IN 2014, bassist Eze Mavani had just returned to Malaysia and had a desire to start a band with musicians based in the country. At the time, Lowyat Forums had an active music community, and it was on the forum that Eze made a post saying he was looking for a vocalist for his band at that time.
Three years after that, in 2017, vocalist Imran Muhammad came across the post and sent Eze an email, which also contained a demo of Imran singing a song from the band Exodus.
“I was really hesitant to respond because I was out on a date that same night. It was a really boring date, because she pushed me to go to H&M. I hate H&M. I was sitting near the changing room and saw the email containing the demo,” Eze told theSun.
He explained that it was the first time he had experienced anyone showing an interest in starting a band while providing a demo.
“That was initiative, and for me, that was enough to consider taking the idea seriously”.
When the duo met, Eze made it clear to Imran that he did not have a lot of time, and if they went through with starting the band, Eze had no intention of it being a “weekend warrior thing”.
Imran was in agreement.
“When we met up, we also talked about our direction, and what our short and long-term goals would be. Then we met up with a couple of guys that Eze had played with before, and we officially had our first line-up in the January of 2018,” Imran explained.
Early genesis
Initially called Mothlung, the band decided on changing “lung” to “flesh” as the latter carried a lot more weight due to the visual imagery, which supplemented the “moth”, which represented the night and regeneration.
“Nocturnal regeneration as a concept. That was what we wanted to do; to regenerate the metal in Malaysia,” explained Eze.
In Mothflesh’s early days, the band played an amalgamation of melodic death metal and groove metal.
This was due to how the band’s first two guitarists wrote much of the first album, Nocturnal Armour in the style of Gothenburg-style Swedish death metal, while Eze brought groove as a counterweight to the latter two due to his background as a bassist.
To round out the instrumentation of the band was Imran as the singer, whose vocals has evolved from the very first single to the band’s latest album.
“I was heavily influenced by hard rock and blues music. When I started listening to more extreme forms of music, I was at first inclined to a lot of thrash bands like Slayer, Exodus and Overkill. When we started playing together, their influences inspired me to listen to a lot more bands like Meshuggah and Gojira, which I previously only listen to casually,” Imran explained.
“Our individual influences melded together, and we found a particular sound that we can’t really put a label on.”
Learning and adapting
One of the biggest problems with the underground music scene in Malaysia is how new bands seemingly crop up fast and dissolve before they even move past the “playing for a small crowd on weekends” stage.
These breakups usually go back to one main reason; band members are never in alignment with each other.
Mothflesh had to learn this the hard way several times over the last four years, and the fat had to be trimmed from the flesh, so that the band could truly become an “aggressive musical unit”.
“Friendship saved the band from utter destruction and disbanding,” lead guitarist Ranveer Singh said.
Ranveer joined the band in February 2020, touring with Mothflesh for the last two shows in Thailand before the pandemic hit. His entrance came after the band’s previous guitarist bailed two days before the band played in Indonesia in 2019.
The band faced further strain when Covid-19 hit, causing cancellations for many of their booked shows. After a year of no activity, the band pushed through just one single, “Skyfather”.
“With that momentum, we felt that regardless of what happens in 2021, we need to release one album. Though it wasn’t shared with other members of the band, the three of us shared that goal,” Imran said, before explaining how several other wrenches were thrown into the band members’ lives.
In 2021, the band lost another two members, drummer Tunku Shafiq, over creative differences, and guitarist Giri Ganesan, over his growing responsibilities in other matters.
Now a trio, the remaining members of Mothflesh are operating like how a unit is supposed to function; in tandem with, and in support of, each other.
“Friendship is very important. I realised that after playing in many bands, Mothflesh is the only band where the camaraderie and friendship is at such a personal level, where even without the band, we can still be friends,” Eze said.
“Giri is not part of the band anymore, but he is still very much a friend. We know he’ll be there for us. I think that’s very important.”
Earning their stripes
From the band’s conception, Eze made it clear that the band was going to be goal-oriented, and that they had to bring a different style of music into the Malaysian metal scene.
“A lot of things were possible because of this, like how we were the first Malaysian metal band to play in Cambodia. After touring Southeast Asia for our first album, when we were barely two years old, we realised that we could do more,” Imran said.
After conquering Southeast Asia, the band saw an opportunity to reinvent their sound, style and musical weight further after Ranveer joined the band.
“When we were composing with the original line-up, one of the problems I had was getting the other members to be a little more current with their musical taste,” Eze explained.
Imran added that Ranveer being in Mothflesh was a breath of fresh air, as the guitarist injected further technical songwriting and musical tech-savvy that the band’s previous guitarists couldn’t necessarily bring.
With Eze on bass, Imran on vocals and Ranveer on guitars, the band dropped the hefty Machine Eater album on Dec 12, which has been described to lean heavily into technical groove metal and djent, a subgenre under progressive metal.
Despite the troubles that led up to the successful release of the second album, things have started to look up for Mothflesh, with the band also signing a deal with local labels Goatlordth and GLordRecords for merchandising and CD release of the album.
“They mentioned that the market they’re looking at for our music was abroad, in countries such as Japan, Taiwan and Poland,” Imran pointed out, with Eze saying the organisation resonated with the band due to how they saw eye-to-eye on the cultural views of heavy metal in Malaysia, in marketing, sound and image.
Machine Eater is out today, which the band will follow-up by headlining their official album launch show on Jan 22.
