The musical alchemy of 3rd Pyramid

There was a point around 2018 when Matt Miner thought his years of making music were firmly behind him. At the time, Miner said he felt burned out from decades spent playing “the most brutal music I could come up with,” which included stints in bands such as Teeth of the Hydra and Nukkehammer.

“And I just couldn’t do that music anymore, where I was just screaming my head off,” Miner said by phone in early January. “The music was still fun to play, and I didn’t hate playing it, but it became too physically demanding is basically the best way to put it.”

For years, Miner maintained this stance, finally relenting a few years back only due to the constant prodding of drummer friend Scott Vogel, who roped the guitarist in for a series of basement jam sessions. Soon after, the pair invited Miner’s childhood friend Joe Kelly to join them on bass, though their plans for the nascent project – later dubbed the 3rd Pyramid – remained admittedly modest. 

“We were sort of like, ‘We’re just going to play in the basement,’ because we didn’t have a singer or really any aspirations at all,” said Miner, whose expectations began to shift a year later with the addition of singer Nic. “Then it was like, ‘Oh, we can try to actually be a rock and roll band.”

In some ways, though, the first seeds for 3rd Pyramid, which recently released its self-titled debut album, were planted in the early months of the Covid pandemic – a stretch in which Miner spent more time woodshedding on guitar than he had in years, rediscovering the love for the instrument that first inspired him to take it up as a teenager decades earlier. These experimentations fueled the earliest jam sessions between musicians, which found Miner straying from the sheer brutality of past bands and incorporating more sonic and textural explorations.

“One of my favorite records is Dinosaur’s You’ve Living All Over Me, and I wanted to take the guitar textures on that record and apply them to more metal-ish riffs, which is more my style I guess,” said Miner, who pulled further inspiration from Jamaican dub music, particularly in the way he used pedals to incorporate long echoes and layered echoes in his playing. “I’m super into Jamaican dub, so I always try to have some gear that can pull me in some of those sound realms – not that we play reggae music.”

The elements drawn from Miner’s past are more easily discerned, with the musician revisiting unreleased Teeth of the Hydra and Nukkehammer recordings, surfacing riffs that might have felt out of place in those projects and adapting them for 3rd Pyramid. “End of Time,” for one, builds around a relentless woodchipper of a riff that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Nukkehammer’s A Distant Hissing in Your Ear, while “Plastic Reptiles” incorporates heavier, more doom-laden sounds more in line with later era TOTH. But where past efforts were often shaped by an unrelenting ferocity, 3rd Pyramid allows songs to hold at a simmer, injecting ample sonic space into the terrain of tracks such as “Lost in the Desert Blues.” “Auto Mazar” splits the difference then, beginning as a slinky, noir-ish burner before giving way to an eardrum-ripping wall of guitar noise. 

Lyrically, the songs trace a similarly diverse landscape, with Nic writing verses that confront everything from the rise of the patriarchy and the sexual oppression of women (“Auto Mazar”) to the challenge of living through a political era in which those in power breed a culture designed to keep the populace in a state of agitation. “They feed on fear,” Nic sings amid the road grading “Seven Centers from the Sun.”

“That line in particular was indeed a reference to the current political/social [moment],” said Nic, who went on to describe the line as a parallel nod to the Archons from Gnosticism, who act as cosmic jailers, of sorts, manipulating our thoughts and emotions and “making it difficult for our souls to leave the material realm.” “We grapple with these forces every day in the world and in our personal lives, faced with challenges, systems, or people that keep us in a slave state or distract us from the things that are truly important. I know the issues we see and experience in the world can feel quite heavy but pouring it out on paper is a good release for me. … That’s when it becomes alchemical, [which] can be quite transformative, very powerful.”

Alchemy could also be a good word to describe the musical connection developed between the 3rd Pyramid bandmates, each player providing some element that sparks against the rest to create a more magical whole. It helps, of course, that the four have already navigated multiple decades in music, which has both imbued the players with a sense of confidence and freed them from the weight of expectation that might have accompanied earlier projects. 

“We don’t have any big ideas about how the record is going to get traction or anything like that,” Miner said. “I’m just blessed to be able to play music and to play shows. … Considering we’re all past 50 – well, except for Nic – I didn’t think that was in the cards. But here we are.”

Nic expressed similar wonderment, while also acknowledging the way that time had steeled her for this moment.

“I used to be in bands over 20 years ago, which I know is showing my age, but back then I didn’t have … the life experience and confidence to truly express myself,” Nic said. “I was so young and full of angst and frustration but didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say with courage. I think with age, I’ve learned to let go more [and] not get so hung up on what other people may think. There’s a sense of freedom that comes with that. It’s a big relief when you can just let go and simply be.”