Heavy stoner trio Brunt recently released their third album ‘Ataraxy’ and it’s already a classic instrumental stoner riffland.

Brunt are Elliot Mariess on bass, Squirrel Mariess on drums and Ave Thompson on guitar.

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

Elliot Mariess: Squirrel and I are brothers so we’ve both been jamming together for a long time. We have been in several bands together since we were kids. We met Ave whilst we playing a cover of a Kyuss song in a pub, he was the only one singing along to every word so we knew we’d get along!

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

We’re all part of a small very active music scene locally, we all get involved in various side projects. Lord Vapour was one I’d highly recommend, they’re currently on hiatus but recently did a one off reunion for the Vale Earth Fair festival.

When did you decide that you wanted to start writing and performing your own music? What brought that about for you?

Since we were kids! One Christmas I got given a bass guitar and Squirrel got a drum kit and our parents have regretted it ever since! We started writing pretty much as soon as we were good enough to jam together. I don’t think covering songs ever quite had the same appeal to us. One of our early bands ‘Dead Wing’ got labelled as ‘stoner rock’… we’d never actually heard that term and so we started looking up stoner rock bands, it was a whole new musical awakening.

Can you share some further details how your latest album ‘Ataraxy’ was recorded?

Some of the songs on ‘Ataraxy’ had been with us for 3+ years but we didn’t quite see them as ready to record. It’s really hard to know when an instrumental song is ‘finished’. As you play it you tend to add things and refine them. I mean we’re still doing that to some songs on our first album. I think we got to a point where we were finally happy with them and felt like we should get them recorded.

<a href="https://brunt.bandcamp.com/album/ataraxy">Ataraxy by Brunt</a>

We went to our friend Mikey from Apocalypse studios. He did an amazing job recording ‘Blackbeard’ in our WW2 bunker/practice room and he’d just opened his own studio so we were keen to try it out. The whole thing was recorded live. I think that’s how we’re most comfortable and what feels natural to us. Ave went back in and recorded a little extra guitar over the top.

How do you usually approach music making?

It usually starts as a single riff that we play around with and have a bit of a jam session. Squirrel will see how many weird time signature changes he can apply to it and then we’ll make a phone recording. Some of them go nowhere but then every now and then it’ll click and we start to build more of a structure around it. The songs end up being quite long and change a fair bit over time so they can take a while to perfect. Having that said, we pretty much wrote the title track ‘Ataraxy’ in the studio room. We had a bunch of interesting instruments with us we wanted to play with and see what we could summon. We intended it to be a short interlude track, but it ended up being 4 minutes long and a complete song in itself.

What are some bands/musicians that have a big influence on you?

Aside from all the stoner rock classics that we all have a shared love for we all bring a mix of other influences to the table. Ave is into his punk like Rancid, Social Distortion, Offspring. Squirrel loves the jazz, Moses Boyd, Portico Quartet, Gogo Penguin. I have a thing for neo-psychedelia, Khruangbin, Andy Shauf, The Dandy Warhols, Kurt Vile.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Personally I’ve been really digging King Krule’s latest album ‘Man Alive!’ I think collectively we’d definitely recommend Stone Cold Fiction‘s new album ‘Strange Times’, those guys are so tight.