Spineshank Return to Download Festival After 23 Years

When Spineshank say they never expected to be here, they mean it literally. “The band ended and this whole thing was dead and gone. Really, really dead,” they tell us at Download Festival. “We didn’t even keep any equipment. We sold all our gear. So for this to happen again, it’s beyond our dreams.” Some 23 years on from their last appearance, the Californian nu-metal veterans are back, and still slightly stunned to be. We sat down with frontman Jonny Santos, drummer Rob Garcia, Tommy Decker and his son, new recruit Tommy Decker Jr. on guitar.

They are here touring The Height of Callousness, a quarter of a century after it landed. “It might be doing better now than it did back then,” they reckon, and they are probably right. Revisiting it has been its own surprise. “Very unexpected. I didn’t know what to expect, and that’s been great,” says Tommy Decker.

Why come back, and why now? The maths is brutally simple. “It’s 25 years. If we wait for 30, we’ll be too old to do it. So it’s now or never.”

There is history here for them too. They played one of the very first Downloads, back when the festival had just taken over from Monsters of Rock. “We grew up with Castle Donington and Monsters of Rock, so for us it was a really big deal. A dream come true.” Returning to it closes a circle.

The descriptive question gets the bleakest answer of the weekend. Asked to picture The Height of Callousness as a room, Jonny Santos doesn’t hesitate. “Desperation, pain and chaos.” And the smell? “Stale beer, anger, frustration, rejection and failure. Broken bottles, broken glass. Very pleasant.” A drop of whiskey, too. The rage, clearly, has not mellowed.

Summing the band up, the answers stay on brand. The emoji is the one with crosses for eyes. The object, fittingly for a band called Spineshank, is a knife, a shank. The weather, with a wry nod to their hosts, is “a lot like England. Drab and dreary, but the sun comes out every now and then.”

The real headline is that there is new music coming, and it started almost as a dare to themselves. “We weren’t planning on new music, but this has been going on over a year now, so we thought, let’s see if we still have it. And it seems like we might.” The process is old school: riffs first, then drums, then the two vocalists work their magic. Six or seven ideas are taking shape, and the fuel has not changed. “Anger and frustration, same as always. After all this time we have something to say again, and maybe the world needs to hear it.”

They are in no rush, and they will not release it unless it clears a high bar. “If it’s not up to standard, we’re not putting it out just to put it out. We want to top ourselves. People have waited 25 years. We can wait another couple of months.” It will still sound like them, two voices and all, but with new elements, different time signatures, a little noisier, a little hookier. “It’s Spineshank, but 25 years later.”

Their advice for everyone else is blunt and warm in equal measure. Stop being, in their words, awful to one another. And start being nicer. “Live and let live. Everybody’s so concerned with what everyone else is doing. The world’s so small now with social media, everyone’s got something to say, and people haven’t learned to mind their own business.” Tommy Decker Jr., meanwhile, mounted a passionate campaign for more ranch dressing, a UK availability crisis he jokingly intends to solve. Spineshank ranch, you heard it here.

On why nu metal is suddenly everywhere again, with Linkin Park headlining and a bill that feels lifted straight from 2001, they have a theory, and they do not hold back. A handful of great bands aside, they reckon plenty of current music falls short, while the names from 2000 and 2001, Slipknot, Disturbed, a returning Mudvayne, Deftones, are still the ones doing it. Make of that what you will, though the veteran’s confidence is hard to argue with on current form.

After Download comes a US run with Nonpoint and (Hed) P.E., then a return to the UK in the autumn alongside Skindred, Alien Ant Farm and Orgy, a near reunion of a tour they did in 2001, this time at Alexandra Palace, a venue they have never played. And somewhere in all of it, Tommy Decker Jr.’s attempt to crack TikTok. “I have to do all the social media, and I’m bad at TikTok. They keep making me do a stupid little dance.” Consider this his cry for help. The new music, you suspect, will land harder than the choreography.

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