Born of Plagues took shape in Baltimore (USA) in 2018, but the people behind it had already spent years playing together in other bands, most recently Destroyer of Man. Austin Lunn came in when that chapter was ending and a new one was starting, with a couple of songs already on the table and the band deciding whether to keep the old name or move forward as something else. They moved forward. Dead Endings, the band’s second full-length after Cast Down, was written over roughly two years and carries a lot of that history inside it. In this supporter interview, Austin, vocalist and guitarist for Born of Plagues, gets into the writing, the arguments and instincts that shape the songs, and the different threads running through the record, from gothic horror to war, private grief and the push and pull between slow weight and sharper movement.
You formed in Baltimore in 2018. What brought the four of you into the same room, and what was the first shared idea that felt like “this is the band”?
Austin Lunn (vocals & guitar): I’m not sure if I’m the best or worst person to answer this question. The other guys had all been playing together for a while before I came along. They had been in bands together over the years, and most recently they were all in a band called Destroyer of Man. I basically joined to replace the singer while they were deciding whether to continue as that band or give it a new name. They already had a couple of songs written, and I loved the sound and feel they had. To me, it was more reminiscent of the Peaceville doom of the ’90s than any “Maryland doom”, and I was sold immediately. There was another guitar player when I joined, and I didn’t start playing guitar in the band until he left. No disrespect to him, but I think that was the moment when it really felt like we found ourselves. I’m the only guy in the band who was really coming from a doom metal background, so I guess it made sense for me to be more musically and tonally involved. Mike still writes almost all the riffs, though.
Your EPK name-checks Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard and Neurosis. Where do those reference points show up naturally, and where do you feel you’ve moved away from them?
If I’m being totally honest, and I always am, those are not the bands we all listen to the most or turn to for inspiration. Sabbath is, of course, part of every metal and doom band’s DNA, and I’ve been a Sabbath fan my whole life. I play a Laney Iommi signature amp and have the Gibson Iommi signature pickup in my Flying V. But stylistically, I think we pull from a lot of different places, and we tend to avoid the sort of Sabbath-worship doom and stoner metal riffs that are such a staple of American doom. The other guys all used to play in punk and hardcore bands, or still do, and Mike’s riffs come as much from his love of King Diamond as they do from any doom bands. I joined the band because the songs reminded me of My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, but I’m the only one in the band who even listens to those bands. Somehow, despite having these different frames of reference, we all have similar tastes and ideas about what we want this band to do, so we’ll write a part that reminds each of us of a different band, but we all like it, so it stays in the song.
“it’s a pain in the ass getting everyone to slow down enough on the groovy or driving parts.”
A lot of you have punk and hardcore history. How does that background shape the way you write riffs, build rhythm, and keep the songs moving when the tempo drops?
Mostly, it’s just a pain in the ass getting everyone to slow down enough on the groovy or driving parts. Take a song like “What Dreadful Music”. It starts off with this fast, chromatic riff that’s totally coming from that hardcore and thrash background, then settles into this really heavy, foot-stomping verse. It’s tough to hit that verse groove slowly enough. On the other hand, we have varied enough tastes that in a song like “Angels on Fire”, we made the conscious choice to strip the chorus down to the bare bones to keep the song slow and mournful. But we also recognise that after six minutes or whatever of that, if you hit the audience with a picked-up d-beat part, it’s going to feel that much heavier. I guess what I’m saying is that mix of backgrounds gives us a bigger repository to pull from, which helps keep things fresh and interesting for us and for anyone listening.
“In the end, we put out an hour of music that we all felt really good about and thought represented us well as a band.”
Dead Endings is your latest full-length. What was the starting point for the record, and what kept it cohesive as it came together?
“Of Wisdom and War” was the first new song we wrote after we finished the first album, Cast Down, and it took about another two years to get the whole second album written. I think the fact that it was so spread out helped keep it from becoming repetitive or boring, because we moved in and out of different listening phases and were influenced by a lot of different things throughout that process. If there’s any cohesion at all, that’s really just down to it being the same four dudes jamming the hell out of every song until we were happy with them. In the end, we put out an hour of music that we all felt really good about and thought represented us well as a band.
The album has long tracks, but it rarely feels static. How do you build dynamics inside a song so it stays tense and alive from start to finish?
We have so many different influences and interests, and we workshop the hell out of every song. It’s very intentional, but also very natural. We’re not getting stoned in the jam room and giggling at the way the bass notes tickle our nethers, you know? We like to play those slow, heavy riffs, but we also want to get excited and rock out. We’re not gentle with each other when we write, either. We will absolutely call out a part that isn’t pulling its weight or say when a riff is cool but gets boring if we play it that many times. We’re hard on each other, but we listen to each other as well, and the proof is in the pudding.
What themes were you circling on Dead Endings, and what parts of the record feel most personal to you?
There are a lot of things going on lyrically. When I joined the band, I wanted to write horror songs based on gothic horror. Songs like “Mountain of Souls” off the first album and “What Dreadful Music” do that. But I also react a lot to the real world around me, so a couple of songs deal with social and political issues, like “Mausoleums” and “Angels on Fire”. Other songs are about my own personal woes. “Inheritance” is the one that’s closest to me. I’ve never even told the guys what it’s actually about, and it’s also the only song on the album that I wrote all the parts for, although it still took a lot of input from the band to make it what it ended up being. It was a hard moment in my life that I needed to process in this way. Most of the time, the process is that Mike brings some riffs to practice, we jam them out, I take them home and write lyrics, and so on. But this was a case where I literally stopped what I was doing, punched out a bunch of words in the notes app on my phone, then picked up the guitar to try to find the right feeling to make the song tell the story I was carrying.
Pick one song on Dead Endings that carries the album’s core. What is happening in that track, musically and lyrically?
Oh man. I bet Tim would disagree, but I have to say “What Dreadful Music”. It’s been a live staple since we wrote it, and it does all the things Born of Plagues does best, from the fast opening to the stompy verses to the absolute despair in the bridge and finally that heavy, HEAVY ritardando before the last verse, not even to mention the guitar harmonies. I always introduce it by saying, “This song’s about Dracula,” and that’s not a lie. It’s based on the first part of the novel, when Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula’s castle and slowly realises what’s happening and is driven insane by it. The title line is a reversal of that famous Dracula line about the wolves, when he says, “the children of the night, what music they make!”
You put out an official video for “Angels on Fire”. What story did you want the visual to tell, and what was the process like getting it made as an independent band?
The song is about the human cost of what passes for war in these times. I wrote the lyrics after seeing videos of bombed-out homes and parents crying over their maimed and killed children in Palestine. I can’t imagine any greater pain or greater injustice, and I had to channel that. We wanted the video to reflect that without being too explicit or exploitative, which was a hard thing to get right. Making it was pretty low-key and fun, though. The director plays in a band called Nixil, who practise in the same building we do. We just put up some black masking in the practice space and spent a Saturday miming to the recording. It’s good to be friends with other creatives for a lot of reasons, and this was definitely one of them.
Cast Down came out in 2021. Looking back, what did that record teach you about your identity as a band, and what did you want to do differently on Dead Endings?
We recorded Cast Down entirely on our own in our practice space, with everyone doing their parts separately, and a lot of it was done at home by ourselves. I think it taught us a good deal about what we’re capable of, and it felt as much like a foundation to build on as it did a starting line to move forward from. For Dead Endings, we worked with an engineer in his home studio and mostly all showed up together, which meant we made the record much more as a band. But despite doing it more as a live, full-band recording, we also spent more time writing in new parts and adding things we hadn’t been playing live. The end result is a much fuller-sounding record. And Noel, the engineer, does a great job, so every instrument and every song really sounds clear and true to its source.
Have you connected with any African bands or scenes so far, through line-ups, online friendships, or shared influences? What stuck with you?
Oh man, I wish. We’re a bunch of middle-aged dudes with jobs and families, and our focus has been much more local than that. I would love to check out some African doom, though.
After Dead Endings, what’s next for Born of Plagues in 2026, writing, releases and plans to get on the road?
Same old grind, really. We’re trying to pick up more shows a little further from home, but nothing as ambitious as a real tour. We’re excited to be playing Maryland Doomfest’s Knights of Doom festival in June here in Maryland. Nothing in Africa just yet. Even though we finished recording Dead Endings a year ago, we haven’t really started writing the next one yet. I’m excited to get that going, though. I’ve been listening to a pretty steady diet of Candlemass and Dio-era Sabbath, Dehumanizer was my first Sabbath album and still holds the top spot for me, so maybe some of that Sabbath influence will come through on album three.
Dead Endings is out now on Bandcamp.
