Empire State Bastard guitarist Mike Vennart on the band's origin, touring, Twitter and more

Guitarist Mike Vennart traces the beginnings of extreme metal band Empire State Bastard to about 12 years ago.

“It was sort of a mythical sort of joke band — everybody goes through this stoned idiot phase of let’s pretend we’ve got a band but never actually do anything — and it was just one of those for years,” Vennart said last month in a Zoom chat from Manchester, England. “It was always going to be some kind of really intense left-leaning — I hesitate to say metal — but it was always going to be something along those lines, maybe a noise band or some kind of really weird psychedelic thing, and it kind of ended up being all three of those. It just took an awfully long time for us to have the time to do it, the pandemic just put everything on ice, so it was like, ‘Well, let’s do it now then.’”

That time is now, as Empire State Bastard is on the road supporting Sleep Token, with both bands scheduled for a sold-out show Sunday at Petersen Events Center.

The band is the brainchild of Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil (who handled vocals and added guitar and keyboard) and Vennart (guitar and bass), who fronted Oceansize and serves as a touring guitarist for Biffy Clyro. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo played on the album and is touring, as is Naomi Macleod, who handles live bass.

“It’s quite a daunting prospect, this one, to be honest,” Vennart said, “because I’ve not toured America in a van for like 20 years.”

With that said, he added that it feels like a no-pressure situation for them as an opener, and he was relishing the opportunity to play venues like Radio City Music Hall in New York and Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. The band has released one album, 2023’s “River of Heresy,” and the “Silver Cord Sessions” EP last month.

The heaviness and in-your-face aggression of Empire State Bastard is purposeful, and Vennart expected that not to sit right with some fans of Biffy Clyro, who skew a little more toward modern rock than metal.

“I mean, (expletive), you just assume that whatever you put out, your own fans are going to like it. There’s definitely a portion of my audience that’s just like, (expletive) this,” he said with a laugh. “It’s definitely not for everyone, but it’s funny because people always want me to do heavy stuff. And then it’s like, well, here you go (and) it’s like, ‘Oh no, that’s too heavy. That’s too much, no, no, no, no.’”

One source of inspiration for the album stemmed from interactions on Twitter (a site he’s since banned himself from using because “it’s not good for me.”)

”Every day in this country in particular — I’m sure you have your own frustrations over there — we’re dealing with a corrupt government of unparalleled proportions. So, yeah, I just got embroiled in a rather heated debate with the entire far right coven of this country,” he said. “It wasn’t fun as such, but I did kind of entertain it for a while. I’m (expletive) bored of it now, but it did inspire quite a lot of, well, this entire album was the only sort of outlet that I had, because there’s no point trying to combat these (expletives) on the internet, because it’s like throwing (crap) at a pig. The trouble is the pig likes it. And so it became just a complete waste of time.”

When it came time to write, Vennart said he would have a double espresso and a double tequila, scroll through Twitter and start playing.

“I would just have the record button going while I was just playing guitar, just reading this absolute (horsecrap),” he said. “So it’s a direct conduit to tap in to these primal rages. The lyrical side of everything is left to Simon, and I’m sure he has his own methods and he’s very good at cloaking this kind of (expletive) primal rage about the kind of (bullcrap) that we’re subjected to every day. He has a manner of making it sound far less on the nose. That’s his department. But musically, it was very directly an expression of anger about everything really.”

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Vennart can remember the first riff that he knew had to be a part of the project. It came in the middle of the night and turned into standalone single “Tired, Nah?”

“I just woke up and got my phone and just whispered the instructions, make an album that sounds like ‘Cold War’ by Siege,” he said. “You don’t spend too long on it, just make it do that thing, don’t (expletive) veer off into territories that you’ve already covered. Just make an album that’s so (expletive) angry and (ticked) off as I was at the time. And that’s kind of what we ended up with. It did sort of veer off into more sludgy, psychedelic terrain sometimes, but ultimately that was the blueprint.”

Growing up obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden, heavy metal was in his musical DNA but not always able to come out in other projects.

“I think that stands you in really good stead if you soak that stuff up very early. Your technical chops are absolutely off the (expletive) chart, so you can cover virtually anything. People get kind of offended when I say that,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t know if to be a technically good player you have to be into metal, but it definitely helps.”

Empire State Bastard’s music could be seen as abrasive to some, but Vennart, who also cited Aphex Twins and King Crimson as influences, believes there’s a place for that type of confrontational music.

“Well, I think to whatever degree, heavy metal will never (expletive) die. It had a rough time in the post-Nirvana climate; we all remember feeling a little bit stupid for admitting that we liked Iron Maiden in those days,” he said. “If it can survive that, it can survive anything.

“And what I appreciate now is that, you’ve got the mainstream acts, your Sleep Tokens and your Architects. But the underground, more left-field stuff, there’s so much to discover. So going to festivals such as Roadburn or ArcTanGent, in the Netherlands and in the UK, respectively, it’s just fantastic that this otherwise ignored music, it does get held up in certain quarters for people to discover. And that’s more and more important in this day and age, where touring is just becoming virtually (expletive) impossible, that some festivals are willing to curate a lineup that is so outside of the mainstream, and we’re looking to feel like we’re part of that, to be honest.”

Vennart described the period spent writing this album as “a really, really productive, fertile time to just try anything within the permutations of the riff,” with Neil trimming about a full album’s worth of riffs in order to have a more cohesive flow. None of the riffs he created left him wondering about their origins within himself.

“Not enough time’s passed yet. If you ask me that again in like 20 years, I won’t remember making any of this,” he said. “Apparently, because I’m so (expletive) old now, dealing with reissues of my old band — this is not important — but just sort of going through that whole stuff and I have no memory of making it whatsoever. And it’s (expletive) really good. I’m like, how did I do that? It’s like, who was that guy? Why don’t I do (crap) like that again?”