This week’s featured Meet The Band artist is the trans-Atlantic project Grey Mountain. Guitarist/vocalist Jon Higgs (Thūn, Moose Cult) gives us the scoop on the band’s self-titled debut album.
Chad Bowar: Give us a brief history of Grey Mountain.
Jon Higgs: The band is the result of a collaboration between myself and Kishor Haulenbeek (guitars, bass, vocals; also of Black Harvest, Construct of Lethe, In Human Form), rounded out by my long suffering brother-in-arms in Monsterworks, James Garnett (drums). James and I are based in the U.K., Kishor in the U.S. I got to know Kishor through www.metalforum.com and first reached out to hire him to paint a cover for Bull Elephant’s third album. At some point in 2023, knowing he played in Heavy Meta, I asked if he would be interested in laying down bass for a bunch of tracks I had in mind to record with James as a side project. He said yes, but went a step further and contributed a song and guitar leads to the whole thing. Why stop there? He also blasted out a good chunk of the vocals.
Describe the songwriting process for your self-titled album.
I am constantly demoing new music with basic programmed drums, scratch guitars, etc; just to get arrangements down. When a demo song is done (although it still sounds pretty rough), I write out tab for the guitar as a prompt for how to play the riffs because otherwise I will forget or take forever at a later date trying to relearn what I played. The demo gets added to a pile until I have enough for an album. Usually demos that get written around the same time end up on the same album, but lately I have such a backlog that I tend to pick and choose from the pile what might work well together. Sometimes I have an idea for a lyrical theme, but almost never start writing lyrics at least until the album is laid out, say a track list of eight songs in order. Quite often I don’t even start lyrics until the music has been recorded properly, i.e. with real drums.
Kishor works in a similar way but his demos are far more polished and closer to a finished product than mine. I use the demos merely as a means of getting arrangements down for future reference. My drum patterns evolve, but I really don’t spend too long on them because I don’t want to be too prescriptive for when the human drummer takes a crack at the song. Anyway, I am really OCD when it comes to keeping an album length to around 40 minutes, so we dropped one of my songs to make room for Kishor’s track “Hermitage.” That is no skin off my nose, because I just throw the song back on the pile for the next album.
What will be your strongest memory of the recording of the album and the biggest challenge in its creation?
I like tracking drums live with no click track and bashing it out with James in a room. The Grey Mountain production was pretty similar to what we’ve done over a dozen times before in various studio environments. All my songs were pretty easy to blast through in the studio because we’d jammed them out a few times before the session. I do remember James finding tracking Kishor’s song pretty challenging because we just didn’t have time to rehearse it beforehand (no way I could learn all those parts in a few days), so James played along to the demo guitars and drums as best he could.
It was the end of the first day and he was getting pretty frustrated. So we went home, had dinner, and then he spent half the evening listening to it over and over, tapping it out with his drum sticks. Next morning he nailed it in one or two takes. Recording rhythm guitars was a little different on Grey Mountain because we split the signal and recorded two amps simultaneously (Diezel Herbert and Dual Rectifier). I’d never done that before. A nice thick sound but a lot of guitar tracks at the end of it. Double tracked guitars x 2 mics x 2 amps!
How would you describe its style/sound?
We’re going with traditional heavy metal, filtered through death and doom, with post-metal and discordant influences. I’ve seen it referred to as progressive metal in some reviews so far. I mean, yes, it is a different blend of sounds, but we are a long way from Opeth or some other noodly band I think.
What lyrical topics do you cover?
The initial concept behind the album and the band name was the idea of isolated cultures surviving and developing outside of “modern civilization.” The lyrics can be relatively bleak – societal collapse, self-inflicted disaster, the end of the world as we know it. The usual stuff.
What are your goals and expectations for the album?
It is all very new, so just to get it out there and see what kind of feedback we get. I am particularly happy with the vibe and it has been great working with Kishor. He’s like the perfect bandmate, a beast of a songwriter, guitarist/vocalist and a graphic artist/painter to boot. James is also a pleasure to work with. He’s reliable and we have a great time hanging out. We all have pretty well aligned worldviews.
Do you have plans to play live shows?
Being transatlantic and shackled by day jobs and families, probably not! I do this for the sheer joy of creation. Happy to consider it though if the opportunity arises.
How did you get started in music?
I was a dedicated metalhead by the time I left high school, and had cultivated a wicked screaming voice, but didn’t start playing guitar until I left home and went to university in another city. It just grew from there. My first band, Monsterworks (formed in 1996), is still going albeit with different players (including James on drums) and in a different country.
Who were your early influences and inspirations?
The first major influence in heavy music was Twisted Sister from the videos they did. A few years later a buddy of mine promised to dub a bunch of Iron Maiden on cassette from his older brother, but he let me down and came back with four Judas Priest albums instead. Best mistake ever. Around the same time I was also into Queen and AC/DC. Toward the end of high school thrash was taking off. My school friends provided most of the influences that affected me forever. During university, I graduated to death and black metal, through new and old friends.
Halford was always my biggest vocal influence, but I also took a lot from the likes of John Tardy. Oh, and Martin Walkyier of Sabbat. History of a Time to Come was a fairly obscure British thrash album, but it was a huge influence on me vocally and also in the songwriting approach too (thanks to Andy Sneap, before he became a cookie cutter producer and seat warmer for KK). These days I look both back and forward. I am constantly discovering new music in my own journey through Bandcamp or via recommendations on metalforum.com, etc; all the while spinning the classics on vinyl in the evening. I listen to a lot of Black Sabbath.
What was the first metal concert you attended?
I don’t remember for sure. One of the earliest was a band called The Nod in a dodgy shed on an industrial estate in Petone (near Wellington, New Zealand) who played a bunch of Megadeth covers. I distinctly remember “Hook in Mouth” and it blew my head off. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it as it was a fairly profound experience. My first proper professional gig would have been Anthrax at the Wellington Town Hall in 1990 (Persistence of Time tour), even though I only heard the band a few weeks before the show. It was just something that came up and me and my best mate decided to go.
What are some of your non-musical interests and hobbies?
Good question! These days I am not sure that I have many. I live and breathe metal when I am not being a dad or working a day job. I enjoy hiking/outdoors but don’t get to go really remote very often. I used to like body building. That has slipped away in recent years although I still keep fit and eat well. I follow a plant based diet because I always knew I was better than everyone else, but hadn’t found a way to express it yet.
What’s currently in your heavy musical rotation?
The latest purchases in my Bandcamp account are The Great Old Ones – Kadath and Balmog – Mud to Gold EP, followed by Morbid Angel – Blessed Are The Sick and Givre – Destin Messianique. I was never into Morbid Angel in my death metal heydey for some reason, so I am re-discovering them.
Anything else you’d like to mention or promote?
Check out our other bands: Monsterworks, Moose Cult, Construct of Lethe, Black Harvest, Bull Elephant. Thanks for taking an interest!
(interview published March 8, 2025)
