Ne Obliviscaris’ latest album, Exul, dropped in March. Credit: Courtesy Photo / Season of Mist Records

It happens all the time.

There you are, headbanging to sick riffs from your favorite extreme metal outfit when the graceful sound of a violin filters in and … Wait, what?

The inclusion of violin in a punishing metal band, replete with death growls and thundering bass drumming, may not sound like an obvious fit. But it’s the calling card of Melbourne, Australia’s Ne Obliviscaris, who will perform at The Rock Box on Sunday, Oct. 15.

Yes, the band features slamming death metal elements, including the harsh vocals of Marc “Xenoyr” or “Xen” Campbell. However, what separates it from the extreme metal pack is the addition of Tim Charles, a classically schooled violinist.

Under Charles’ leadership — he also provides Ne Obliviscaris’ striking clean vocals — the band has made long flamenco and waltz passages, not to mention infectious melodies, part of its sound. Although some have called the combination “gypsy metal,” the members of the band argue that its music falls under the larger umbrella of progressive metal.

For 20 years now, NeO — as the fans call the band —has delivered powerful live shows and albums, most recently Exul, which dropped in March.

We talked to Charles via Zoom about the band’s loyal fans, how its unusual sound developed and more.

You’re Australian, but you spent time in San Francisco as a youngster.

When I was a little kid, my dad was a politician, and he spent a lot of time away in Canberra, which is where the federal parliament is here in Australia. He was a member from 1980 to 1990. By 1990, I was 8 years old. At that point in time, my parents had four kids under 10. I think my mom thought maybe it might be nice for dad to be around a little bit more. You know what life is like for a politician pretty much anywhere you are in the world. So, he left politics and ended up being given a position as consul general in San Francisco. It’s a three-year role, so our family went off. It was this semi-bizarre three-year period where we were living in a government house that was enormous. Then we came back to Australia and back to this normal, middle-class lifestyle. I love it in San Francisco, and I still have friends there. Before this tour I’m stopping by San Francisco for a couple of days to see a Giants game with a friend of mine.

A baseball game? That’s a very American kind of thing.

I played baseball as a kid back in Australia. I was 11 when I came back to Australia. I had a complete American accent. It’s still a thing. People in Australia say, “Where are you from?” I’m Australian, but my accent is a bit weird because I was in the U.S. as a kid, and I travel the world a lot.

When did you start playing violin?

I was about 6 1/2. I’d been learning for a year, year-and-a-half. I just continued from there, and it’s 30, 35 years later. Whenever I get a compliment about my violin playing, I say, “It took me 35 years, so you’d think that after 35 years of practicing, you’d be pretty good.” Literally some of my very first memories of my life are my first violin lessons.

It seems like the band started off as more “traditional” extreme metal, for lack of a better term. Then some of the folk and flamenco influences started to come in as the core group got more comfortable with each other. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, the original idea behind bringing in a violin was Xen’s. He wanted a black metal thing with that classical, symphonic element. We actually didn’t end up sounding like any of those things. Instead, it ended up being this more progressive influence and then bringing in stuff from a lot of different genres. We liked it even if it was kind of weird or we hadn’t heard bands do that before. Xen and I took it very seriously, which is kind of funny looking back, because we weren’t really very good.

You played here in San Antonio with Black Crown Initiate back in 2016. Is that the tour where you met James Dorton, who’s filling in on harsh vocals for the current tour, or were you aware of each other before that?

I think I already knew Black Crown just as a fan, but we hadn’t met the guys until that point. When the idea of finding a fill-in vocalist came up, we remembered on that tour that Xen got sick and lost his voice for two or three shows. I remember James learned “Devour Me, Colossus” and maybe a second song and jumped up with us.

It was an audition.

We knew we liked him as a guy and that we could hang out, and that we also thought he was an unbelievable vocalist. Incredibly versatile. He can do so many different things. We’re not asking him ever to mimic another vocalist. We want him to be himself. But at the same time, it’s [about] matching the energy of our music.

What was it like the first time the band toured the states? You had personally been here before, of course. But touring stateside must have been a culture shock.

It almost didn’t happen. The first time we came here we were opening for Cradle of Filth. In the couple weeks beforehand, we got told that Cradle of Filth’s visas still hadn’t been approved yet. The week of the tour there was one member that still didn’t have their visa, and we got told from Cradle of Filth management that there was no guarantee that the tour was definitely going ahead. They cancelled the first three or four shows. They knew they weren’t going to be able to get there in time for that. But the problem for us was that we bought flights that were totally nonrefundable. When we looked into changing our flights, we couldn’t. It would have cost us $10,000 or something to change. The same as buying new ones. The problem with that was we had to make a decision to go on the original flights not knowing if the tour was happening! So we had this big debate in the band. “What do we do if we get there and it’s cancelled?” If the tour was cancelled, we would have had to crowdfund money for flights to come home. We had spent all of our money on flights to the US. We had a few hundred dollars in the bank. We spent the last money we had printing merch. We decided to get on the plane. We had, like, Melbourne to LA to Chicago to Philadelphia. It was a long way to get there. I remember landing in LA, and it was the first stopover after 14 hours in the plane. We’d announced we were coming, that the first few shows were cancelled and there were all these fans saying, “You should play here” or “You should do a headline show on these days” [or] “Hey, I’ll put you in touch with this local promoter.” Just tons of comments from fans offering to help us find shows on the days off. I called our agent and said, “Hey, can you go to the comments and hit these people up?” Literally by the time we landed in Chicago — which was a few hours after that — we had a show booked for the next day in Philadelphia. By the time we got to Philadelphia — which was in the middle of a snowstorm and the airport had been closed half a day earlier, and we weren’t sure whether we’d be allowed to land — we had an extra couple of shows booked in Baltimore and Providence. We went from having nothing at all in those first few days to all of a sudden having three headline shows. And the next day, about a hundred people turned up on 24 hours notice to the show in Philadelphia. We sold so much merch, and the excitement in the room was just unbelievable. We couldn’t believe we almost didn’t come!

You’ve had real success with using crowdfunding to pay for album releases and overseas tours. What is it about Ne Obliviscaris that inspires such fan loyalty?

I often say to people that we don’t seem to have too many fair-weather fans who kind of like us. People either don’t get us at all or we’re one of their favorite bands. Maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. It definitely seems that way, because of the fans we do have, there’s a really good number of them that are what you call superfans who come to every show or come to five shows on the same tour or travel around or buy every edition of vinyl that we ever release. We just do our own thing, and we’ve attracted people who connect with that.

How challenging is coming up with a setlist? A lot of the songs are long, so I’d think that limits the choices. How do you put it together before a tour?

My solution so far is just to keep making the show a bit longer.

There’s an upper limit to that approach.

The limit is really from three people. Me and Xen as singers. There’s only so long you can sing six nights a week. And it’s also the drums. You’re asking the drummer to run a marathon and then do it again tomorrow. The endurance element of drums in our music is, I really think, the hardest of any band going around, because we have extreme metal drumming and such long songs. Most extreme metal drummers are playing songs that are half the length of ours, so they get these little breaks. For the drummer in our band, they’re gonna keep going and keep going. When coming up with a setlist, for this one we just love the new album so much. We really wanted to play a lot of it, so that was kind of the starting point. “OK, well, let’s play most of the new record. And what do we select from everything else?” So, we’re playing songs off every album. There’s an ebb and flow I’m trying to create in a way the songs are connected, the way you choose a track listing for an album. I’m choosing from our discography to make the setlist. It’s like, “If this song is the opener, what song follows from that? What song fits here for a change of pace in the middle?” So, I think about it like an album track list but for a live show and the energy of a live show. The result is that for this tour we’re doing a 100-minute show, and I think that’s eight songs.

$28-$32, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 15, The Rock Box, 1223 E. Houston St. (210) 772-1443, therockboxsa.com.

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This article appears in Sep 20 – Oct 3, 2023.