. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take it seriously and shouldn’t pursuit it as a job, but it means you got to remember why you picked up the guitar or why you started writing or why you started painting in the first place and that you remain in conversation with that version of yourself. I mean, I have been playing guitar almost thirty years at this point, we have been in this band for fourteen years now and it is not like we are trying to go back to who we were fourteen years ago. I don’t want to do that. I like who I am. I don’t like getting older because my back hurts and my knees hurt too, but I like getting older because there is a serenity that comes with getting older. An ease of accepting things and an ability to prioritize things that I think is just totally outside your grasp when you are 25 to 30 years old. I think that is part of that reconnecting with that joy of creating together and realize how precious it is, how rare it is. People have asked us over the years and especially during these press slots: ‘how do you guys stay together so long?’, things like that and the answer is simple. Because we love each other, we treat each other like family and we have grown together. It is never been easy. We all had to grow as individuals in order to be better together, which I think is true in every relationship and since what happened to the initial versions of the songs seems to support this, that reconnection to joy, to that energy, sort of unbridled love of heavy metal has come through in these songs. It is not like it is a feel good, sunshine and rainbows and puppy’s album, but it is a joyish, rockish ritual of celebration of what makes heavy metal so powerful.
Going for a self-titled album, most of the time means that it has a particular reason. Is this the case?
Yeah. We were trying out a lot of different album titles. I think at one point we had a list of probably 20 or 30 possible album titles. Some of them were more interesting than others, but none of them really felt like they encapsulated the record. I think it was me that originally suggested a self-titled album. I do remember thinking – even in the early chats about the album title – that self-titling was an option, and there was something interesting about that, in conjunction with this intentional reconnection to the joy of creating together, the fact that we had set up some directions upfront before writing songs. We wanted them to be able and use in a live set, but also that we wanted to write the shortest songs ever on an album and also the most songs up to date. They are not exactly radio friendly stuff, most of them are four or five minutes long, but we succeeded on that front, shorter and more songs on the album, and still feeling live we have made an album that we want to listen to if someone else had written and recorded it. If we would have the feeling like ‘this doesn’t feel right, this feels like someone else’, then we would have scraped the songs and started all over. We will have this conversation two years from now (chuckles), and so self-titling the album really felt like the best way to sort of put of bow on it, to show the world; this is the most fully realized version of the band to date and this is a statement that we are making.
Usually, because it also a kind of reaffirming that it is really you, the personalities of the band are in the music…
Yes and thank you for saying that. Reaffirming I think is a very good way to put that. I was thinking the other day that when I was in my first death metal band, when I was 19/20 years old, and the singer of that band was maybe 7 or 8 years older than me and I remember trying to show him newer bands and he constantly said: ‘that’s great, I am glad you like it, but I already have the things that I like and that is just the way it goes’ and I thought ‘oh what an old fart’, you know (laughs), but the reality is – I am 41 now – I still find new bands that I get excited about, don’t get me wrong – but the things that shaped me, the bands and the musical experiences that shaped me and grew my love for heavy metal, are classic metal bands and moments. It is Mercyful Fate and King Diamond, it is Judas Priest, it is Iron Maiden and reaffirming with that kind of legendary Heavy Metal, was an important part of this process.
We still prefer to listen to classic rock on internet radio…
And I think that is a beautiful thing, to just passionately love the art that you love and to let it inspire you. I think one of the many things that I find so frustrating about contemporarily criticism is that everyone thinks that everything that anyone does has to be something – or at least try to be something – that’s never been done before. The reality is: Tony Iommi already wrote all of the perfect doom metal riffs, he wrote them even all before 1980, so we are all just taking what he did in Sabbath and trying to turn it around a little bit. We are just taking what Metallica did in the eighties and turn it around a little bit. We are all still working with an electric guitar, an electric bass, acoustic drums, a 12 bit system, because there are not so many things you can do, so rather than try to reinvent the wheel, just make the wheel that you love!
Indeed, because doing something new isn’t per se doing something better.
Exactly and the idea that I would go and try to write a metal album that sounds unlike anything anyone has ever heard, is wild, because I don’t listen to stuff I read that no one has ever heard. I mean, we all have our underground favourites that only few people have listened to, but again, if you are inspired by the riffs of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, everyone will judge: ‘yep they are influenced by Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’. And there you go…
What can you tell about the new bassist David Small and his way of serving the band?
David Small joined on bass officially a few years ago, after he had been playing live with us a couple of years already at that point. I have known David for seven, almost eight years now. He and I also play in a death metal band together called Glacial Tomb and he joined that band back in 2019, so I have been making music with him for a few years. It was kind of a no-brainer to bring him in Khemmis. He is not only a great human being, also a phenomena’s musician and he is not only an incredible bass player, but he is also an excellent guitar player. He is very good at thinking about music in the big picture, which is a thing I think important to us, and that he was able to find his place in the band, personality-wise and creatively in such an easy fashion, was great. Coming into an established band is tricky, because Khemmis already has a sound, Khemmis has a fan base, Khemmis has a record deal – all these kind of things – and yet the moment that Dave brought in his first set of riff ideas, it was clear that he understood where the heart of the band is. In fact the first riffs that he brought in, ended up in the first song that we wrote for the album, which was ‘Tomb Of Roses’. He comes from a lot of the same places, because he has been making music for so long. I know a lot of his influences, all of the death metal, all of the black metal. He listens to a lot of Indie stuff, lo fi and a lot of kind of avant-garde hiphop, electronic music, I think he just cheers these melodic ideas that fill in the cracks in Khemmis, a fine way to support the way that Phil and I already write. And then again, just personality wise, it is an absolute joy to be in a band with him. Actually I am doing press for the next couple of hours and then he and I are loading up the van and the trailer and we are driving nine hours to Oklahoma City to play this Acid Bath show this weekend Phil and Zach are flying in for, but David and I are going to be in the van, just the two of us for a total of 20 hours on the next four days and I am looking forward to it. I love the guy, he is one of my best friends.
Your music has a doomy effect, but on the other hand it has a kind of spiritual tinge I cannot lay my hands on… do you agree with that?
Yes, I think so. A spiritual aspect can have different meanings for different people I think. People who are religious or practice any sort of regular spiritual rituals versus people like myself who… I think of myself as being spiritual, but in a very grounded way, so when I say ‘spiritual’, I really am talking about senses of community and family and togetherness and a sense of obligation to our fellow men and sense of divination of existence and one thing that could convey these feelings and those struggles and those victories that are more than just the things that are happening in our daily lives, but have a sort of grander meaning, I try to convey that in the music, without ever feeling like it is just a sort of tact-on. I think my favourite experiences with music are the ones that feel spiritual, that feel transcendent. The band that immediately comes to mind is Yard, the doom band from Portland, Oregon, I think one of the greatest heavy bands that ever exist and definitely a band that has that spiritual power. You listen to the music and it takes you somewhere and it gets you out of your head and it connects your heart with the hearts of people around you and people around the world in a way that our species is sorely lacking at this moment. To have those moments – and hopefully I will be able to contribute more of these moments in lives of the people that listen to our music – it feels like a real gift and something that we are not taking for granted.
Indeed, I did not mean some new age stuff, but feeling awe for the vastness of the universe for instance…
Yeah, I have certainly had my fair share of time pondering the universe, pondering our place in it and that sort of thinking can certainly be overwhelming and isolating, but I think if it is framed in the right light, and in my case if I am consumed that line of thought when I have my anti depressions in me, so I don’t feel overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe, that there can be something really beautiful and empowering about the realisation that we are all just small specs of dust floating in the cosmos. We are here for so little time and that is okay, that is beautiful, we are all made of star stuff and when we die, we go back to being energy in a different form that at some point may coalesce into something else. It is all part of something much bigger and more fascinating than our life, so anything we can do to make our time in this world spent reducing the suffering in our lives and lives of others, I think that’s time well spent and for us – and for me especially – I feel that art is how I am supposed to do that.
Now two members of the band are living far away. Did it change something in the band?
For many bands members moving away would spell the demise of the band, but one of the few positive sides of the 2020 pandemic and lockdown and everything, is we have seen that we could write music remotely, because we literally could not get in Denver in a room together. So whether we were all in Denver or whether we are spread all over the country, technology enables us the ability to shape trade ideas. We also started doing weekly video calls three years ago. Actually we were keeping the band in business and whenever we get together we can just play music and we did not have to talk about contracts, merchandising orders and stuff like that and just weaving into the regularly song-writer meetings. I think we are better when working as a band and we do, although two of us live in Denver at this point. If anything, it has made us more mindful of how to spend our time together and has made us really appreciate the time we spend together rehearsing and touring and recording. Maybe in that way we are even closer to each other than ever before.
If something becomes rare, it is more valuable mostly…
Yes and at the end of the day, everybody is just a short plane ride away from one another.
There is something going on with the artwork I guess. Now it is an esoteric oil painting and you approached a different artist…
Yes. We worked with an artist called Christopher Remmers this time around. We wanted to have the art support this idea that this album is a statement, it is a new chapter in the Khemmis story And Phil has Chester Disguise Studio. We started talking to him and he was totally on board, although he had never done a metal album cover before – which is crazy, because his art seems very appropriate for all kinds of heavy metal – and he and Phil collaborated in-depth on this. You could see on the stuff on social media already that some ‘behind the scenes’ footage showed the two of them getting together and literally staging a reference photo that Chris used to paint. They went out to the forest in Northern Washington and gathered all these elements. He even had the artist’s wife/model as the warrior queen. He used all these reference photos and then he uses those to paint, it is truly made. It is just an amazing piece of artwork, I am so happy with how it came out.
One of my favourite tracks is ‘Benediction Tones’. Can you tell something about that?
Sure. That is definitely the most outright doomy song on the album, but it still got these weird, almost psychedelic elements. When we were recording the guitars, our producer Dave Otero even said at some point: ‘somebody’s riffs sound like slowdown Gorguts riffs’ which is awesome. I mean, I am actually wearing a Gorguts shirt right now. So it is very doomy in terms of tempo, but also it has a sort of sludgy, crushing kind of vibe, but it is a Khemmis song, so it has that big chorus with that emotional journey. We knew pretty early on that, that this was going to be the album closer, it just felt right.
And ‘Tomb Of Roses’ because there we hear very nice acoustic guitars…
Again, more than half of the riffs in that came from Dave. He had some ideas for acoustic guitar and the way that we treat song-writing is that no matter who brings in the ideas, it is put through the Khemmis machine. So whatever it starts as, it is going to end up like something from Khemmis in the end and sure enough, by the time we got to get our hands on it, it took on the life that it has now.
What are the plans for playing live? I see a kind of Cruise at Copenhell, Denmark…
Yes, we are and everybody overseas, keep on eye on this, because there are more European dates coming very soon. I think that will be announced next week or the week after. We have now two European dates so far, Copenhell cruise and Desert Fest in Liège (Belgium) and there will be more. We are touring with a very cool band that I think people will be a little surprised to see us tour with (Celestial Sanctuary – Vera), that we take out as support act and they are very heavy and very cool. I am very excited to share that. We’ve got some great tours coming up for the rest of the year.
