For their fifth album, doomsters Khemmis went the self-titled route. I spoke with vocalist/guitarist Phil Pendergast about the record, their newest band member, A.I. and numerous other topics.
Chad Bowar: What led to the almost five-year span between albums, which is the longest in your career?
Phil Pendergast: It was a product of the times. We wrote and recorded Deceiver right at the beginning of COVID, and so it was an unprecedented time for musicians in general. We were all experiencing all of these restrictions on what it is that we can potentially be doing in terms of touring, promotion, so we put that record out not knowing when we’d be able to tour, and then luckily we were able to get in early with people opening touring back up.
We went out with Mastodon on one of those first big tours that was happening after things started to open back up, where we were starting to feel like we had space to get back into creating something. That sounds like a long time, but it went by so fast that we didn’t even really realize that we had created the longest gap between albums. And I think people don’t understand how long it takes for something to come out once it’s actually done. We wrote the album starting at the end of 2023, recorded it in the summer of 2025. So, it took us maybe a year and a half to write the whole thing, feel really good about it, and then by the time you see it, it’s another year later, basically. So, for us, it felt like a pretty normal time frame. It just so happened that like it got spread out a little bit longer with COVID than we anticipated.
Speaking of spread out, you guys are spread out across the country now, so how does that impact your songwriting process?
We knew we could do this because of the experience we’d had with Deceiver, where we were really writing things remotely from each other, just given the situation. And then we just had to come together before we went into the studio and figure out, what is working when we actually play it together? What stuff feels like it needs to do something else? How do we structure the songs differently around that feeling? So we knew that we could do that for this record, and it actually ended up being really fun once we gave into that this was going to be the workflow. And so we started doing these weekly band calls over something like Zoom, and we would just be exchanging files with different types of demos and like material. And we would just sit there and listen to it together, piece things together, decide I don’t like that. Maybe somebody grabs a guitar and is showing people how to play a riff slightly differently or whatever.
And so it ended up being really collaborative in a way that was so intentional. If we were all just together in a room, it’s easy to get lost in the fun of playing something. But that’s not always necessarily the most conducive to making forward progress on a composition. And so it actually was really helpful for us to be able to approach composing the record that way, and then give it time to sit with all of us, and then make these intentional times to get together for four days or something in Denver, play songs together, figure out what’s working. And so the record came together really fast once we had the material. We only spent a couple weeks together in person before we recorded the album, but we were all feeling really good about everything. And I think it also helped us keep some of the energy of the creative spirit that we’re drawing on by keeping it so fresh. It felt like we were coming into the studio with a lot of that inspiration still, and able to pour that into the recording rather than having been playing it together for months and months and months, and it starting to become kind of rote. It didn’t have that feeling at all.
This is the first album for bassist David Small. What did he bring to the table?
Dave is probably the best musician in the group in terms of his knowledge and ability to play a lot of different things. So just having that kind of mind in the band and the ability to draw on new musical influences, super important. But I think the really fundamental thing was he came in with a fresh energy that we were able to reorient ourselves around. I think it really brought a lot of possibility and excitement to the writing process. He brought in the very first riffs for the album that ended up making it onto the record, and they sort of formed the backbone of the song “Tomb of Roses” that’s on the record. And that was the first song we were writing, and it created a mindset for the whole rest of the album. It was okay, this is what it could be. How do we keep doing stuff that feels like it’s giving us the same feeling?
And one of the things that he also brings to the table that is pervasive throughout the record is that he has a different way of locking up with Zach and bridging the rhythm section as its own distinct entity with what the guitars are doing. So he has the ability to speak the melodic language of the guitars and the rhythmic language of the drums and bass in a way that has opened up the way that those two parts can play with each other. The interplay, I think, is stronger on this record between the rhythm section and melodic elements than it’s ever been before. So, he’s the unsung hero of the record for me, and Dave is the one that made the record end up being a lot of what it is. We’re all feeding off of the new things that he’s bringing to the band.
When you’re writing the vocals, do the harsh and cleans come naturally, or do you experiment in the studio?
It’s a good question. We generally have an idea of the placement of each part, because we see them as storytelling elements, and when you’re looking at the song as a journey, you can tell where those parts need to be. And sometimes the musical backing just doesn’t lend itself to a clean vocal part or a harsh vocal part, and so you know, okay, either there’s going to be a guitar lead, or there’s going to be harsh vocals, or whatever. So it’s like looking holistically at the song and asking it what it needs in a given part, but there’s also room for experimentation. One of the things that’s cool about the vocals for this band is that we don’t really have a super strong idea before going into the studio of exactly how everything’s going to work out, and then we use the studio as the creative process for that.
I’m still writing vocal parts up until the moment that I record them, and it’s kind of scary to leave something as important as the lyrics up to the last second, but I’ve always found a lot of creative inspiration in that. And one of the things that we do is, because of that, sometimes I’ll have an idea for a chorus for a song. For instance, in “Gilded Chambers,” I was originally picturing the chorus of that song as having these harsh and clean vocal trade-offs, and then when we got into the studio, we just realized the way this song is evolving, that was going to not be as satisfying as if we just made it clean vocals during those parts. So it’s a little bit of responding to what is being created and how the energy of it changes once you’re recording it. It’s hard to predict what that’s going to look like sometimes.
This is an era of singles, but this album to me flows really well. Is that something you take pride in putting together?
Oh yeah, we’re not a singles band. Our main inspiration always has been growing up with our dad’s record collections and being able to pull a Yes album or an Allman Brothers record or Molly Hatchet or something out of your dad’s record collection and stare at the album art, open it up, see if there’s cool art inside, look at the lyrics, listen to the whole record. And so we try and do all aspects of that, deliver on all aspects of that every time. We’re really, really into the album art. We’re really into trying to make the packaging cool. We want it to be a satisfying holistic experience. And so the songs individually all matter, but it’s almost more important to us that they’re telling a story together cohesively in a way that feels like it’s represented by the thing that you’re holding in your hands. So that’s very much our intention. I would say this and Hunted are the two records that we’ve made that are the most cohesive in terms of delivering on that front.
Why did you decide to make this one a self-titled album?
It has a lot to do with the answer that I was given about Dave joining the band. Just this feeling of being reinvigorated by the environment of writing the record and working with a new person who’s bringing so much to the table. And that gave us a new found sense of both exploration and inspiration, but also redefinition. It felt like we really had hit upon something that felt so honest to the character of Khemmis and of what we’ve always been trying to do. That hearkened back to the first record in a lot of ways in terms of the amount of excitement and not caring about how people were going to digest the record or what they wanted to call it. It was subgenreless in our minds so it made sense to just say this is Khemmis. This is what we’ve always been trying to do. This is us with a newfound sense of purpose and excitement and joy for what we’re doing. It just felt honest to us to go ahead and it feels like a bold move.
You filmed a couple videos for the album. Is that a process you enjoy or is it a necessary evil for the promotion process?
It’s a hard question. I have two answers to this. One is that I love the idea of doing cool video for the band, but the reality is that we don’t get a large enough budget to do it the way that I would ideally want. So we’ve been experimenting a little bit this time with how we can do something that feels representative of our vision for the band. We clearly have a strong visual element to the records and it’s been difficult to not be able to translate that into video because we’ve never really had the proper investment in it. But I think we’ve gotten closer than we ever have before at trying to do that. So I like the process. I think that it’s a little frustrating. I wish that we could just really go for it, but it would be so expensive to try and do.
For instance, I would love to do a fully animated video. That would be like what I would really want to do and then find ways to incorporate live footage in a way that made sense in that format and it would be so expensive to do that. So yeah, I like the idea a lot. I’m satisfied with the videos, especially the one that me and Dave made that’s compiling silent film footage and then I drew these title cards for it and hand wrote the lyrics and did a little animation and stuff. That to me is really satisfying because it’s fully capturing a vision that we have for something. I think that the one for “Invocation of the Dreamer” turned out great. It looks like how the song sounds to me, which is satisfying, but there’s a lot that we haven’t gotten to do yet with video that I would really like to try and do. So we’re going to be experimenting, I think, throughout this album cycle with maybe trying to do more video even after the record comes out based on the aesthetics that we imagine for it and trying to do as much of it ourselves as we can, even if it’s really laborious because it’s something that we haven’t fully realized for the band yet that I think would be satisfying for all of us to be able to do.
When it comes to album art and videos, AI has become a big part of it these days. Is that something you would ever consider?
Absolutely not. I don’t think AI has any place in human creativity, period. I see how some people could maybe be drawing inspiration from AI related stuff, but I don’t think that AI should ever be the end product. I don’t think that it’s honest to human creativity or expression to use AI for that. I think it’s bullshit that it’s something that is making it harder for people to understand what is real and what has been created from a serious investment of human time and emotion. It really bums me out if people are like, that looks like AI about something that we’ve done that I know that I fucking drew with my own hand. I hate that, but it’s just the way that people have to view the world now. People have to be skeptical of whether the things they’re seeing are real, and that’s really the saddest thing that’s happened with AI is that we’re all just questioning, what even is our reality anymore? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to see something coming from another human being? And that’s not a world that I expected we would be living in, nor one that I’ve consented to, and quite frankly, I’m pretty fucking mad about it. I don’t see us at all in any way ever using AI for anything, just as a statement of purpose about the nature of what it is that I think we need to be doing to continue producing art that matters in the world at all.
With the band spread out and day jobs and things like that, is it difficult to carve out the time to be able to tour?
It’s always been part of the band’s ethos that we try and work smarter rather than harder. We’ve always been strategic about what touring we do. It’s always been part of what we’ve done as a band, and we originally set out to not tour with the band, and then it just became part of the reality the more that we had people that were interested in wanting to see us. There’s a lot of things that we haven’t done that we’ve gotten offers to do that I would have probably liked to do, but they weren’t a good fit for us collectively as a band, and we’re gonna always just keep approaching it with that same mindset. And that does mean that there are not going to be 200 Khemmis shows in a year that people can go see, but I think that that’s better for all of us as humans to not have to sacrifice that much of our lives to it.
I think there’s something to be said for being really intentional about how we’re using our time, and if that means that this gives us more energy to start working on a new record, to be with our families and our loved ones, to be spending time doing other things that fill us up creatively, and it’s not a sacrifice then. It gets to be something that we can do as an expression of our love of the music. So, that touring that we do is really just a labor of love and expression of how much we like spending time together and how much we like being able to see an audience react to new music and connect with them. So, we tour as much as we can while keeping those other things in mind, and so this year we have three different tours that are coming up. We’re keeping all of those reasonably short, so they’re all three weeks or less, and that makes it sustainable for us.
So, it’s something that we have to juggle with the other elements in our life, but I think that’s true of everyone that’s touring in bands, and we’re just trying to do it in a way that’s sustainable for the four of us. Every configuration of people doing this is going to be different, and that meets our needs. I think it also meets the audience’s needs. Nobody needs to go see the same band twice in the same year, and my desire for this album cycle is that we get to go to places that we haven’t been before. That’s what makes me the most excited about touring is, oh cool, we get to go to Norway or whatever, and that means that we’re having a new experience. I’d really like to go to Japan. I’d really like to go to New Zealand or Australia or Southeast Asia with the band, and those are all things that I really want to be seeing happen on this album cycle. So, if it’s at all possible, I’d be inclined to do shorter tours in more different places than just slogging it out in the U.S. for six weeks.
The band is on the cover of Decibel for the new album.
I love it. I’m never gonna take this for granted. I grew up being that kid who would buy Guitar World or whatever at the supermarket and read it. Anytime I flew when I was a kid, I was always looking forward to that my parents would let me buy a magazine, and so I would spend forever in the Hudson News and try and find the coolest magazine that had Slash on the cover of it, or Jimmy Page or whatever, and then I would just pore over it on the flight. So, it means a lot to me to be able to see myself in that same spot that I saw these people that I idolized growing up. Decibel has been a huge supporter of us since the beginning, and I just have so much gratitude for Albert and all the folks there for wanting to do that. It’s my third time being on the cover of the magazine, first for the Decibel tour that we did with Enslaved, and then we had a previous cover story with Deceiver. This one, I think the photos and the story ended up being really great. It’s cool because we don’t really get to see that stuff until it’s in print. We just do the interview and see what happens, and I was so satisfied with the way that story got told. It’s really an honor, and I hope that we continue to get those kinds of opportunities at the other remaining magazines. We haven’t done Metal Hammer or Revolver or anything, and I would like to see us in those places.
Other than friends and family, what do you miss most about Denver?
I miss the food, actually. I feel like Denver has a pretty strong food scene, and where I’m living in Bellingham, Washington, it’s pretty bad, and so I miss the food. I also really miss the camaraderie of the local scene. There’s such a tight-knit metal community in Denver. If you go to any local show, there’s a good chance that you’re going to see people from other bands that have been around for forever at that show. There’s a good chance that you’re going to run into promoters for different venues and people who have just been part of the scene, photographers or sound people or whatever at these shows, and everybody gets along. There’s no sense of competition unless it’s a friendly sort of competition where you’re like, ah shit, what a great record. I have to put out a better one. It’s not cutthroat at all. Everybody just supports each other.
There’s such a mutual admiration there that I think is unique to Denver’s scene and I really wish somebody had been documenting as we were coming up alongside all these other great bands like Blood Incantation and Spectral Voice and Primitive Man and the Company of Serpents and Wayfarer and Dreadnought, they’re all just killing it, doing their own thing, completely different bands, none of them sound alike at all, and supporting each other, going to each other’s shows, the community embracing all of us, lifting us up and creating all these bands that are now internationally known just because of the support of this local scene. I really wish people had been there documenting that. I suspect it will be one of those moments that people talk about in the future in terms of the development of important scenes across the country, and maybe somebody was. Maybe somebody had a camera that was trying to do this at the time, but there’s something really special about Denver, and I don’t think that you can replicate that elsewhere.
Have you guys ever played Red Rocks?
I would say Red Rocks and Japan are my two biggest aspirations for the band that I’ve had ever since we started, ever since I realized that people will book us to play a show. Those have been on my musical radar as my pie-in-the-sky dreams, and a lot of the other things that were on that list we’ve since been able to do, and those are really the two big remaining ones. And I know that Danny, the guy who helps book Red Rocks, wants to have us play there. He’s a big supporter of the band. They just don’t book a whole lot of hard rock and metal shows there, and usually if they do, there’s already a lineup that’s touring, so it’s tough. But I really do hope that we can do that someday, and I think I have some plans in mind about how we might be continuing to grow the band in terms of the creative direction that I hope might help us get there in the near future.
All right, Phil, is there anything else that you’d like to mention?
Make sure that you’re picking up the new record on June 12th when it comes out, and if you’re inclined to come and visit us on tour someplace, come and say hi. We’d love to chat with you, reminisce about old days with the band, and I’m just so grateful for everyone’s support. It means a lot.
(interview published June 10, 2026)
Watch Khemmis – “Invocation Of The Dreamer” Video
