I've Seen All I Need to See

Since the late ’90s, The Body has been one of the most prolific forces in experimental heavy music. Specializing in exploration and collaboration—they’ve done collaborative releases with Uniform, Thou, Full of Hell, and many others—core duo Lee Buford (drums, programming) and Chip King (guitar, vocals) have stripped their sound back to sheer monolithic power on I’ve Seen All I Need to See. Described by their record label as an exploration of “the extremes and micro-tonality of distortion,” the album is as menacing as it is unsettling. “I think that’s just a fancy way of saying that we tried to focus more on the distortion and reverb, which is how we sound live,” Buford tells Apple Music. “We just tried to recreate that to the best of our ability.” Below, he comments on each track.

A Lament
“Our friend Seth [Manchester], who records us, that's actually his dad doing the voice-over. We get him to come in and read stuff for us every once in a while, which is always fun because he's a real regular dad and he'll be like, 'Okay, what are we doing today, guys?' And in this case, we got him to read a poem about a guy’s wife who was dying of cancer. It’s by this British poet Douglas Dunn, from a book he did called Elegies. I wanted Seth’s dad to read it because on the last song on our last record, he reads a passage from a Czech writer, so we wanted to have a continuation, with Seth’s dad ending the last record and starting this one.”

Tied Up and Locked In
“We recorded this before the pandemic, but the title seems pretty apropos now, especially with the claustrophobia of the record. I learned how to play drums by playing hip-hop beats, so I feel like that’s what I always go back to—this weird hip-hop groove—which is kind of the basis of the song. And then we have our friend Ben [Eberle] singing on it at the end, who is from this band Sandworm that we’ve done a split with. He’s on almost everything we do, and he’s one of the only guests on this record.”

Eschatological Imperative
“I think this was the first song we recorded, so it’s us getting used to this recording style. With all the distortion and reverb and stuff, we had to slow everything down and couldn’t play too many notes because then it gets really muddy. When I was playing drums, I couldn’t use cymbals, basically, because when I did, it would just blow everything out. So this is us learning how to play the songs in a way that would sound okay with all the crazy distortion.”

A Pain of Knowing
“Lyrically, most of our stuff is pretty grim. On this record—and especially this song—I think Chip went even more bleak than normal. Maybe he was feeling something a little different on this record—I don’t know. But this is a droney song, and it’s pretty sparse. It’s an example of us just laying back a little bit musically.”

The City Is Shelled
“Lyrically, I think this is about war. It also has our friend Chrissy [Wolpert] on it, who sings on a lot of our records. When we made the decision to make this record less melodic, we still wanted Chrissy on it, so she plays piano here. Then we just distorted it an insane amount and blew it out, probably much to her chagrin. She likes more melodic things. This also has Ben singing on it, and I think it’s the only song with both of them.”

They Are Coming
“Lyrically and musically, I think we were shooting for a more paranoid thing here. I don’t know if we achieved it any more than on any other song, but that was definitely the intention—that feeling of gloom and paranoia. I think we probably have that in all our songs, but we tried to amplify it in this one. Chip came up with the title—he came up with all the song titles and the album title for this one.”

The Handle / The Blade
“This one has a recording trick on the drums at the beginning. It’s this weird delay that makes the drums seem a lot crazier than they actually are. So it makes me look better, which I appreciate. And then we dubbed out Chip’s vocals at the end, with this weird delay and echo. It’s our little nod to that genre that we both love.”

Path of Failure
“The idea was to have this big finish at the end, so it’s me playing and then this drummer Max Goldman plays this crazy jazz style—which I’m not good at—and then it comes in with all of us playing. This is one of my favorite songs on the record just for that aspect of it. With the title, I think there’s always this undercurrent of me and Chip being like, ‘We’re in our forties now. I wonder if playing in a band for 20 years is a good idea or a bad idea?’ I don’t know if we chose the correct path or not, but this is the one we’re on. I guess we’ll see how it goes.”