Interview with PUSCIFER (2/2)

In the first part, we spoke to Mat Mitchell about the origins of the new album “Normal Isn’t”, which will be released on February 6, 2026. We continue our conversation.

Like in a sandbox

On “Normal Isn’t”, the guitar plays an unusually large role for Puscifer. The guitarist explains: “For me, the guitar was about finding ways to make it aggressive and present, but not in the way we know it from traditional metal. I like it when guitar lines are like those of synthesizers or vocals. I like them to be less basic and more like little ornaments of their own. Technically, it’s a fuzz sound.” – So a kind of dirty distortion. How can we imagine working on the album? “Maynard contributed some of the basic ideas musically, as he has done in the past, but this time it was more like coming up with ideas for the soundtrack of this album, for a rhythm or for a little vocal melody. On this album he contributed more developed ideas where there might have been some vocal parts or a drum rhythm to create a foundation for an idea. But our typical process is still the same: we take these ideas, bring them all into our own sandbox and play around with them and see how we can contribute and what we can add, and then we give them back and see. We sort of toss them back and forth and watch them go here and then there again.”

Music comes to life

In “Pendulum” you can really hear the swinging of the pendulum. We ask about the genesis of the piece. “It started musically as an idea. It started with a Fairlight sound, which is a synthesizer from the early eighties that has its own voice and character and tends to tell you where to go with it. Maynard liked the idea and wrote the lyrics. Then came the drumbeat and it developed into a danceable number.” The song has already been played live in front of an audience. “When we had finished the album, we decided to play two shows to give the fans a first impression”. Sequences from these can be seen in the video. Presenting new songs in front of an audience for the first time is certainly exciting. Was Mat nervous? “Things that start out as an idea somehow come to life. We don’t think about how we’re going to perform the songs live when we’re writing them. Sometimes we maneuver ourselves into a dead end. So the nervousness was more in the pre-production. We spent a week sitting in a room trying to figure out how to deconstruct the song for the live performance. Once we play in front of an audience, the fun part begins. It was exciting to play something to people for the first time and see how they took to it.”

Signed

The first comic book in the “Tales from the Puscifer” series was recently published. Mat nods: “Maynard is always creative and constantly coming up with new ideas. He’s had these characters since the beginning of Puscifer. He likes to have alter egos and other personalities through which he can tell stories. There are characters that you’ve only seen if you’ve been to certain shows in Las Vegas at the very beginning, for example. It’s a good opportunity for him to go back and have some of those characters appear and tell new stories.” Mat himself likes the art form of comics and the way they tell stories. But he couldn’t afford one as a child.

Painted

We let our eyes wander to the album cover for “Normal Isn’t”. “This is an artist that Maynard really appreciates and he found this piece that he felt fit well with what we do musically and lyrically. It tells a story but also leaves enough room to imagine your own version, which I like. I like it when things are open enough that you can find your own meaning in it. We’ve never done anything with a visual art style piece before. It’s cool to incorporate that and make it a cohesive part of what we’ve been working on.”

Claudia Zinn-Zinnenburg

Line-up:
Maynard James Keenan – vocals
Carina Round – vocals, guitar, percussion
Mat Mitchell – guitar, bass, programming, synthesizer, production