What is the origin story of AGENBITE MISERY?

Agenbite Misery really took shape when I met our bassist, Cam, in a graduate literature class in the fall of 2022. I had already been good friends with our drummer, Adam, for years. We share similar musical tastes and backgrounds and had collaborated often, but it wasn’t until Cam entered the picture that the band truly began. Cam was a fellow literature nerd who had also read Ulysses and was into weird metal bands, so we hit it off quickly.

After jamming together once or twice, it became clear we needed to start something serious. I was the more experienced guitarist, so Cam picked up the bass, and I introduced him to Adam. From there, we were ready to make strange, dissonant metal. At first, our goal was to play blackened sludge metal (which is slightly easier than most metal styles) without a unifying concept. This was partly because Cam was new to bass and Adam wasn’t the most seasoned drummer. But over time, we gravitated toward becoming a concept band focused on literature.

Our first album naturally centered on Ulysses, not only because it is such an ambitious artistic work, but also because it symbolized the beginning of our collaboration.

 Where does the name come from?

The name comes from Chapter 10 of Ulysses, in one of my favorite passages, where Stephen Dedalus sees his abandoned sisters struggling for food. He thinks: “She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite. Misery! Misery!” It’s one of the most poignant moments in the book and has always stuck with me.

The word agenbite comes from an old Middle English text titled Agenbite of Inwit, in which the narrator mourns the death of his mother. Stephen is also mourning his own mother’s death, burdened with guilt because he refused to pray for her on her deathbed, since he was an atheist. This was a radical position in 1904 Ireland. That guilt haunts him throughout the book, and the phrase agenbite of inwit recurs whenever his thoughts turn to remorse. The phrase itself, when modernized, would be “the again-bite of inner wit,” or more plainly, remorse of conscience, which is also the title of the album.

 Is the band’s vision limited to James Joyce or is it wider?

We’re certainly big fans of Joyce and his works form a rich tapestry to pull from, but I think our inspiration and goal is much larger in scope. Our album is less about grabbing elements from this notable text and turning them into fun metal tunes, it’s about trying to harness the emotional and thematic impact of the original art piece and bringing it into the modern day, in a different context, with the hope that it can illicit some of the same powerful feelings in a similarly divided time.

 James Joyce is known as one of the most complex and challenging writers in the Western literary canon and Ulysess as one of the most difficult books. Why did you choose Ulysess?

That notoriety and challenge were actually part of what drew us to it. It felt like a compelling starting point—to take one of the greatest and most complex novels ever written and try to distill it into an hour of metal music. Starting with such a bold concept helped ground us as a band. It gave us something concrete to rally around and made it clear that we would need to fully commit, both creatively and musically, to make the album work.

From another angle, the narrative of Ulysses isn’t as wild as its reputation suggests. At its core, it’s about a couple of guys walking around Dublin over the course of a single day in 1904. What makes the book so fascinating and endlessly rich isn’t the plot, but the way the story is told. The events themselves are purposefully mundane, but the style, structure, and voice shift dramatically from chapter to chapter. That episodic nature actually makes it surprisingly well-suited to an experimental album, where each track can explore a different mood or sound.

We briefly considered tackling Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon or Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but those books have a much looser structure and are harder to break down into defined parts. In contrast, Ulysses gave us a clear framework to build around.

 What other Joyce works would you consider tackling?

A little bit of a spoiler, but our second album is fully recorded and each song there covers a short story from The Dubliners. I’d also personally consider doing an album based on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and potentially his play The Exiles. Finnegans Wake is awesome and a real triumph of literature, but I don’t think the text could be captured or even conveyed with music in a way that would be satisfying.

 What other authors or works?

We all read and love all different periods of literature, but for the scope of AGENBITE, I think we’d keep things firmly planted in the realm of literary modernism. Something about that period is just very evocative and raw and I think lends itself to the aggression and dynamism of metal, as well as providing some banger material to pull from. We’re planning to do an album based on Faulkner, but I could also see us drawing from Conrad, Hemingway or Woolf to name a few.

 There seems to be a strong link between metal and literature. Why do you think this is?

A couple of major reasons. Metal, more so than most styles of popular music, encourages its practitioners to strive for a real mastery of their craft in a way that mirrors the study of literature. Really great metal, jazz or classical musicians are often taught to dedicate themselves to their instrument in a structured and disciplined way which lines up very closely with traditional academic structures, so it makes sense that a lot of individuals who enjoy reading would

gravitate towards it in such a way.

Also, a lot of metal musicians are just nerds who love reading. I think metal in particular also has a storied history of its artists pulling from other things they like and putting it in their music. Great literature has a lot to offer as far as inspiration goes. I guess from like Maiden with “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” or Metallica with “Call of Cthulu” to the several hundred Lovecraftian or Tolkien-based bands today, a lot of classic literature iconography aligns closely with what we consider metal.

AGENBITE MISERY is described as an experimental metal band, which doesn’t really capture the essence of the style. How would you describe the music of AGENBITE MISERY?

Yeah, experimental metal isn’t necessarily the best genre tag in general, but if we wanted to get really annoying and granular about it, I guess I’d call us “experimental progressive black/death/doom” which is somehow worse.

Putting any one label on the Agenbite music is hard, because we pull from a lot of different places and each song sounds fairly different. At the same time though, we don’t have any super crazy Bungle moments or esoteric noise sections that push the boundaries of music, all of the songs are grounded in metal styles, there’s just a lot of them.

I think of the AGENBITE music as grounded primarily in black metal, with the vocals and tremolo riffs being consistent in almost all of our songs, but we add in a lot of different elements from other styles, like angular death metal riffs, crushing sludge riffs and chord progressions from indie music, and sometimes do things entirely different like the horror movie post-punk rave thing of our song “Whatness of Allhorse.”

Coining our own phrase like AGRICULTURE and KNOLL have is probably our best bet, which I’d want to be something like “Ineluctable Metal” or "Ineluctable Black Metal.” Ineluctable means “unable to be avoided” and has some fun connotations with amorphous contents, but it’s also used famously in the beginning of chapter 3 of Ulysses with the opening line: “Ineluctable modality of the visual.”

If metal did not exist in the world, what other musical style do you think you would have used for this album?

I think any music style that has the potential to be longform or dynamic could meaningfully adapt Joyce’s works, like modern classical or free jazz. If I had to do a non-metal Ulysses personally, I’d probably do a post-rock/noise rock thing like the more contemporary SWANS albums. That music is repetition-based with lots of room to expand and collapse over longer song lengths, so you’d be able to fit in plenty of Joycean lyrics and it’s also very mutable so you could cover different styles and moods easily.

You created a unified, multi-thread approach on this album. The lyrics are directly from Joyce’s works, the music amplifies the different tones and modalities of his prose, and the name of the band is a deep cut reference to Joyce. Tell us about other threads, for instance the album cover, the title, the blue robes.

The blue robes serve several purposes. They reference the histories of both black metal and academic study, particularly monastic traditions. We chose the color blue because a deep navy was the original color Joyce wanted for the cover of Ulysses. Another reason we wear them is to embrace a central idea in Ulysses and in Joyce’s later work: “Metempsychosis.” To put it simply, it’s the idea that one thing can represent many others. In literature, that means the author is not confined to a single character but is expressed through all of them, as well as through the prose itself. There are essentially three main characters in Ulysses, and each represents a range of ideas and themes that extend across the literary canon. The robes allow us to blur our individual identities when performing live, letting each of us embody different aspects or elements of the text. The robed figures you see in our media represent both the main characters of Ulysses and us as artists in Agenbite. They’re also just cool and serve as a strong visual symbol.

The album cover was created by Canadian artist Alex O’Dowd, whom we chose for his skill in detailed cityscapes. It vividly depicts a 1904 Dublin cityscape beneath a colorful sky, symbolizing a boundless and evocative atmosphere.

 There is a visualizer video for “Whatness of Allhorse.” Are there plans for others?

We also did a visualizer for our first single, “Bellwether and Swine,” and I’m currently finishing up one for our third single. Currently the plan is to finish one for each of the singles we’ll be releasing and to tentatively do one for the whole album. They have been a lot of work, with us shooting and editing them entirely ourselves with essentially zero budget. I am proud of them though, and I like how they give a visual element to a text that is very hard to represent visually.

Which track are you most pleased with? Why?

I’m probably the most proud of the song “Cascara Sagrada.” It was the last song we wrote on the record and just does a lot of interesting things that I’m a fan of in other music. It has a non-traditional structure, each riff is in a weird time signature and the whole thing is constantly moving and heavy conceptually in a way that not all the other songs are.

Tell us about your musical influences. What bands are on your playlist? Anything that would surprise us?

I’ll start off by saying all three of us are big music nerds in general and listen to just about everything in different shapes and forms, but we all gravitate towards metal as our favorite style. We’re all big prog nerds and I love the classic 70’s stuff like YES, KING CRIMSON, CAMEL, RUSH, etc. . . . and I love more modern stuff like OPETH, BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, PERIPHERY, CALIGULA’S HORSE to name a few.

For stuff that directly inspired AGENBITE, I’d have to list bands like COBALT (particularly in our song “Bellwether and Swine”), PRIMITIVE MAN, SUFFERING HOUR, PYRRHON, BORIS, SUMAC, ORANSSI PAZUZU, SLINT, KHANATE and a million other underground bands.

Currently I’ve been listening to a lot of cheesy European power metal and a lot of dissonant black metal. If there’s anything that I enjoy that might be surprising given how serious and “heavy” our music is, it would be fun hyperpop artists like 100 GECS or KERO KERO BONITO. I’m also a big fan of cloud rap and just saw the rapper BLADEE recently, which was an awesome time.

There are over 150 active metal bands listed in Metal Archives, which I think most people will find surprising. How would you describe the metal scene like in New Hampshire?

New Hampshire has a surprisingly rich history of heavy music despite our biggest exports being GODSMACK, VATTNET VISHKAR and OUR LAST NIGHT. In the mid-2000s we had no shortage of sick metalcore/mathcore bands that shared some overlap with the broader New England scene. Nowadays, NH is very similar to a lot of the surrounding states, and we have a lot of really dedicated, talented artists who are usually involved in several different active projects, but very few that achieve any national acclaim or beyond.

Not having a central city like Boston or Portland certainly makes things a bit harder to gain traction. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of bands don’t have very many high-quality recordings, so you end up with a lot of bands that have decent followings, but few that capitalize on it or allow themselves to get bigger. It is a good scene though, lots of deep music lovers.

How do you think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to impact metal either on the artist’s side or production side?

Oh gosh, it already has in a lot of negative ways I think. It’s very easy now to generate AI art, or even AI lyrics for your band. The music generation programs are also getting better to the point where I don’t know where we’ll be in a few years. I’ve also seen people I know use certain AI mastering programs to decent results. I think art in general faces a serious threat when it comes to AI and music is no different.

What’s next for AGENBITE MISERY?

Our album comes out in February, so until then we’ll be prepping our singles, getting merch ready, filming more videos and generally keeping busy. Hopefully the album does well enough to garner some positive attention so we could sign to a smaller label. We also have been planning a few smaller tours for promotion. We already have a second album fully recorded that will likely release in late 2026 and early 2027 and we’re always writing music. It helps us to keep busy.

Any special message for your fans out there?

I guess just a profound thanks from myself and the other AGENBITE guys. We never thought that niche music about a relatively niche text would garner the response it has, and it means a lot to us. For anyone reading this, look towards powerful art and to those around you for comfort during these trying times.