Born in the “year zero” of 2020, TodoMal has quickly ascended as one of the most evocative names in the modern European underground. Following the critical success of “Ultracrepidarian” and “A Greater Good,” the Anglo-Spanish duo of Christopher B. Wildman and Javier Fernández Milla returns with “Graveyards of Joy,” out July 3rd via Season of Mist. This final chapter of their debut trilogy is a widescreen exploration of grief, Spanish geography, and hard-won hope. We sat down with the band to discuss the closing of this cycle and the profound personal shift that shaped their most mature work to date.
You formed in 2020, a year often referred to as “Year Zero.” Looking back from the vantage point of this third album, how much of that initial global isolation still fuels the “All Bad” (TodoMal) philosophy today?
I’d say it’s kind of a backdrop running through our music, though not in the strict sense you’d find in “Ultracrepidarian.” That isolation, so to speak, is more like an undefined landscape, an intimate space where our music can stretch out and breathe. We’re into evoking landscapes and mental images. Actually, we usually demo what later become our tracks in solitude. We live in different cities, so there’s a lot of introspection baked into those early stages of writing. For some songs that’s crucial, since they barely change from that first version to the final one. Others mutate along the way until they’re unrecognizable. Oh, and TodoMal — besides the translation you mentioned, in Spanish it can also be read as “All Evil,” referencing the prayer line “…and deliver us from all evil”. That’s where the deeper meaning comes from.
The partnership between Christopher and Javier is described as a product of “pure serendipity.” How does the Anglo-Spanish nature of your collaboration influence the way you balance traditional Doom Metal with more Cinematic, international soundscapes?
Christopher and I have been friends for years. We’re pretty different people, but humor is where we click. Musically we overlap on some stuff, but we’ve also got pretty different tastes. TodoMal is kind of the sweet spot where the two of us meet in the middle. He’s got more of a classic rock background, 70’s prog and that kind of thing. I’m more punk and experimental. I’ve also played in bands that have nothing to do with metal at all — pop, electronic, ambient. But we just enjoy making stuff together, and when TodoMal came about, I think what he brought to the project was something I just couldn’t, and vice versa. His musical vision is more “abstract,” more intuitive, while mine’s more technical, I guess — also because I’ve spent years doing studio work, everything from ads to jingles. It’s not always easy to find someone on the journey who fills in that other side of you.
“Graveyards of Joy” is the final act of a trilogy. Did you envision this three-part narrative from the very beginning with “Ultracrepidarian,” or did the conceptual arc reveal itself as you progressed through “A Greater Good”?
It really started to make sense once we finished “Graveyards of Joy.” It’s a nice way to give our discography some coherence, but honestly, none of it was planned. I’ve said before it’s kind of like a setup, a knot, and a resolution. Ultracrepidarian was made during a really dark, tough time for everyone, and that pessimism bled into the final result. By “A Greater Good” the storm was passing, but a whole new set of really tough personal circumstances were kicking in. There were moments where we genuinely questioned whether to keep the project going. We weren’t in a great place personally. I’ve always said that album is a miracle, and I think it “unlocked,” so to speak, whatever came after. In a way, the really positive response we got gave us the push to finish it. Friends started showing up offering to help take the project live. And we just kind of let ourselves be carried along by the circumstances. It felt like everyone around us was more excited about the project than we were ourselves.
This new record was written in solitude following a personal tragedy. How did the creative process differ this time around, and was the music a form of catharsis or a direct documentation of that grief?
It doesn’t really differ that much in terms of process: we write, make demos, send them back and forth, keep fleshing them out, and then head off to this remote spot in Spain — a house that’s basically our studio-slash-refuge — to record and finish everything up. What’s been different each time is our personal circumstances. Keep in mind it’s been a long process, almost 6 years, to make three albums. We’re emotional songwriters, especially Christopher. Sometimes it’s just impossible to write or record. You don’t have the energy. Sometimes that lasts for months at a time. In this last stretch we’ve gone through losing family members, births, putting together the live band… and this album gave us that breath of fresh air we needed, a chance to focus on something beautiful, to escape ourselves a little. An excuse to get together, go out and play. The storm’s still there, but we try to keep it under control. It’s not always easy. A big chunk of those demons roam through the album, locked in there, between the grooves. It’s like a dybbuk box, where in Jewish folklore people would trap their demons to keep them contained
You’ve moved from a core duo to a five-piece live ensemble, including figures like Javier Félez and Cecilia Tallo. How has this expansion affected your studio approach, especially regarding the vocal arrangements and the “choral” textures present in the new tracks?
That’s been one of the factors I mentioned earlier. At this point not everything revolves around just the two of us; there are more people involved now, responsibilities, new excitement. Having that thread tying us back to reality has, in large part, given us the push we needed to break out of that bubble. We don’t want to be the typical tortured-artist types, it’s too much of a cliché. Cecilia, for her part, has been the cherry on top. She was the last member to join the band, and it happened by pure chance. A stroke of luck. She’s a really disciplined musician, brings a whole new arsenal of influences, multi-instrumentalist, and her take on music has been a breath of fresh air for us. She recorded some amazing vocals for the album, and on some tracks, like “Mare Ignis,” they’ve basically become the leitmotif of the song. Same with “Humanised Gods”.
The term “Widescreen Doom” has been used to describe your sound. How much does the desert-like, “emptied” landscape of rural Spain (Alcarria, Matarraña) dictate the slow-burning tempo and the sense of space in your music?
The landscapes are essential. Once we’ve got the bulk of what’s going to be the album done and we move into vocal tracking and “production,” so to speak, we have to escape the city. That region I mentioned earlier, Matarraña, is surrounded by nature, endless landscapes, ruined villages… it’s kind of a way of reclaiming that backdrop that wraps around everything we do. We’re not a snowy-forests, gothic-literature kind of band. What we do is more connected to Miguel Delibes’ “Los Santos Inocentes,” or Fellini’s films. In La Alcarria, where I live, just 10 minutes out of the city you’re suddenly in a world of golden light landscapes. We’ve shot a good chunk of our music videos and photo sessions out there. Let’s just say once you leave the city, time slows down. The background noise drops, the light is different. The roads aren’t plastered with insurance company billboards or giant buildings looming over you… they’re these soft little country roads with sunflower fields around them and tiny scattered villages. You can pull over on some side road, get out of the car, and walk down a path that disappears off into the distance where you can’t see anymore. And then end up stranded in the middle of nowhere with no signal, car stuck in a ditch. I’ll tell you about that later…
On the track “Point of Coalescence,” the music seems to gather “scattered particles” into a dense, oppressive wall of sound. Could you explain the lyrical and sonic intent behind this specific moment of the album?
Funny story actually — we were at an abandoned power plant in the Teruel region on a rainy day, shooting footage for the video, and it was an absolute nightmare. Completely covered in mud, car stuck and unable to get out (which happened to us again on the “Graveyards of Joy” video — we had the car abandoned on a dirt road for three days after some torrential rain). We’ve got a real talent for this stuff. So, conceptually, it’s the most surreal track on the album. “Shameful life, shame for life…” is the mantra that repeats through the choruses. It’s about self-indulgence and vanity (something we’d already touched on in “Antichrist of Love”). Those “sins” nobody sees, but that still add up in your total tally. Kids playing at war, setting up little power dynamics over each other. At the end you see a group of young people watching some “deity” descend from the sky, which turns out to just be a distorted, threatening image of something supposedly kind. And total unawareness of what’s coming for them. If I hit someone on some abandoned road — a lost baby, say — and nobody saw me, I can just carry on with my life, blindfold myself, act like nothing happened. But the horrific act is still there. It’ll stay with you your whole life. All of that sits underneath the song’s concept. The octopus represents that dreamlike, repressed part, those ancestral fears. Sometimes it also symbolizes lies, because of its ability to camouflage, to deceive the eye. And we wanted to wrap it all in an oppressive atmosphere, with a dense, suffocating sound.
There is a strong Cinematic quality to your work, with references to Morricone-like strings and Hammond-driven passages. What is your relationship with film scores, and how do you translate that visual “dusty plain” feeling into a Doom Metal context?
That cinematic element you mentioned comes partly from how evocative orchestral music is — strings, percussion, choral textures — in the context of those landscapes, it practically asks for it. A lot of the time it also comes from needing to create space, to clear out room between the guitars and drums for moments of breathing room and release. There are loads of soundtrack references in there: in “Lucid Nightmare” there’s a choral touch in the verses, an atonal drop in the voices, a little detail heavily inspired by Jerry Goldsmith, specifically the track “Killer Storm” from “The Omen” soundtrack. The opening of “Mare Ignis” has some similarities to Vangelis, and the verses in “Deliverance” carry a bit of a Morricone vibe (relatively speaking), like “A Fistful of Dollars”… just to name a few.
“Deliverance” stands out for its balance between melancholic acoustic arpeggios and Symphonic, almost Prog-oriented passages. How do you manage to push these genre boundaries without losing the “Atmospheric Doom” identity?
We don’t write music thinking about labels, beyond having some clear stylistic guidelines for TodoMal. From there, it’s all pretty much a “brainstorm.” We listen to a ton of really different music, and those influences naturally bleed into our musical language. There’s a lot more stuff we’re going to be experimenting with down the line. Some people find this “ability” to move between styles kind of curious, but for us it’s just spontaneous. A lot of the time we write directly on keyboards, no guitar involved, which also gives the music a different kind of feel. I guess we’re just not two metalheads making doom metal. Maybe part of our “exoticism” comes from that. Sometimes we really feel like we crashed the metal scene’s party, but nobody actually invited us. So we’re gonna try to steal as many appetizers and champagne as possible while we’re here.
The title “Graveyards of Joy” is a powerful oxymoron. Does it represent the death of happiness, or rather the “hard-won hope” that remains when joy is buried but not forgotten?
More the second thing you’re pointing at. Hope can never die. Same as life. It always finds a way through, even among the ruins, like you see on the cover. Nothing would make sense otherwise. We wouldn’t be doing this. However much it hurts, however badly things are going, there’s always some relief, some ray of hope. We’re pretty upbeat, positive people. When we go dark and gloomy, a lot of the time it’s also just a way of channeling our black sense of humor. We like being emotionally “intense,” we’re comfortable in that space, but we also enjoy a bit of a “mindfuck” every now and then. Anyone who knows us has probably picked up on that. But at the end of the day, when we go finish albums at the house in Matarraña… after the emotional catharsis and all that boring stuff to talk about… we head down to the village bar, where our friends are, kids running around, drinking beer, talking nonsense and laughing as much as humanly possible. Off to karaoke in the next village to sing ABBA songs, check in on how someone’s been doing this season, or have a laugh about how grumpy the women at the bar are. Without any of that, it’d be impossible. Or we’d end up killing each other.
Cecilia Tallo’s contributions, particularly on tracks like “Mare Ignis” and “Lucid Nightmare,” add a unique layer to the dual-vocal interplay. How do you decide where a track needs that ethereal contrast versus the more solemn male leads?
Like I said before, it’s natural. It’s usually Chris who shows up with some crazy idea after listening to Laurie Anderson, or god knows what. And since we’re into eccentric stuff, we start figuring out how to pull it off. It used to be more complicated, but now with Cecilia on the team, all of this is way easier. Honestly, when you make a song… it almost never matches 100% what you had in your head. You’ve got to step back from it a bit and let the ideas flow. Not everything ends up fitting in, or fitting the way you’d imagined. But there’s a really fun side to that final stage, when you’re thinking about arrangements, where you can really let loose with that kind of stuff. We want to push our songs all the way, no limits. If a song gives you a feeling of desolation, dryness… that’s when it hits you that some strings or a more cinematic vibe would push it even further. And then the search begins, trying things out… it’s probably the stage of the process where your influences, what you’ve been listening to, your musical background, come out the most — honestly, it’s the most creative part. Finishing a track, giving it structure, recording vocals, bass and all that… that’s often only 50% of the process.
The album cover features Ruïnes (1865) by Lluís Rigalt. What led you to this specific 19th-century work, and how does it reflect the internal logic of the album’s themes of decadence and beauty?
It’s basically a snapshot of that environment I was talking about earlier. Actually, the photo on the album’s back cover, and others from that same shoot, have a really similar light to it. There’s something very hypnotic about that kind of romantic landscape painting. It’s the kind of image you could stare at for hours and just get lost in. The moment we saw it, we knew we had to get the rights to use it. In our opinion, it frames the music inside it perfectly. Without getting too into specifics, the people who are no longer around us are part of the ruins. And the vegetation growing out of it is the new people who’ve come into our lives. It’s a cycle we’ve been living through firsthand during this time, and we think it’s something a lot of people can probably relate to in some way. Unfortunately, or not, we’re getting on in years now and life keeps moving, with its highs and its lows. That’s the essence of this album, that contrast, that duality. Those moments of joy, of light, and that dark side we all carry with us, that hurts.
You recorded at Moontower Studios and Trinitat-Montseny with Javier Félez assisting on engineering. How important is the “DIY” spirit and the choice of these specific locations in capturing the “raw and untamed” sound of the record?
It’s baked into TodoMal’s DNA. From the very start we knew that if we wanted to pull all this off, we had to be as self-sufficient as possible. The way we operate isn’t your typical band setup; a lot of the time the recording, writing and production processes run almost in parallel. We don’t have a traditional “modus operandi”. We couldn’t just lock ourselves in a studio for a week or two to bang out an album. That’s not how we work, never has been. We need to do things at our own pace, with our own means. Now, having Javi Félez on the team makes things easier, since we’ve also got his experience and studio to handle certain processes in a more controlled way. Same goes for the promo videos and photos. We’re very protective of what we create, and handing this stuff over to other people is something we really struggle with. We’re not the best video makers in the world, or the best producers, or photographers, but at least we know that everything that comes out of our hands is genuinely ours. And we want to give that some value, especially now that everything tends toward being perfect. Maybe at the start it was a way of justifying not having the resources, but at this point it’s become a conscious, definitive choice.
In “Humanised Gods,” there is a shift toward a more groove-dense rhythm and hypnotic synths. Is this a direction you see the band exploring more deeply now that the initial trilogy is complete?
“Humanised Gods” is kind of the eccentric one on the album. We honestly think of it almost as a “cover.” Our own version of another project Chris and I had a while back that never saw the light of day. We’re into doing covers (we already put one out for The Rolling Stones), and we’ve got a couple more in the pipeline. So we figured, instead of covering someone else’s song, we’d do a cover of our own, and at the same time lighten up an album that could come across as a bit dense. Actually, it’s kind of tucked away on the tracklist, we didn’t want it to stand out too much either. We had our doubts about including it, but the rest of the band loved the track, and the label too, so in the end it was kind of a “why not?” It’s also a bit of a tribute to that 90’s gothic rock vibe, which we lived through firsthand, and there’s stuff from that era we love, everything from Sisters of Mercy to Type O Negative. Honestly, there’s not much more to say about it. We think it threw the average TodoMal listener for a loop a little, but that’s something we find pretty fun too. And we figure anyone who actually knows the band knows we operate within a pretty wide range. It was a lot of fun shooting the video too. Actually, I’d say it’s our only “professional” video (we rented a space, cameras, lighting, the whole deal). Since we were going to commit to the joke, we figured we’d commit all the way.
Signing with a label like Season of Mist marks a significant step for TodoMal. How has this partnership helped in bringing your vision of the “Spanish desolate wasteland” to a global audience?
Honestly, it’s still too early to say where this new chapter is going to take us. We hope our music reaches as far as possible, though we know that’s tough. It’s a really saturated scene, releases coming out constantly overlapping with each other, in a scene that’s far from massive, let’s be honest. We’re a lot of fish in a very small pond, and we know it’s hard to grab enough attention. But for now the numbers seem to be climbing, interest in the band too, and I can assure you we’re busting our asses at every stage of the process. We don’t know if all that will be enough. Hopefully it is. Either way, our idea of “success” probably differs a lot from what a lot of bands have in mind too.
Lyrically, you touch upon the search for “something on the other side” of loss. Is this album meant to be an ending, or a transition toward a different kind of spirituality for the band?
Only time will tell on that one. We don’t plan anything. Since it’s “honest” music, it’ll go hand in hand with whatever the future brings us. I think having a tour ahead of us, having had to battle a thousand demons and problems, is going to make us stronger. That might cast a different kind of light on whatever we end up doing. If we manage to get stable enough to keep the project afloat, keep traveling, recording, and building connections with people, then it’ll definitely have been worth all the effort.
Your upcoming live schedule includes major festivals like Tolmin in Slovenia and dates in Germany and France. How do you translate such a personal and intimate studio record into a massive, live festival atmosphere?
It’s funny actually, because there’s this weird kind of serendipity to it. Your music, once it passes through other people’s hands, inevitably transforms. Even your own interpretations of it transform. Maybe it’s less precise, or less expansive, but it gains in intensity and power. We’ve got a live sound engineer who’s an absolute killer. He knows how to channel all of that into a dense, brutal sound. That side of things tends to get lost on the records. So whatever might suffer a bit on one end, gains in power and intensity on the other. Even so, we try to carry the whole atmosphere of the albums over into the live show. Cecilia handles vocals, keyboards, percussion and so on, we use backing tracks for details and orchestral parts, video projections that add a cinematic layer to the whole experience… so the live translation stays pretty faithful to what you hear on the records. We’ve got to make do with five members to reproduce what, on the albums, are tons of tracks and arrangements.
Now that the trilogy is closed with the title-track’s final notes, what remains of TodoMal? Are the “Graveyards of Joy” a final resting place for the project’s current form, or just a new foundation?
I’d say it’s a new beginning. Maybe the end of a chapter that started with two half-crazy friends making music in solitude, and has ended up as a band touring internationally on a prestigious label. It’s so strange when you really think about it, it’s almost dizzying. We’re aware we’re in a good place right now and we’re going to make the most of it. So we’ll just see what fate has in store for us. But above all: travel, meet people, laugh about everything, and enjoy it as much as humanly possible. Thanks so much for your interest in TodoMal. Hope to see you out there at a show soon.
We would like to thank TodoMal for their time and for providing such a profound insight into the closing of this cycle. “Graveyards of Joy” is a rare testament to the beauty that can be found within tragedy, and it stands as a definitive milestone for the Spanish scene. The album is available for pre-order now and will be released on July 3rd via Season Of Mist.
Pre-Order “Graveyards Of Joy” on Bandcamp: https://todomalband.bandcamp.com/album/graveyards-of-joy
Read our Review of their new album “Graveyards Of Joy” here: [Review] TodoMal – Graveyard Of Joy