PURE EVIL HAS COME!!!

K.C. ElectonicCore band The Browning forcefully invaded Maryland at Cafe 611 on May 7th 2017.  The Browning are a perfectly blended audio experience, ranging from hardcore extreme metal to EDM and drum and bass influenced tracks. Empire Extreme got to sit down and talk to singer Jonny McBee and drummer Cody Stewart before they took to the stage to not only crush your soul but to make you enjoy it while it happens.

Empire: How’s the tour going so far?
Jonny: Tour is going great,Mushroomhead are a huge influence on me, so it’s crazy to be involved with them in anyway .
Empire: How would you describe the type of music that you do?
Jonny: Well its metal with a massive influence on electronic, we take all sorts of influences for dance music from hardstyle, to dubstep, to trance and then we put that out to heaviest metal that is out there right now.Super high energy, super dark and melodic. Our goal is to be the most electronic metal band in the world.
Empire: Has the sound changed any because of the line changes within the band?
Jonny: No, I started this as a solo project when I was 15, and since then I have written the mass majority of the music so the sound hasn’t changed much from the song writing, but since we have gotten older the sound has matured a lot. When I first decided to make it into a full band it was kind of all over the place, but this last album I felt it was the most controlled and most matured. Me and Cody fully produced the last album, it also our best produced album. Cody produces bands fulltime and we were able to spend all this extra time working on it, so the sound has changed but not stylistically but in quality.
Empire: Where do you draw your inspirations from when you write the songs?
Jonny: I try not to listen to any music while I’m writing because I don’t want to sound like anybody else, and so especially when I’m in writing mode I don’t listen to anything because I want to get the inspirations from my own head. But if I do reach for anything to get influences it’s never in the metal it’s in the EDM side personally. Nobody else in the band listens to electronic music really at all. Really all me and Cody listen to is female fronted ambient music.
Cody: Just the softest stuff you can imagine.
Jonny: When it comes to influences for us in the future, we just focus on writing The Browning that’s it.
Empire: You said that nobody else listens to EDM how does that convey with the band, are they all cool with that being in the band?
Jonny: Yeah, everybody loves the energy the live aspects of the genre. Also the way our dance side is, it’s very dark, it’s not like we go into a Backstreet dance part it’s still very dark and really heavy. Everybody is down with it. Our Bassist Rick only listens to Blink 182 or Hatebreed, so there’s no electronic is his music but he loves it live, Once you seen it live, the energy is there.
Empire: Have you guys done any Electronic tours/festivals like that, or would you in the future?
Jonny: That’s what we want to do. Bridging that gap is the ultimate goal. We get people who tells us they don’t listen to any metal but us, and we get them saying we don’t listen to anything electronic but you guys. We would love to do those big EDM Festivals. We have done some where it was like. We did this one in Philadelphia where it was a DJ stage and a metal stage and we headlined the whole thing. It would go DJ set, metal set, DJ set, metal set and we headlined the whole thing. That was awesome because that like merging the two, and that’s what the goal is.
Empire: Who comes out with the artwork for your albums?
Jonny: We all think of a concept of what we should do, everybody puts in two cents of how it could be. All three albums we had a guy named Dan Mumford do the artwork, we basically give him the idea of what we want and then he draws it, from there we can have him tweak it a little.
Empire: I seen that you guys did a tour with Static X, how was that and any stories to tell about Wayne Static?
Jonny: Ya it was great a lot of those bands like Static X and Fear Factory specifically told us that we are the new age of what they were trying to do. We hung out with a little, Wayne was off mostly in his own world so didn’t get to hang with him as much, but everyone was awesome. We never had a bad experience with any of them.
Empire: Most of your fans already know, but some people don’t know that you guys were robbed in Milan Italy, do you want to talk about that any?
Cody: So what happened was we were in Milan, we wanted to go to a mall and kill some time. We found this super nice mall, we parked in staff area with cameras and everything. We went in side to grab a bite to eat, we came out and realized the van was unlocked, our driver Robbie opens the back doors where we put our suitcases and stuff, he went to put something he just bought in his suitcase and everything was gone and he starts yelling and we all run up to the van. I jump in and check out the bunks and first thing I see is that the bunks were all cleared out, my bunk was completely trashed, I had basically my whole life in my backpack, my mixing laptop and all of our hard drives. It was literally everything we had with music period. It all got stolen.
Jonny: What it was is that Italy has a big problem with Gypsies, they live in tents and live kind of above the law in their eyes and rob communities and terrorize. They came to our van and punched out the locks and got in. People think that we lost drums and stuff, we didn’t lose any of that, we just lost all of our electronic gear which is a huge part of our sound, so we can’t play with all that. The cops didn’t give a crap they were like who cares about this kids from the United States, whatever we can’t help you. It was a big of a mess and had to cancel the rest of the tour, but our fans supported us like crazy. We got $10,000 in the first four days, which we weren’t expecting.
Cody: We weren’t even expecting $5,000 in two weeks.
Jonny: We were expecting to get $5,000 in a month, but we got that in a few hours.It was a very humbling experience.
Empire: Anything else you like to say to the fans?
Jonny: Just come out and see us on tour, it’s a completely different experience than you would expect. After this tour we will be working on a new album, streaming the whole writing process.
Cody: Thanks for listening.

From their intense onstage performances, to the amazing feats of head banging mastery, to the rave like moments that make you want to jump or grab some glow sticks then brutally smash them on someone’s head as soon as that hardcore metal groove comes back, there’s no question that The Browning are exactly what the metal scene needs right now.PURE METAL AND PURE ENJOYMENT.

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Ron

Ron has keen eye for new talent, a love for the underground, and a tremendous passion for music of any genera. You’ll probably bump into him at a horror convention or some seedy club checking out the next need-to-know band.

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