Metal Monday: Q&A With Fit For An Autopsy

Fit For An Autopsy brings Jersey-based deathcore that hits like a nuclear blast — pun intended.

With a career spanning over a decade, Pat Sheridan, Joe Badolato, Josean Orta, Tim Howley, and Peter “Blue” Spinazola have years of experience of blowing minds and riling up mosh pits across the world. Fit For An Autopsy describes their sound as “extreme,” because they never hold back.

The crushing music of Fit For An Autopsy is for any fan of extreme metal, as it’s devoid of preachy politics or grandstanding soapboxing, but its sound and fury is absolutely unflinching in purpose. The band expertly blends excessive-force fueled death metal with atmospheric groove and impassioned personal diatribes, reflecting back the dark state of current events… They embrace the responsibility to put as much devoted purpose into their lyrics and message as they do into their dense, heady, songs, forging a magnificently powerful new post-deathcore.

Fit For An Autopsy Official Bio

The whole gang took the time before heading out on the road to talk with us about some of their favorite memories touring and making their new album, The Sea Of Tragic Beasts.

Q&A WITH FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY

EB: With regards to your current tour, what is your favorite part about being on the road?

Pat Sheridan: I’ll speak for the team and say that we’re just excited to be out playing shows with our friends that we’ve either seen or toured with before. We’re just stoked to get out and play cities that we do really well in with bands that we really, really like.

EB: When you’re on the road, what are the highlights of being with the whole band?

PS: Other than playing shows, probably food and coffee.
Blue Spinazola: All the food, all of the coffee, and friends.
PS: Getting to see people you know and familiar faces all over the country, and I mean just as far as the banter in the band, it is probably the best part of our day. You know, we’re North-easterners. We talk with each other a lot. There’s a lot of interesting back and forth.

EB: What is the most interesting conversation you guys have had?

PS: *Laughing* We will decline to have this conversation. We all have an extremely dark sense of humor, and we really enjoy making jokes out of things that make us all uncomfortable. Things that maybe most people don’t think are funny. So we’ll just let that one slide under the carpet because we also know it’s not cool to offend people. It’s just typical bathroom humor. Lots of fart jokes, disrespecting each other, it’s typical dark humor. We’ll leave it at that.

EB: Dark humor, fitting. So, The Sea Of Tragic Beasts just came out. What were your biggest inspirations on that album?

PS: If you’re asking musical inspirations, there’s a lot — old death metal, modern metal. There’s post-rock, hardcore influence. But, lyrically, it is more about social issues and things going on around us at the current time. There’s plenty of stuff to dive into.
Tim Howley: We kind of like to bring light to situations that not everybody might see. For us, to have our soapbox at the moment and be able to tell people about other hardships that people are going through — that’s how we like to use our platform.
PS: Other bands like to do the fantasy, horror movie kind of stuff in our world. But, it’s something I must have repeated in every interview: there’s nothing scarier than the things going on around you every day and what people are willing to do to each other for money and power. “Black Mammoth” is a thing that we did because there was something going on, that the media wasn’t grabbing onto and people didn’t know about it. It’s a very important subject matter, so I’d say The Great Collapse and The Sea Of Tragic Beasts — some of it’s a little more personal. But there’s definitely a lot of social influence in our lives.

EB: That is very apt. If you had to describe the sounds of Fit For An Autopsy in your own words, how would you do it?

PS: Aggressive. Extreme. It’s aggressive music. I don’t even know if I would call it heavy metal at this point because there are so many different experiences coming from so many different directions. We are an extreme music band. We take all of the extreme versions of a lot of different types of music and combine them together in what we do. There are parts in our songs that are not as metal as people expect us to be. We do what the fuck we want. We don’t make music that other people want us to make. We create music that we like and I think that is very important for people to understand. If we wanted to change our sound, we would do it. We’re just evolving.

EB: How did you get started playing guitar? Who were your biggest influences?

PS: I started playing guitar when I was a kid because my brother had a friend who was a guitar player and brought his stuff to the house and kind of left it laying around. I started fiddling around with it when I was younger. Then, you know, I started learning stuff. And then I found punk rock and I played three chords until I started playing heavier, metal-influenced bands. I was in a bunch of hardcore bands, and then that led me here. I would say it wasn’t any different than anybody else that picked up a guitar and started learning. It just so happened that somebody had a guitar and it was there so I started to learn from it, you know?
TH: I had no hobby! I was like 10. I went to my dad and I was like, “Dad, I need a hobby. I don’t know what to do, I’m bored. I want to play guitar.”
BS: I saw Kiss and Metallica.
PS: I think it was just the typical thing. We all wanted to rock.

EB: Speaking of guitar, do you remember the first time you picked up a pack of Ernie Ball Slinkys?

PS: I found that just the Regular Slinkys last a long time. They’re not overly expensive like other brands and they do the job. They sound good. I put them on for three days, play three shows, and I don’t have to worry about how they sound.
BS: The first set of strings I ever bought for guitar were Regular Slinkys. I didn’t know how to put them on right, but they were the first set I ever bought.

EB: What is up next for Fit For An Autopsy?

PS: There will be some interesting things coming out from the band. There’s some stuff going on in November that I can’t really get into but you know, pay attention to the Internet. There may or may not be some new things coming around for Fit For An Autopsy around that time. We’re going to keep grinding and put out a new record hopefully in 2021 if everything goes the way we want it to. We don’t like to take a breath, we push ourselves as hard as we can. We plan to keep on doing what we’re doing.

STRINGS

Fit For An Autopsy plays Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky, Skinny Top Heavy Bottom, and a custom set of bass strings using Ernie Ball single strings.

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