A Dirty Dozen with GRANT NETZORG from IN THE COMPANY OF SERPENTS – July 2025

Photo credit: Kate Rose

According to a recent press release: “A Patchwork Art is the latest video / single from Denver sludge / doom metal outfit IN THE COMPANY OF SERPENTS. Now playing at Decibel Magazine, the track comes by way of the band’s A Crack In Everything full-length, set for release on July 11th. IN THE COMPANY OF SERPENTS traffics in sonic catharsis. Their music inhabits the strange fringes between sludge metal and sprawling Spaghetti Western scores, constantly striving for visceral power and raw intensity, contrasted with eerie, spare instrumental passages. While previous work focused largely on occult and esoteric themes, A Crack In Everything, the band’s fifth full-length, delves deeply into themes of personal struggle, depression, and grappling with addiction. Threads of esotericism still weave their way throughout the record, however A Crack In Everything stands apart as a deeply personal effort. IN THE COMPANY OF SERPENTS formed in 2011 as a two-piece sludge / doom-focused project between guitarist / vocalist Grant Netzorg and drummer JJ Anselmi, author of the books Doomed To Fail and Heavy. While Anselmi soon moved to California to pursue teaching and writing, the duo recorded the band’s debut together that year, releasing it in early 2012. The sound quickly evolved beyond the confines of sludge / doom, and they continue to paint from a broad palette of influences across the heavy music spectrum. Netzorg has continued on with the project, releasing four LPs, including 2020’s critically acclaimed Lux, an EP, and a standalone single since their inception.” We get guitarist / vocalist Grant to discuss new music, influences, and more…

1. Tell us a little about your latest release.  What might a fan or listener not grab the first or second time they listen through?  Are there any hidden nuggets you put in the material or that only diehard fans might find?

This record, A Crack in Everything, is probably the most personal record I’ve written for this band.  While all the previous material contained personal elements (a lot of Lux pertains to the birth of my daughter, Merging in Light to my then-new marriage, etc.), the meaning was often blended with, and shrouded by, my interest in the esoteric & mysticism.  With this record, the chief subject is my struggle with alcoholism, and that’s at the forefront.  There are definitely still esoteric elements (the whole thing functions as a sort of “cord-cutting” ritual for me), but that fairly uncomfortable subject matter is at the forefront of all the lyrics.  I don’t feel great about putting this out in the open, but honesty is important for me, and I didn’t want to hide this material behind a lot of esoteric sleight-of-hand. One thematic “hidden nugget” that isn’t necessarily out in the open is our use of light as an ongoing theme.  We’ve explored light as sort of metaphysical root essence, and it’s present in the titles of our last several releases: Lux, Ain-Soph Aur (‘Limitless Light’ in Hebrew), and Merging In Light. While we don’t have light in the title itself on this one, it is implied. The title of the record takes its name from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem,” which includes the line “There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.”  This metaphor is one that I thought fit the subject of this record well:  there is all this anguish, despair, and self-loathing, but still a glimpse of rising from the ashes transformed.

2. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician?

I have an older sister who is eleven years my senior, so she was a teenager when I was first starting to get into music as an elementary school kid in the early 90’s, and I considered anything she was into as undeniably cool.  She went to a boarding school for most of high school, so I had free reign of her music collection when she was gone, and I would dig through her tapes and play different stuff that looked interesting.  One of the first tapes that I commandeered from her collection was AC/DCs Back in Black.  That was definitely a major turning point in my musical discovery, and it whet my appetite for heavier music in the years to come.  I was also watching plenty of MTV, and records like Nirvana’s Nevermind and In Utero, along with Metallica’s Black Album, were huge at the time, so they definitely shaped my early musical taste.  I had no idea what any genre distinctions meant, so while I didn’t really know what metal and punk were quite yet, I was drawn to that music heavily.  Rancid was kind of my “fischer price baby’s first punk band,” and I loved …And Out Come the Wolves, which served to turn me on to a lot of great earlier punk like The Clash, Dead Kennedys, Ramones, Black Flag, etc.  I loved that punk could be made by anyone with the fire to get out there and do it, and the emphasis on passion over proficiency definitely spurred my early desire to play music.  It didn’t matter whether or not I could rip crazy shredding sweep-picked solos, so long as I fucking meant it.

3. Building on that, is there a specific song, album, performer, or live show that guided your musical taste?

I mentioned it above, but Rancid was my gateway drug into all things punk, while Metallica and Black Sabbath served similar roles for me as a young kid discovering metal.  I also absolutely loved the Misfits, and the first four Danzig LPs, so both were very pivotal in forming my tastes as a young’un.  If there was a specific “ah-ha” moment when I decided to become a musician, it was probably when I started playing guitar at age 10.  It wasn’t right away, but once I began to learn riffs by my favorite artists I got the bug to want to start figuring out how to make my own stuff and perform it. As far as live shows are concerned, seeing Swans shortly after reforming (this was probably sometime around 2012 if my memory serves me, which it often doesn’t) had a direct tangible impact on the direction I took In the Company of Serpents.  If you listen to our self-titled debut LP, it is a pretty straight-forward doom / sludge record.  Swans inspired me to explore more eerie & textured soundscapes, and that has been present in everything we’ve done after that first record.  In particular, Kritoff Hahn’s lap steel guitar playing in this latest iteration of Swans has impacted our work.  After seeing them live for the first time I began to incorporate drones in an open minor tuning on all our records, and that can be heard on everything we’ve released from Of the Flock onward.  In a live setting we didn’t start incorporating it into the band until Ben joined in 2018, making us a three-piece, but that sound is present in all our recordings, save for the debut.

4. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be, and why?

This is a tough one!  If we have supernatural abilities & can raise the dead for this endeavor, it’d be rad to get a Roky Erickson vocal on one of our tunes.  I’ve always loved him and his work, and got the pleasure of seeing him in a small club in Orlando along with the Black Angels in 2014.  There are plenty of musicians that have struggled with mental illness (Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson are usually the first ones people think of), but Roky was one of the few who continued to write and record whilst battling those demons, and I love that about him. If we’re limiting it to only those who are still with us, it would be a dream to collaborate with Swans and / or Michael Gira.  They have such an otherworldly sound that, for me at least, transcends music and song, and becomes something supernatural.  I hold Neurosis in similar esteem, and while they’ve disbanded, Steve Von Till’s solo output and the Harvestman records are all incredible, so that would be a bucket-list collaboration as well.

5. What is your favorite activity when out of the studio and/or not on tour?  What do you like to do to unwind?

I obviously listen to tons of music, but I feel like that’s probably not what you’re asking!  I love to read, and watching movies is another favorite pastime.  For books, I read a lot of esoteric / occult material, and some of my favorite authors that are alive and active are Gordon White, Dean Radin, and Mitch Horowitz.  White’s The Chaos Protocols is required reading for anyone getting into Chaos Magick in my opinion, and Horowitz has done a great job of elevating the “new thought” movement spearheaded by authors like Neville Goddard, Napoleon Hill, etc. from the trash heap of “new age woo” to legitimate magickal praxis.  He’s also helped to revive Anton LaVey, who many occultists had, until recently, written off as a huckster conman with no real magickal prowess.  As for Dean Radin, his book Real Magic is a tome that I’ve pushed into the hands of many a skeptical friend who has doubted the possiblility of phenomena like ESP, precognition, etc. I also read plenty of “popcorn” books as well.  I just finished Garth Ennis’ comic, The Boys, which was excellent, and I read a lot of rock bios as well.  Wayne Kramer’s The Hard Stuff was probably the best one I’ve read in the last few years (R.I.P. Wayne!), and I’m currently reading Kid Congo Powers’ Some New Kind of Kick, which is great so far. Beyond that, I recently got into silversmithing, and I love to shoot pool as well.  If there’s a pool table at one of our upcoming shows, grab me and I’ll shoot a few racks with ya.

6. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before? What is the one comparison a reviewer or fan has made that made you cringe or you disagreed with?

I basically tell people that it’s kind of a “cosmic gumbo” (Tip of the Stanzo hat to Detective Crashmore / Santa Claus) of doom, sludge, and post-metal, with a healthy dose of Ennio Morricone’s work for spaghetti western scores thrown in for good measure. I haven’t had too many cringe comparisons, thankfully.  It only really bothers me when someone tells me they’re sure band X, Y, or Z is a clearly a “major influence” on us when I’ve never listened to them.  As for reviews that completely missed the point, one reviewer called our EP Merging in Light “puerile sludge,” basically saying it was brainless. That record dealt with my marriage to my wife through the lens of an alchemical union of opposites, as well as William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin’s concept of “the third mind,” wherein any discourse between two individuals creates a sort aetheric consciousness that is distinct from the two individuals involved, and greater than the sum of its parts.  I did not consider it a knuckle-dragger of a record, but that reviewer did.

7. When your band is hanging out together, who cooks, who gets the drinks in, and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

Both my bandmates are vegan, so we’re probably just picking a spot that accommodates all of us and leaving the cooking to them!  That said, Ben has been known to whip up tasty vegan burritos before shows and tours, so he’s probably the cook.  Before I quit drinking, I was definitely the one supplying all the drinks.  I still keep our fridge outside the practice space well-stocked, albeit with PG rated offerings of a less Dionysian type.  As for the acoustic guitars and singalongs, I often write on acoustic guitars before transposing things down to the lower tunings we use when plugged in, and will present what riffs and lyrics I’ve written to my bandmates acoustically.  So that guy could be me, however there’s a good case for our drummer, Andy Thomas, as well.  He’s a multi-instrumentalist and talented singer / songwriter (check out his bands Tin Horn Prayer and Only Thunder), so he could easily fit the bill.  Same goes for Ben Pitts, our bassist and lap steel guitarist (check out his bands Nightwraith and Abhoria).

8. When was the last time you were starstruck and who was it?

Ben & I got to watch Ministry perform on their Squirrelly Years tour from the side of the stage at the Mission Ballroom last week, so probably then!  Ben’s old friend and bandmate, Patrick, had been teching for them, and he recently got the call to get on-stage as their live bassist due to an illness.  That was an awesome experience, and I have huge respect for Ministry.  Al’s autobiography is a killer read, and one of my favorite rock bios.  That said, he did not seem stoked to see us standing at the edge of his stage every time he looked over at us!  We tried to stay out of the way, but I got the impression that he’d rather not have us there.

9. What is the best part of being a musician? If you could no longer be a musician for whatever reason, what would be your dream job?

Creating and performing music is extremely cathartic for me, so the release that I get from doing it is why I continue to make music.  It has also given me the opportunity to meet tons of cool, inspiring people from all over the globe that I would have never crossed paths with otherwise.  In addition to all the musicians I’ve met from doing this, I have made many great artist friends by commissioning their work for our releases & merch.  It’s pretty rad to come up with a crazy concept that I could never tackle myself, and turn it over to the capable hands of a killer artist and let them run with it. Music is my chief creative outlet, so without it I would be looking for something else that scratches that artistic compulsion.  Silversmithing has been pretty great, but I’d need thousands more hours of studio time before I could ever expect to make a living at it.  Failing making music or art directly, I would probably try to land a gig at an art museum, or try my hand at the production side of music.

10. What is one question you have always wanted an interviewer to ask – and what is the answer? Conversely, what question are you tired of answering?

People always ask about musical influences, but rarely what other influences contribute to a band.  I touched on several authors I like above, so I’ll spare rehashing that, but film is another major touchstone for me.  Some influences, such as Ennio Morricone’s scores, have had an obvious impact, but others might not be as apparent.  For example, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain is an all-time favorite of mine that has absolutely impacted how I write music, and his writing, whether in comics like The Incal or books like Psychomagic, has helped shape how I approach creative pursuits.  Another film that has had a big impact on my writing is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man.  Aside from Neil Young’s score (which is fantastic, and almost certainly an influence on later Earth records), the austerity of the visuals along with the circular parts of the narrative (e.g. Crispin Glover’s scene on the train at the beginning) have helped shape how I’ve approached writing for this band. As for questions I’m tired of, I am never thrilled to be answering questions about the world at large or anything not even tangentially related to what we’re doing.  Our last record came out during the height of the pandemic, and every other interview had something about what we were doing to stay safe from Covid, or what we thought the government should be doing about it.  I appreciate the faith that some might place in musicians, but if you’re turning to us as the sole arbiters of what is good and evil in a profoundly fractured world, you are not approaching these questions with the gravity they deserve.

11.  Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep or you would like to have a “do over,” even if it didn’t change your current situation?

I would have taken songwriting much more seriously at the beginning.  Some of our early work was repetitive, and droned on far too long because I thought doom bands had to have long songs.  Those songs would have all been better if I ended them earlier, or at least steered them in new directions.  Also, I would have toured a lot more when I was in my twenties, and had far greater flexibility to do so, even though that was not apparent to me at the time.  Younger bands:  take your craft seriously, and hit the fuckin’ road!

12.  If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

Probably The Velvet Underground & Nico.  They were all intensely creative people, doing weird drugs, and weirder shit with their music that no one else had done at that time.  I’ve read a bit about those sessions, and it sounds awesome.  John Cale had filed down the bridge on his viola so every string could be played simultaneously, and he tuned every string to the same note for maximum drone potential. They were also one of the first bands to record their nosiest material with all the amps completely dimed to max volume. “European Son” is a great example of this – there’s breaking glass, chaotic amp feedback, and a totally frenzied performance from everyone on there. That record really spoke to me, as it was exploring dark, hedonic approaches to life that were not fashionable for the time.  Everyone else was singing about free love and acid, and here they were writing about bondage and heroin.  It was flagrantly outsider music while simultaneously being insiders of one of the coolest, weird scenes of the era- Warhol’s factory.  I’m sure some elements of that scene were obnoxiously pretentious, but that era of The Velvet Underground is timelessly cool for me.

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Category: Interviews