The Meshuggah Workout
My doctor tells me I need to get more exercise — apparently sitting on your ass all day making fun of metal bands isn’t as healthy as you’d think. But because I’m both self-destructive and in denial about my own mortality, it’s unlikely I’ll do as my physician has ordered.
Having said that, if there were a spin class that included choreographed dancing to Meshuggah’s “Demiurge,” I would be at least 17% more likely to actually work out.
I dunno why, but for some reason, the revered Swedish djent progenitors seem to invite memeing. In addition to the above video, we’ve seen Meshuggahified clips of the Democratic National Convention, the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, and a mosque of “moshing” Muslims. Which is to say nothing of the Jens Kidman meme. My theory is that maybe it has to do with how outwardly humorless Meshuggah appear to be? That’s the best I can come up with. Share your own hypothesis in the comments section.
Last month, Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake offered Knotfest.com an update on Meshuggah’s next album, revealing that “we have most of the material” written, and that they’re aiming for a late 2021 release:
“Of course, we have a certain framework that we still wanna sound like Meshuggah, we wanna have that signature sound, we want people to be able to — even if they haven’t heard the song [before] — in the best-case scenario, it’s, like, ‘Oh, that’s gotta be Meshuggah,’ even if it’s a brand new thing. So hopefully that’s something we’re aiming at.
“But with that said, as far as the music goes, we try to [do] kind of the opposite of what AC/DC has been doing for 40 years. So we’re not trying to write the same album over and over. And whether we succeed with that or not, that’s more up to our fans and other people, but that’s definitely the aim. We try our best to kind of find new grips within the framework of what we’re supposed to be, I guess.
“‘Cause we don’t wanna really step out of that either. We’re not looking to be another band all of a sudden or something that we haven’t been or that is not true to kind of what we’re doing.”
