People radically underestimate what it takes to try and take all that sonic abuse and turn it into something that you can listen to. It eats the mix … - Karl Sanders

I didn’t get really exposed to metal until I was a teenager, but world history I loved from a very early age. I was in fourth grade and had to do a book report on Alexander The Great, and that just fired my brain up. My dad was always watching the epic flicks of the day like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Land Of The Pharaohs, so it was a worm in my brain from an early age.

The 80s were a lot of fun. It was a time where everybody had disposable income so everybody was always going out. There were half a dozen places to play in my home town. You could have quite the life playing four nights a week, even as a cover band, but after a while we wanted to write our own songs. You have to start asking yourself, ‘What is it I wanna do? What do we wanna sound like?’ It was a chance meeting with [ex-Morbid Angel frontman] David Vincent while we were playing Charlotte, North Carolina, where he introduced me to this whole universe of underground death metal that I was completely unaware of. That was the poison apple that I bit and it soon infected my entire band. [...] The vibe in the late 90s was that death metal was dead. We didn’t care though, because we were going to do whatever we wanted to do, the world be damned. We were from Greenville, South Carolina, which is a nowhere town. Already we had wrestled with the idea that probably no one was going to give a fuck, so let’s just do what we like and own it. We didn’t care about the ebb and flow of whatever is currently popular. [...] That mindset has helped us over the years, remembering who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s humbling in a way that we are just some guys from South Carolina who are willing to work hard. We were happy that the timing of the universe then worked in our favour. You can’t complain - you just have to thank the metal gods.

Basically, if you’re a guitar player, there’s riffs that are going to come out. It just happens. It’s part of it. So we’re not lacking in inspiration. George (Kollias) is always playing drums, so he’s always got drum ideas. You know, (guitarists) Brian (Kingsland) and Zach (Jeter) are always playing. So there are always new guitar ideas. It’s not necessarily an endless well, and not every riff that we come up with manages to make its way into a song. That is where it comes from; we love to play music, so we’re always riffing. But, as soon as you try to dictate to the muse, it goes away. You can’t force yourself to be creative. You can be disciplined and work on your craft every day. That’s a little bit different. Not always is gold just gonna fall out of the sky, like when you hear a Nile record. You know that’s not just because we sat down in 10 minutes and said, “Okay, we’re done writing the record”. No, those songs took years to put together. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into taking the inspiration that we had and crafting it into something.