Archspire need little introduction for anyone even remotely aware of modern technical death metal. The Vancouver five-piece has quickly gone from releasing a relatively overlooked debut (2010's All Shall Align) to arguably one of the biggest tech death releases of the decade so far with 2021’s over Bleed the Future. Key to their increased fame and success is their relentless, over-the-top focus on speed at all costs, along with an intense touring schedule and a savvy internet presence.
Except as of this year, the five-piece is now a four-piece: hot off of their biggest North American tour ever, drummer Spencer Prewett has suddenly stepped down from the band. Now, turnover happens all the time in this line of work, not least with metal music not being the most easy, stable, or lucrative of careers. Despite relative lineup stability otherwise, Archspire themselves are on their third (and since longest-tenured) bass player in Jared Smith, and they’re clearly doing just fine.
But Prewett leaving feels different. Anyone who’s heard anything by Archspire knows just how essential his particular drumming vocabulary was to defining their sound. Although high-speed tech death usually lends itself to a well-characterized style of blast-beat-heavy drumming, Prewett instead brought an unusual set of approaches to the table. Here was a drummer relying just as much on odd approaches to gravity and switch blasts as he did traditional blast beats (see here for a quick primer on some of this terminology) and stringing together extremely unorthodox lines to match Archspire's frequent rhythmic trickery. Or, without the jargon: in a genre where intricate guitar parts typically take centre stage, his drumming style found ways to be uniquely frenetic. There was a time and a place for metronome-perfect traditional blasts in any given Archspire song, but the drumming on their material typically went far, far beyond that.
More importantly, this style sounded hard as hell to replicate. Outside of John Longstreth of Origin, there is arguably no major tech death drummer that approaches the genre quite like Prewett does. So who was to take his place? Longstreth himself initially seemed a good candidate, but he was already Origin’s full time drummer, and arguably as irreplaceable in his own right. Plus, even if we consider that several other tech death drummers plausibly have the skillset to match what was on the records, are we sure they’d be able to write material that sounds like Prewett's unusual style on future releases?
Seemed Archspire were asking themselves the same question. In the same post announcing Prewett’s departure, the band announced an open audition to replace him. Let’s be clear about something: this is not a common occurrence for a band of Archspire’s caliber. We typically see bands figure out lineup turnover in a much less public fashion. It also did little to assuage the fears of anyone concerned that Prewett would be difficult if not impossible to replace, if the band themselves had to resort to something like this.
What’s emerged since, however, is a fascinating case study on various aspects of tech death musicianship and how it’s perceived by fans, solely for one reason: Archspire asked entrants to publicly post their entries online with a hashtag, instead of just submitting an application to the band directly. This means all auditions are available for the world to see, and although there is no ‘fan vote’ component, it has still generated a ton of discourse and even some drama between entrants. In doing so, the audition has captured a microcosm of how tech death, and tech death drumming in particular, can approximate being a spectator sport at times. Let’s dive in.
The Mimic Well - The auditions so far
Going to spoil the surprise here — at the time of writing, the audition is still open as far as I’m aware. It’s been over a month and the only communication from the band has been two goofy reaction videos that spend more time talking about entrants’ outfits than their drumming (never change, Archspire). One can presume they may have privately reached out to promising entrants, but it looks like the initial wave of audition videos is nearly all the public gets. The good news is there’s still a lot to digest in what is currently available to us, and it’s a helpful exercise to quickly review the state of the auditions for anyone who hasn’t been following along (though this section is probably safe to skip for those who have).
At first, the auditions were slow to start. This is unsurprising for several reasons:
- There existed comparatively few professionally-shot video playthroughs of Prewett himself doing the songs, for whatever reason, meaning that drummers had to learn the songs based off limited drum cam footage and otherwise by ear;
- There existed even fewer transcriptions of Archspire drum parts. Most Archspire transcriptions (whether available on the internet or sold by the band directly) focused on the guitar and bass parts;
- Because of the points above, there existed very, very few fan covers of most Archspire songs on drums (save for one insane channel consistently doing playthroughs of fan-made Clone Hero drum maps).
All this is to say — it would be surprising if any drummer had a bunch of Archspire songs already memorized and ready to go, though that didn’t stop the initial worry that the band was absolutely cooked in finding a replacement. But the auditions soon came all the same, and several names jumped to the fore. We’ve seen entries from newer, less well-known drummers who’ve since seen their channels explode (such as Wildy Souza, Cole Summerhays, and Greg Smith) in addition to entries from more established drummers (Benighted's Kevin Paradis, and even John Longstreth himself). These auditions vary somewhat in approach, sound, and visual ‘feel’ — after all, a video audition is just as much a chance for a potential drummer to show their personality as it is a means for talent evaluation.
Unfortunately, it’s also shown that there’s an ugly side to this whole thing. Following an audition video from an Italian drummer named Riccardo Merlini, Craig Reynolds of Stray From the Path released a video pointing out several inconsistencies in Merlini’s take that suggested some rather concerning post-production edits. We’ll discuss this further below, but the evidence does look damning - and the vitriolic comment sections of Merlini’s video after Reynolds’ post seemed to reflect that (that is, until the comment section was disabled altogether). Even then, bad press is still press: Merlini very promptly had a Drumeo video release a week or so after, where he joined a popular series of videos in which professional drummers learned songs that they’d never listened to before. The comments section of that video of him jamming along to ‘Through the Fire and the Flames’ was also initially a doozy before stabilizing, but then again any and all negative comments still reflected additional clicks in the end. It’s a wonderful algorithm-driven world we live in.
So thus ends a recap of some of the auditions so far — but what can we take away from this, and what does it tell us about tech death more generally?
Lucid Collective Evaluation - Four takeaways
Music as sport
First off, the (hashtag) Archspire audition is one of the clearest reflections of music as sport that we’ve seen in modern metal. Again, lineup turnover and subsequent auditions happen all the time, but this is a rare instance where we’re seeing auditions posted entirely for the public to judge, and to fill in the oddball drumming style of the self-proclaimed fastest band in the world.
What do I mean by ‘sport’ here in this instance? Quick thought experiment: why do you and I listen to tunes? To feel something? To have difficult feelings reflected back in song? To stay in the groove at the gym?
Any of these answers can apply to varying degrees depending on the song, the time of day, and what’s going on in one’s life. So given this, how do we formally define one musician as better than another? Assuming a baseline level of competence between the musicians considered, everything beyond that is arguably subjective, is it not? Anything can be evaluated relative to what it's trying to accomplish, whether that's, well, representing difficult feelings, or getting your heart pounding at the gym. Plus, there’s no obvious scoring method we could use, like ‘fastest lap’ or ‘points scored’.
But this is a question every viewer immediately answers for themselves when actually watching through the videos, whether they know it or not. Consider gymnastic competitions, or figure skating, where competitors are judged on metrics such as difficulty and execution instead of their ability to score highly on something as straightforward as ‘goals scored’ or ‘bullseyes hit’. When evaluating music in a competitive setting, we, too, have our own implicit rubrics. In the case of the Archspire audition, one can imagine the ‘best’ drummer is one that is an absolute machine, metronome-perfect, and with economical technique. This is also a drummer that sounds like Prewett did, but does in a way that comes across as natural, whatever that might mean. Perhaps they also need to be funny? Or bald, like 3/4 of Archspire are (as they like to remind you). We could also consider logistical aspects like studio experience, touring experience, and current location, but these are secondary to the musical evaluation.
In this case, we can create our ‘scoring criteria’ pretty easily based on what the point of all this is — you know, a literal competition to see who will become Archspire’s drummer. But it's not often in music that we see scenarios that lead to relatively obvious and interpretable scoring criteria, given the subjectivity at hand (consider, say, ambient music or free jazz, and how much harder this would be to do there). And so despite there not usually being objective or quantitative ways to go about ‘music as sport’ in a one-size-fits-all manner, here is a real-life example of it working just fine. All it took was a competitive setting like an audition that's seeking an extremely specific style of musicianship.
Tech death (in particular) as sport
Zooming in — I’m treating this as a separate point (sue me) but for all the discussion above, technical death metal is very uniquely positioned for this idea of music as sport. I did literally just say that there are no obvious quantitative ways of deciding who’s a better drummer, but if any subgenre allows you to find criteria close to that, it’s tech death. While I’ll never claim that other subgenres are ‘lesser’ for being less technical, I think it’s fair to argue that tech death requires a particularly intense technical mastery of one's instrument. Few other genres require as much precision and stamina regardless of the instrument being played.
Naturally, when you have a subgenre that’s trying its hardest to stretch human limits, you’re going to witness a highly optimized set of techniques on display — and so we’ve seen the auditions judged on everything from gravity blast snare hit consistency, ability to switch the leading hand between different kinds of blast beats, the precise sticking on switch blasts, and more. Conceptually, once again, having this specific a set of criteria is not that dissimilar from gymnastic scoring. Judges for gymnastics at the Olympics similarly score athletes on their proficiency with very specific routines, and penalize technique errors like balance issues or what they would deem (e.g.) over-bending of legs.
So yes, this does extend from the previous point above, but tech death in particular lends itself especially well to the analogy, and especially so in the case of this audition. And so here we are with a single set of immensely demanding source material to replicate, where each of the drumming techniques it requires can be closely evaluated on its own merit — again, much like different types of specific gymnastic feats being performed before a judging panel.
Cheating
And now we dig into the uglier side of things. The outcry to Merlini’s alleged fakery (mentioned above) was quite pronounced. And for good reason: if he did indeed edit his playthroughs, why the hell would you do that in an audition video? Surely if you get hired by the band, you’d be found out eventually, right? We’ll revisit this shortly, but first, a different question: why cheat when one is already clearly immensely talented to begin with? Merlini is not some nobody with nothing to lose: he’s been featured by several drumming publications, and refers to himself as the ‘fastest drummer in the world’ on his website. Seems apt for Archspire’s mission statement. So why go through the trouble of faking anything?
Now, this piece isn’t going to make claims about whether or not Merlini ‘cheated’. His audition and Craig Reynolds’ breakdown are linked above and freely available for viewing and evaluation. But it’s worth really diving into the questions above for a moment.
Here’s where we take a brief left turn into the world of speedruns. For the uninitiated, this is a huge community of people trying to complete video games as quickly as possible, and competing against one another for the best times. This is actually far more intense than it might sound — good speedrunning is often a mix of precise mechanical ability and technical knowhow surrounding the games themselves, and the end result is often incredible to watch in motion. That’s not even getting into how speedrunning has raised a huge amount of money for charitable causes through initiatives like Games Done Quick.
Still, the entire picture is not so rosy, and speedrunners have their own fair share of cheating controversies. Karl Jobst, a YouTuber who studies and chronicles speedrunning, has pointed out a bit of cheater psychology that’s relevant to us here: speedrunners who cheat are not typically absolute novices who are terrible at a game they want to speedrun. Instead, they tend to be highly accomplished and skilled speedrunners already, but ones who ‘want their flowers’ — i.e. those who are near the top but feel frustrated about not being crowned the best of the best. It takes an overwhelming amount of work to the in the top 0.01% of anything, let alone a highly niche skill like this. Given that, feeling like one ‘deserves’ the very top spot can be a shockingly easy psychological trap to fall into when that top spot feels just barely out of reach. So cheating sadly happens all too often in speedrunning too, and can go unchecked for a while — after all, believable faked runs need a very strong technical base to build on. It’s just that cheaters rely on unscrupulous means for that final bump up on the leaderboards.
Zooming back out, this actually isn't that unheard of in sports itself. Doping is an age-old problem in sports competitions. Basketball player Tyreke Evans won NBA Rookie of the Year over legendary players like Stephen Curry and James Harden due to his incredibly strong first season, but his achievements were later sullied by him failing a drug test several years later. In an even higher-profile case, Lance Armstrong was already a talented and celebrated cyclist with major championships under his belt when his career was tragically put on hold by a cancer diagnosis. After beating cancer, he shocked the world repeatedly when he won seven consecutive Tour de France titles, but later admitted to doping for every single one of those post-cancer wins. Point being: the people who cheat in competitive sports are usually good enough to get there in the first place, but the allure of getting over the hump with unscrupulous means can be too much to resist, for whatever reason.
That long tangent brings us back to the audition. Merlini is insanely talented, and lots of his footage does indeed live up to the ‘fastest drummer in the world’ title. But if he did edit his playthrough, why would he feel the need to in the first place, and what would he stand to gain? Perhaps just attention — we did briefly discuss his Drumeo video from earlier, which currently sits at over a million views. Perhaps there was no intention to ever join Archspire, but rather the plan was to ride the hype cycle surrounding the audition and get additional eyes on his content. The Drumeo video’s view count potentially did benefit from the controversy after all. But at what cost? It’s not looking likely he’s getting the Archspire gig, and those claims are likely to follow him around regardless. But it's fascinating reflecting on how this whole saga mirrors, in some way, the same kind of cheating we see in several other forms of sport and competition.
Tech death and human limits
It’s worth closing off on a few thoughts on why fakery in the context of a completely creative endeavour like music is still received so poorly. A good while back, I collaborated with Eden on a piece about ‘suffering’ as a core part of the identity of metal, and how that’s previously manifested in the metal guitar playing world (e.g. with bands like Rings of Saturn being accused of speeding up guitar parts instead of 'putting in the work'). That same concept applies here. Despite a genre like tech death approximating being as machine-like as possible, fans really want to know that what they’re hearing is still from a human stretching the limits of what’s possible in some way.
This isn’t unique to tech death, of course. Music has always been one of the most enduring means of human expression. Much of our collective aversion to fully AI-generated slop from models (illegally) trained on existing music also has to do with just that. Switching gears genre-wise for a second – when you and I hear Trent Reznor singing ‘Hurt’ through gritted teeth, we can picture the rage within the twenty-something that he was at the time, captured forever in song (no matter how many highbrow movies he scores with Atticus Ross now). It's not a note-perfect performance, and the guitar parts are intentionally digitally warped to boot. Despite this, the whole thing feels distinctly human – and it being so makes the song's vulnerability shine that much more.
In tech death, on the other hand, it’s less about the experience being described, and more about the feats of musical gymnastics on display — all to create an adrenaline-pumping final package. There’s something awe-inspiring about hearing crisp blast beats at the speed of sound and knowing there’s a real person behind the kit doing that. Muhammed Suicmez's legendary solo in "Fermented Offal Discharge" blew all of our minds in the 00's because it was surreal that a human being could sweep pick so cleanly. And so, similarly, a band or artist lying about output being human-recorded just doesn’t sit well here either, because there’s still a strong human element to the insane musical feats at hand that we're still looking for. We just don’t want to be misled about what parts of it are human. What I'm trying to say is that a big part of tech death's appeal is that it's extreme gymnastics for metal fans, whether we want to admit it or not.
But of course, the main takeaway is that it would be silly to cheat in an audition. Dude, they’ll find out eventually.
Conclusion
It’s been over a month and Archspire still don’t have a new drummer at the time of writing. The auditions have slowed down at this point, and as mentioned earlier, there’s a high chance the band are in contact with promising drummers already following the initial wave of covers that came in. It’s probably a good thing that the alleged fastest band in the world are actually taking their time with this process. But we’ve also come out of this saga with several previously unknown drummers making a name for themselves online, and that’s a net good for tech death as a whole — who knows what projects they’ll start soon (or be drafted into) if not Archspire itself.
(Separately, it’s also pretty good press for Archspire to suddenly have this many drum covers for their music out there, which also brings more attention to tech death as a whole and the techniques it requires. Win win. Once again, savvy internet presence and all.)
Above all, this has afforded us with a cool opportunity to really think deeply about just how complex and precise tech death drumming can be. No matter what the musical context, we’re fascinated and even enthralled just seeing virtuosity in action, and the audition thus far has been a means of exploring a highly specific corner of that. Now to see what Archspire’s final choice means for the baldness ratio in future band photos.