“I want to operate where there are no rules”: How SpiritWorld woke the ghosts of the Wild West

Stu Folsom has been devouring westerns as of late. Growing up in “a house full of hillbillies” out in the United States’ wild western expanse, the SpiritWorld mastermind has always had a soft spot for cowboy culture, shot through as it is with tales of gunfighters and outlaws on the old frontier. After his mother experienced a heart attack on his birthday last June, however, he’s found himself spending time sitting with her to revisit a host of old favourites. He calls out the all-star 1989 TV adaptation of Lonesome Dove as particularly beloved, having read Larry McMurtry’s doorstop source novel three times, and long since fallen for the verbiage of hard-bitten protagonist Gus McCrae. Serendipitously, the night before we sit down to talk upcoming third album Helldorado he took in the extended, episodic cut of Quentin Tarantino’s infamously brutal The Hateful Eight.

“I think that one might have been a little bit too much for my mom,” he laughs. “I realised she hadn’t already seen it when they started puking blood and shooting each other’s heads off. She was like, ‘Boy, you can pick ’em. Old Quentin really let me down on that!’ I was wondering, ‘What Quentin movie would you actually like?!’ He doesn’t make films for some ‘mainstream audience’. He’s not out to appease anyone. Love him or hate him, that motherfucker pulls no punches. I can’t imagine that he has a long list of compromises that eat away at his soul. He works with blinders on, like, ‘I’m gonna make what I want, and if you don’t like it, go fuck yourself!’ I tip my hat to that.”

Virtually every artist will echo that appetite for unfettered creative freedom, but Stu is the kind of creator who’ll actually do what it takes to chase it down. From the get-go, SpiritWorld seemed like a creative gamble: hardcore-inflected thrash metal dressed in rhinestone-encrusted Nudie Suits while unpacking a viscera-strewn narrative of demons wreaking havoc out on the plains. It paid off handsomely with 2020’s Pagan Rhythms and 2022’s Deathwestern benchmarking a brand of gnarly attack that would do Slayer proud while winning a considerable cult following. But come third LP Helldorado it was already time to break out on a grand scale to reinvent both story and sound.

“I didn’t want to remake Deathwestern,” Stu begins. “I captured exactly what I wanted to on that record. The idea was originally to put out an alt. country album that would separate to this project, but there wasn’t an appetite from our A&R or management, and I’ve never enjoyed situations where the people you’re working with [aren’t totally onboard]. So it became about making a SpiritWorld record that was different but fit into that catalogue. I wanted to open the door to everything that I desire musically so that people begin to have that faith in me, where even if they don’t understand or agree with my vision, they will push for it. I’d love to be one of those weird and prolific people like Tarantino where the people around me always [enable] me to see ideas through. I want to operate in a place where there are no rules. Basically, I just want to cook!”

Helldorado mightn’t actually resemble the alt. country album Stu had in mind. There are only faint traces of acts as varied as The Byrds and Gram Parsons, Sun Volt, Ryan Adams and Wilco who the singer feel in love with as a kid when they walked the line between alt. rock and country. But there is much to treasure in its bloodstained city of gold. From the rockabilly blast that gets things moving on Abilene Grime to sax-infused murder ballad Prayer Lips and haunting widescreen instrumental Cleansing, there is a variety and dynamism far beyond what SpiritWorld have offered before, an expansion from no-nonsense punchiness to epic scope like visionary director Sergio Leone delivered between A Fistful Of Dollars and Once Upon A Time In The West. So when bangers like No Vacancy In Heaven or Western Stars & The Apocalypse do hit, they feel all the more savage.

“I wanted to have heavy moments and aggressive moments,” Stu nods, “but also moments where if you took them out of the context of everything else going on and sent it to someone saying, ‘This is the follow-up to Deathwestern,’ they could be real head-scratchers.”

Narratively, we’re moving into not-yet-charted territory, too. Where Deathwestern represented a distillation of Stu’s companion volume of short stories Godlessness, the piece for SpiritWorld is still being written. “In ways, this album is full of spoilers for a book that’s not out yet,” he smiles. In a nutshell, though, where Godlessness left off on a cliffhanger where its main characters were about to bust open the gates of hell, Helldorado is about what spills out.

“The best way to put it is it’s about finding out what’s under your feet, what’s south of heaven,” Stu expands. “Whether you’re the most religious person in the world, or not at all, it’s what it would be like to find out that that Old Testament description of things was actually the truth. A different plane of existence. Heaven and angels and God – then everything below. I’ve revisited a lot of body horror over the last six or eight years. Growing a little older, seeing my mom get sick and my dad passing away from a brain aneurysm in the shower – dealing with those fucked-up things, looking at them in hospital rooms’ cold light – you begin to process your own grief through weird shit like asking, ‘What would be the most terrible thing that could happen to a person? What would happen if someone is bitten by a demon creature and their hand swells up to the size of a cantaloupe out there in the middle of nowhere? Are they going to cut it off?!’”

Gruesome flourishes like that are some of the aspects that set SpiritWorld apart from the boom in country culture that has coincided with the current American political shift to the right. Talking about the rise of country music that is part of that, Stu sees comparisons with the blood, sweat and tears explosion in popularity of hardcore, and admits that there is something satisfying about watching underground artists like Colter Wall go from playing “40 or 50 people in a bar” to crowds of thousands, even if those new fans are mostly “Trumpers and good ole’ boys”. He doesn’t want anything to do with the MAGA movement, but there is value in joint escapism and inclusion.

“I have five brothers and they run the gamut politically from anarcho-punk to the other side where it’s all about rural values,” he shrugs. “Yes, it’s crazy that Donald Trump is the ‘spokesperson’ for roughnecks working in oil fields. But any time a large group gets together from either side to tell people what to do is when I start to cringe. I just want the art I make and the world I build to be a safe space where people can enjoy themselves. I’m so sick of the division in America. People don’t hate each other nearly as much as gets forced down our throats by Fox News, CNN and online.”

Strikingly, that inclusive attitude extends to the personnel on Helldorado, with the disparate trio of Blackbraid vocalist Sgah’gahsowáh alongside Rise Against axeman Zach Blair (Oblivion) and Kreator bassist Frédéric Leclercq (Stigmata Scars) all packing in to lend their considerable talents.

“I’ve had people say it’s a wild combination to have Blackbraid, Rise Against and SpiritWorld all on the same song,” Stu grins. “But I don’t see it that way. Zach used to play in GWAR. We’re homies. And I just love Blackbraid. I guess I understand the perspective that genres like punk, country, thrash and black metal don’t quite cross over. But I come from a scene where the punk band plays with the black metal band plays with the thrash band, and if you get 100 kids there you’re doing well. Scene elitism is a luxury that you can only really afford to have in places like New York City.”

Longer-term, it’s about breaking down the boundaries to cross over even further than that. SpiritWorld have been privileged to share massive stages with some legends of metal over recent years, but rather than leaning into that tradition it’s emboldened them to forge their own path.

“The sword cuts both ways,” Stu concludes. “I’ve followed Kreator since I was little. In the face of grunge in the 1990s they tried out some different things, but since that they’ve doubled-down on being a thrash band. That’s inspiring in ways. But there’s a part of me that wonders if I could ever be happy doing the same. Would I be able to compartmentalise and say, ‘Okay, I’m just going to do this one thing until I’m a silver haired old fuck’? I don’t think so. I’ve worked a big-boy job and it’s so interesting seeing the consistency, professionalism and ability to cultivate a loyal crowd – especially getting old thrashers to keep going out to shows. But there’s also a part of me where I’m on a tour with Kreator, Death Angel and Sepultura and the last thing I want to do when I get out of the venue and into the van is listen to more metal.

“There will always be a desire deep inside to tell strange stories and make strange shit. And if we’re the only bands that sounds like us, that’s great. We’re already getting there. After a couple more records, I don’t think people will be able to say ‘This band sounds like SpiritWorld’ about anyone else anymore. We’ll simply be too weird…”

Helldorado is out now via Century Media

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