A Ripple Conversation With Chris Babalis Jr. From Acid Mammoth

2020-2022 could very easily be described as years in which the stoner/doom scenes exploded. Bands emerged from the woodshed to write and record incredible albums that have defined the modern sound of these genres. One of the bands that has defined this era has certainly been Greece’s Acid Mammoth, a bludgeoning four piece that openly worships Sabbath while simultaneously not falling into the derivative traps of hero worship. From 2017’s self-titled all the way to 2021’s Caravan, Acid Mammoth has continued to inject vibrancy into the scene with their fuzzed riffs and evil lyrics of horror and witchery. The following is an interview with their frontman, Chris Babalis Jr., who was kind enough to draft some excellent responses to my questions.

Acid Mammoth is quite the name to choose for a band. It implies something ancient and extremely heavy. Why did you go with this for your name? How did you decide on the name? 

 

Hey Blake, first of all thank you for this interview mate. Very glad we have the chance to talk. Ever since we were kids, we have been in awe of these gigantic animals of the ancient world. The mammoth imagery exhibits the heaviness of our sound, and from day one we wanted every riff you hear on the record to imply the feeling of a massive horde of mammoths menacingly marching towards you! At the beginning, because we are Tolkien nerds, we tried to come up with a name from Tolkien’s vast and beautiful lore. However, because we felt that mammoths are pretty doom, we wanted to include them in our name and that’s what we did. We strongly believe that the name “Acid Mammoth” greatly complements our music and that we sound exactly like a band called “Acid Mammoth” should sound. Thus, from pretty early on and without a lot of thinking, the name “Acid Mammoth” simply popped up in our heads and we’ve been called like that ever since.

 

How did the band first come together? I would imagine you and your father have been playing together for a long time, but how did you assemble the rest of the band? How did you decide to include your father?

 

The band was formed by me and our bassist Dimosthenis. We’ve been buddies since forever, since before high school. We connected through music, and I don’t remember a time when we weren’t playing music together. So one night while jamming together at home, we came up with some doomy riffs that we absolutely loved and they would later come together as the 18 minute song “Black Rites” which closes our debut album. We were super excited about it, therefore we formed the band. At first, we never thought it would go beyond releasing a few songs in a demo, but afterwards while the ideas were coming to us like a storm, we realized that this is something really worth pursuing further. We had no idea what we were doing to be honest, haha! We just turned our amps on to 11 and started playing. Through working on the first songs though, we really felt like ourselves. There was nothing pretentious about it, nothing forcing us to create something out-of-character that doesn’t represent us just for the sake of it being cool or catchy. This was 100% us and that’s what we loved and still love about it.

 

Asking my dad to join as lead guitarist was the logical next step. Funny thing is that we never asked him to join the band, I simply walked to him one day and told him “Hey, you’re in a band” haha. He was a Sabbath maniac in the 70s, and he has a classic hard rock background which fit our music like a glove. He has a really rad 70s style in his guitar playing, which when combined with insanely crisp and acid as fuck fuzz it sounds just right and it has done wonders for our sound. His solos are also so beautifully written. They are not super technical and ultra-fast displays of skill or anything like that, and we never wanted them that way. Our solos are Iommic, 70s infused trips which accompanied with some heavy riffing merge together and create what you hear in our records.

 

The line-up was finally complete when our other best friend Marios joined the band to play the drums. He’s such a good drummer. He is a barbarian on the drums, exactly what our sound needed. The line-up has been the same ever since. We are a family, the four of us together, and I don’t expect the line-up to ever change. We are super close to each other and share a tremendous excitement about this band as playing together we are having the time of our lives.

 

What is the sound of Acid Mammoth? What do you think distinguishes you from other bands? Black Sabbath is obviously an influence, but what else influenced your sound?

 

Yes indeed, we are all huge Sabbath fans! All four of us grew up mesmerized by the first six Black Sabbath albums. The sound of Acid Mammoth is what you’d expect; huge, witchy guitars with fuzz at 666%, fat and gargantuan bass lines, crushing drums and hazy vocals chanting words of woe. From the get go we wanted our riffs to give the listener a subliminal feeling of horror which however is not terrifying but delightful to the soul and the ears! What is more, as horror movie nerds, we would lie if we said that horror movies haven’t influenced us in our song writing, not only in the writing of lyrics but in the music as well. Watching a vintage horror movie is enough to put us in the right mindset to write music for the band. This is why horror is such a prevalent theme in our aesthetic as well as our whole imagery. But generally I’d say that each member of the band brings their own influences and adds them to the mix, crafting what you hear on the record. Our primary motivation has always been to have the time of our lives jamming Sabbathy tunes together. We never set out to create something totally new that no one has ever heard before. However, what we do is 100% ourselves and we want to present our own authentic version of doom, in all its fuzziness and insanely heavy delight. What we want from every song is to be able to put us in a trance-like state, engulf us and take us to a different, doomy dimension. If we have this feeling when playing a song, then we feel that the song is fit to be included in a record. 

What gear is essential to creating the Acid Mammoth sound? I know you use Gibson SGs in your live performances, but what else helps to create that signature guitar tone?

 

The combination of insanely fuzzy guitar tone alongside that thick and fat bass sound does the trick. We are big fans of Orange amps. When it came to deciding which amp sounds best for our guitars, even though we tried playing with some real goliaths, no amp’s sound made us feel happier than the small but deadly Orange Dark Terror, which is the one we used to record guitars for our albums “Under Acid Hoof” as well as our latest album, “Caravan”. There was something inescapable, undeniable and mesmerizing about how this particular amp sounds, which captured us like no one else could. Some people said to us “Wait a minute, this small thing?” Hell yeah dude. This small thing! It just felt right for our guitars, more so than any other amp ever could at the time. At the end of the day, you should go for what feels right to your ears and not what is considered “better and louder”. Of course we did use additional amps for some guitars on “Caravan”, like a Marshall JVM and a Sovtek Mig 100H, but the Dark Terror was the workhorse and main amp throughout the whole thing! Ever since we’ve moved on though, as right now we’re using the Orange Rockerverb RK100 which is an absolute beast. However, for our next record we are a hundred percent sure that we are going to be additionally using again the Dark Terror, at least at some capacity. When it comes to the Bass, the Orange AD200B MK3 does the trick and alongside an army of pedals it sounds freaking huge! Also, another important aspect to our sound is the drumming, which is barbaric and groovy when it needs to be, and it accompanies our riffs in a way that makes them sound even doomier and far more interesting the more creative the drumming gets.

 

 

How would you say the band has evolved in the time between your self-titled album and Caravan? Is there something that you hear in your first album that you phased out? What new elements did you include in Under Acid Hoof and Caravan?

 

I think the sound difference between our self-titled debut and the two albums that followed is huge. It feels like day and night for us. Firstly, in “Under Acid Hoof” and “Caravan” everything is bigger, heavier and fuzzier. Also, a very key difference is the drumming, as the debut had already been recorded with a different drummer who helped us for the recordings before Marios joined the band. The debut is darker, simpler, and more monolithic in a way, like 60 minutes of un-tameable chaos. It’s less fuzzy than the albums that followed and the production is clearly different. For example, when you hear the songs “White Hag” and “Black Rites” live, you can notice a huge sonic difference between the actual record and the live performance of the songs with our current sound. It’s true that as we grow as people and as musicians, we always look back to what we did in the past with the eyes of today. Whatever the case, developing our sound and getting better is the logical step from album to album, and despite that we are still really proud of our debut album and its songs. The self-titled debut represents the band’s baby steps, it is more spontaneous and it gives off the vibe of us being very happy to be attempting to record something doomy for the first time. The albums that followed were more carefully crafted, that’s for sure, and a lot more attention was put into detail, yet we feel that there is something really witchy about our debut that makes us want to listen to it again and again.

 

To me, Caravan is a clear advancement in your sound. There’s an epic element to the songs that shows increased maturity and even more thought going into the creation of the song structures. I’m thinking in particular of the musical odyssey of “Psychedelic Wasteland” and “Black Dust.”

 

Thanks mate. While “Under Acid Hoof” was this aggressive, fuzzy and groovy beast filled with tales of horror and witchcraft, “Caravan” is a lot darker, more melancholic, more melodic and more atmospheric than its predecessor. I think what played an important role in that was the pandemic and having to endure lockdown after lockdown, stuck inside our homes and not being able to meet or jam properly, play shows or do a lot of the things we love. Therefore, our mood during that time is greatly reflected through the music of the new record. The entirety of “Caravan” is like a cosmic journey into the unknown, a heavy trip with no return. We absolutely love how “Caravan” sounds. The songs you mentioned, alongside the self-titled track “Caravan” were composed during lockdown, and indeed a lot of attention was put into how the songs are structured and what feelings they exhibit. We really focused on the aspect of making them feel like a journey, like a witchy caravan of mammoths traversing the stars. Our sound engineer Dionysis did a truly marvelous job on the record, despite the hardships we all endured mixing the record during a period of total lockdown, the result sounds amazing to our ears and we couldn’t be happier about it. We feel that it takes things forward and it is a beautiful chapter in the band’s ongoing journey. We are really looking forward to where we’ll go from there.

 

What are some of the bands in the stoner/doom scene that are especially impressing you? Are there any bands that you’ve discovered recently that really stand out?

 

Every year there are so many amazing albums coming out, to the point that sometimes we feel that we miss some real gems, while other times we stumble upon something so great that it causes our head to spin for weeks. Our label Heavy Psych Sounds has been on an epic rampage, releasing absolutely killer records by some amazing bands. Definitely check out the latest albums by our labelmates 1782, Hippie Death Cult, Kadabra, Hazemaze and Sleepwulf in case you haven’t done so yet. As for brand new discoveries, there is this Italian band that has come out recently, Wizard Master. This past week I listened to their debut album on Bandcamp and I absolutely loved it. It is just good old fuzzy doom in the vein of Electric Wizard’s “Witchcult Today”, and while it isn’t something that revolutionizes the genre, there is something really catchy about how they’re playing it which I absolutely loved. Some really cool riffs in there, and I think the dudes have done a fantastic job capturing a really old vintage horror vibe.

What’s next for Acid Mammoth? Are you working on a fourth album? What are you hoping to achieve with your next album?

 

While we aren’t actively working on a brand new album at this very moment, we have some really witchy ideas for new songs and there will definitely be a fourth album at some point down the line. Right now however, our primary focus is touring and gigs. We were really blessed to have the opportunity to play some really awesome gigs last year, despite the madness that has been going on with the ongoing pandemic. We had the time of our lives when we played in Desertfest Belgium last October, and we were also lucky to be able to do a Greek tour the month that followed. That wasn’t the end of it though, as this summer we’re playing at HPS Fest Switzerland and HPS Salzburg in Austria alongside some killer bands such as High on Fire, Elder and Black Rainbows. Plus, we have some other really cool gigging plans on the horizon and we can’t wait to reveal them!!