By KIRA L. SCHLECHTER

It’s been a minute – just about 2.7 million of them – since last we heard from Tallahassee, Florida’s, preeminent stoner doom band, Smoke Mountain. 

But here they are, stonier and doomier than ever, with their latest, “The Rider,” just out on Argonauta Records, their second full-length following the excellent “Queen of Sin” in 2020.
The band is the trio of Sarah, Lee, and Brian Pitt (she sings, husband Lee plays guitar, and his brother Brian, drums).

Lee explained in a phone interview why it took five years for “The Rider” to see the light of day.
“We started working on the new songs not too long after “Queen of Sin” came out,” he said. “We moved a couple times – things kept coming up. And then we started recording it. We record everything ourselves, (and) we don’t go into the studio and do everything at one shot. We record things over a series of weeks or even months.

“I think we might have laid the first drum tracks down like two years ago or even longer. Even once we had all the basic tracks down, I tend to be pretty slow with the mixing and the producing of everything, so it’s probably partially my fault,” he admitted.

The album’s harrowing opener, “Hell or Paradise,” “explores the juxtaposition between good and evil and the fine line that separates the two,” according to the label bio. It’s also a pretty accurate parallel to the state of the world right now.

The lyrics seem to indicate being an outsider, that you “face the rabble’s wrath” and you’re “living in this world of lies,” and if you “shine the light” (or tell the truth), it’s to your detriment.

“We started working on Hell or Paradise around 2020, and I think that song in particular was influenced by what was going on in the world during that period.”

Lee also thinks the song has a post-apocalyptic feel,” like much of their material does. 

“It’s more like society’s basically crumbling, falling apart – am I happy about this or am I not?” he said. “Do I want the whole thing to be washed away and started over fresh, or am I upset about it, or a little bit of both? Do I miss the way things have been, but also at the same time look forward to the new beginning?” 

The accompanying video (see below), directed by friend Maxine Beck, perfectly reflects that theme, of people reveling in excess and salacious activity as the world goes to hell around them.

“Back when ‘Queen of Sin’ came out, she said that she wanted to do a video for us,” Lee said. “It kind of ties into the lyrics. It’s supposed to be this weird ‘70s freak show circus type of vibe. It’s supposed to give you a feeling of do I wanna be here or do I not wanna be here, is this good or bad. 
“The direction we gave her was basically we want the feel of the video to be almost like ‘House of 1,000 Corpses,’Rob Zombie, ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ type of feel. Take that and then take the lyrics and kind of mesh those together,” he added.

This track, and the whole of “The Rider,” reflects one of the band’s biggest influences: early Danzig, the Misfits, and Samhain. The music has a hypnotic, mantra-esque simplicity; there’s aural tricks like single eerie repeating notes here and there (what Lee calls “Samhain bells”).

“The truth is, Glenn Danzig is probably, at least for me and for my brother, probably our number-one influence. Pretty much almost any song, if you go back and listen to it, at least when I do it a lot of times, I can picture Glenn Danzig singing it,” he said.

Even Sarah’s deadpan vocal delivery slips in the occasional Glenn Danzig drawl, like in “The Sun and Heavens Fall.” But he’s not a direct influence on her, Lee says. 

“If she picked up anything from him, it’s by just being forcefully exposed to it by me and my brother,” he said with a laugh. “It’s probably being sick of it!

“She likes the Melvins a lot, she likes Guided by Voices a lot, she likes a lot of folk music, like Joan Baez. I hear a lot of – and I don’t think this is an influence – I hear Grace Slick in her voice, like Jefferson Airplane era,” he said.  

If there are Danzig references in some songs, the occult-tinged “Bringer of Doom” is pure Black Sabbath, with its fuzz-laded guitars, relentless drumming, and dirge-y groove.

“Of course, Danzig is influenced by Sabbath, so you have the influence of both bands,” he said. “On that one in particular, the riff influenced the lyrics. If I remember correctly, I think ‘bringer of doom’ were the first actual words that came to me. I was like, oh that’s kind of cool, I’ll stick with that and kind of write a song around that theme.” 

That theme – and many of the song themes – comes from the band’s fondness for horror movies.

“My brother in particular, and everyone in the band, is really a horror aficionado and a cult movie fan,” he said. “But his house is like wall-to-wall rare VHS tapes and DVDs – he’s been like that since he was a little kid.

“At this point it almost comes naturally – we know it’s going to be some kind of dark theme,” he said.  

Another natural part of Smoke Mountain’s sound is its high-end drumming – tons of crashing cymbals and snares and very little low bass drum vibes.

“I’d say it’s partially Brian’s drumming style and partially just a byproduct of the way we record, which is pretty low-fi,” he said. “This album, I think we made a little jump in production, but it’s still definitely low-fi.

“None of us are big gear heads. I don’t know that much about recording, (so) that’s probably part of why it sounds like that. We hang a microphone over the drums – we have the whole set miced with one microphone – and whatever comes out, we work with that,” he added. 

Yet another interesting band trademark is how they treat choruses. Sometimes there is one; sometimes there isn’t. Or it’s a word, or a phrase, like in “Bringer of Doom,” or the cinematic title track. Or it’s way undermixed, like in the title track.

“That’s kind of a feel thing,” he said of their treatment of choruses. 

That title track is musically a cross between Danzig again and Steppenwolf with its galloping drums and start-and-stop groove. 

“That song could almost be like ‘Death Proof’ part 2,” Lee said. “It’s kind of a ‘Mad Max’ type of feel. The influence there was essentially outlaw biker movies from the ‘70s and their soundtracks – they had a lot of cool songs on those soundtracks.” 

The last three tracks of “The Rider” – “Demon,” “Violent Night,” and “Smoke Mountain” – are actually remastered versions of the band’s 2017 self-titled EP.

“They’d never been on vinyl before – we’d only self-released that on CD,” Lee said. “We talked to our label and said, we have five new songs, can we put the three songs from our EP on the album to round it out and get them on vinyl?”

The band’s penchant for mantra-like songs is especially evident in something like “Violent Night” – it’s repetitive, droning, spell-like.

“I think we were particularly going for that; those were some of our earliest songs,” he said. “When we first started out, we were a lot more of a traditional doom band, I think, with songs like ‘Violent Night,’ ‘Smoke Mountain,’ ‘End of Days,’ which was on ‘Queen of Sin.’ 

“I don’t know if that kind of applies to some of the newer stuff as well, and if it does, then I guess it’s kind of a byproduct of the way I write, the way we arrange. But I think there was more of an intent to do that on the first several songs we wrote,” he added. 

Lee chuckled when asked if the track “Smoke Mountain” was their “Bad Company” moment (you know, the song “Bad Company” by the band Bad Company?) 

“That’s where we took the band name from, was the name of the song,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that’s the first song we wrote. The lyrics to that song are a bit different than the other songs (in that) it tells a story.”

Smoke Mountain has no concrete plans to tour as of yet, Lee says.

“We’re going to do an album release show in our hometown once we have all the CDs and albums in hand,” he said; that will be in June. 

“We’re going to get some other heavy bands from the area and maybe from out of town to come play, so it should be a good time. I’m hoping to, now that the album is out, start ramping things up a little bit more – at a minimum playing in the Southeast, doing maybe a short string of dates” and hit some festivals as well, he said. 

“There are a lot of cool festivals out there and I think we would enjoy doing that for sure,” he said.