Ope emerges from downward spiral with crushing new record

The new full-length album from sludge metal duo Ope emerged from a dark place, singer and guitarist Natty Bumppo holing up in the early months of Covid to pen songs that eviscerate religious hypocrisy (“Cornhenge (The KoЯnmunist Manifestope)”), question the need to preserve family ties (“Grandpa’s Cheesebarn (A Child Called ‘Ope’)”), and grapple with the futility of spinning your wheels in a place you no longer wish to call home (“Wednesday Sirens (Ope!…I Bed It Again)”).

Collectively, Bumppo said the tracks populating Opehio (God Is Dead So Why Aren’t We?) arrived from the forced stillness of the early pandemic, which led the musician to linger on their religious Mansfield upbringing more intently than they had in the past. “A lot of it was me coming to terms with what happened in my childhood,” said Bumppo, who will join drummer Nick Aleshin for an album release show at Spacebar on Saturday, Nov. 8, along with Debris (celebrating the release of its debut LP, War Language), Wax Teeth, and Boat Jail. “I was alone in my thoughts a lot, and doing a lot of drugs, and it spiraled me into thinking about things that had passed that I never entirely processed. … And it was really cathartic, honestly, to be able to let go of some of that anger and to figure out a more positive way to deal with things.”

In the years since, Bumppo said they have managed to kick their drug addiction while also making the difficult but needed decision to distance themselves from their family, recognizing the relationship served as a negative drag in the lives of everyone involved. “I had been asking my mom about various things that happened when I was growing up, but I was also not being the nicest to her in that time period,” Bumppo said. “And I think it helped me to realize, oh, I should just leave her alone and let her live her life, because if I continued to talk to her, it would have just made the relationship worse.” (The musician unpacks these complex feelings within the gnarled, doom-laden “Grandpa’s Cheesebarn,” dredging up the maxim of blood being thicker than water and questioning if that idea is always the healthiest to embrace.)

Throughout, the song’s narrators repeatedly question how they fit – or more accurately don’t – in the spaces they’re forced to navigate, primarily Ohio. “O-H, I-O,” Bumppo recites on “Hell Is Real (OpeSU).” “Kill me now!” 

Part of this is done in jest, with Bumppo acknowledging a desire to poke at the types of people who have traditionally looked down upon Midwesterners. And while the musician might have at one point envisioned leaving the state, they said they have now reached a point of relative contentment here. “It was never my intent to stay in Ohio, but then I moved to Columbus and met Nick, and we’ve been playing music ever since,” said Bumppo, who first played alongside Aleshin in the more punk leaning Etc. Etc. Etc. after moving to Columbus following a stint lived in Philadelphia. “And leaving that seems difficult at this point.”

Other songs take a comparatively global look, with the album-closing “The Longaberger Basket Building (Red Wine Supernopeva),” given a vocal assist by Jess Vonderau, having its roots in the genocides taking place in Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the inherent cruelty of humankind.

While the world presents its share of problems, Bumppo’s narrators also recognize their own culpability, with the musician leaning into “Pieropei Mountain” as a means to explore the idea that some of the hills we’re forced to climb are the result of us having first dug ourselves into a pit. “I was working at Pierogi Mountain when I wrote that song,” they said, “and thinking about the idea that this whole album is really about getting over things.”

Bumppo said songwriting has traditionally served as a way for them to explore this interior world, including their struggles with depression and the way their surroundings can impact how it manifests – a pull to which Ope’s crushing sound is uniquely attuned. “It seems fitting to make music heavy enough to express the weight of what I’m talking about,” Bumppo said. “And playing these songs and singing about what I’m singing about is very cathartic in a way that maybe doesn’t help me to get over it but at least allows me to deal with the experiences.”