Singled Out: Graveslave's God Of Slaughter

Graveslave are gearing up to release their new EP "Devotion" on March 6th and to celebrate we asked Roman Johnson to tell us about the first single and video "God Of Slaughter". Here is the story:

God of Slaughter is an interesting track because we've actually been performing it live since Graveslave was founded back in 2014. It was part of the batch of first songs that I wrote for the band, and it only just didn't make the cut for being included on our debut EP, Corpseborne. We liked it a lot, but we had several changeovers in vocalists during our early days, and there were no lyrics set in stone for the song at crunch time. Josh and I had already started compiling riffs for what was supposed to be our next release, so we decided to save God of Slaughter for the next record.

That was back when our friend Mike Bloodfist (Tomorrow Brings New Blood/Endless Reign) was our vocalist, but he dropped out shortly before Corpseborne was recorded. After he stepped down and Don Doombringer joined and tracked the Corpseborne vocals, Don and I immediately started writing new material together. It was really good stuff, but pretty different than what we were doing before Don joined the band. God of Slaughter didn't really fit the vibe of what eventually became our next record, Sick/Nasty. So even though we were still performing the song live with this new lineup, we decided to push God of Slaughter back once more. I continued tweaking and fine tuning it, along with the rest of the songs in that crop, and it slowly became it's own record.

By the time we were touring on Sick/Nasty, we were finally talking seriously about releasing God of Slaughter and the rest of these songs, which we'd long since decided to call Devotion, due to the card game reference AND the wait on putting out the record. I still have some demos of a few Devotion songs with Don's lyrics and vocals. Tragically, he passed before we started actual tracking. When the rest of us finally regrouped to do something with the band again, releasing Devotion seemed like a more important move than it ever had. Ashton, our new vocalist, wrote all the lyrics for the new record, so the lyrics for God of Slaughter that are finally committed to recording are realistically the fourth or maybe even fifth version of the song written.

All things considered, the song does have a pretty unique history. We just released a video for the track, and it stays true to our goof off vibe, which I'm stoked on. The song is still a blast to play after all this time, its always a standout in the set at shows, and I couldn't be more proud for it to finally see the light of day.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself right here!