Everything I Thought I Knew About Full of Hell Was Wrong : A Conversation with Spencer Hazard
Cover photo: Zenfulvisions
Full of Hell has just released a new album, but they weren’t supposed to.
I know that sounds like the setup to a punchline about the productivity of grindcore and powerviolence bands, but I swear it’s not. Full of Hell always releases new material. It’s practically their whole deal: constant motion, relentless evolution, an ongoing experiment in musical entropy. The band’s entire mythology is rooted in unpredictability, which paradoxically becomes the only predictable thing about them.
But that’s not how Broken Sword, Rotten Shield came into being. You didn’t predict that one? Me neither.
"This record was basically a fluke," explains Spencer Hazard, Full of Hell’s guitarist, primary composer, and architect of chaos. "Four of the seven songs were originally written for my other band, Reaper’s Gong. If you take out the two noisy interludes, there’s only the title song that was conceptualized and written as a Full of Hell song."
Now, if you’re wondering what the hell Reaper’s Gong is or why it sounds like a long-lost 90s anime and not a metal side project, you’re not alone. Turns out it’s a COVID-era project: a sludge-and-noise hybrid Spencer started with Gabe Solomon (who also now plays in Full of Hell) and his then-girlfriend Zoe. It’s raw, warped, and not completely off-center from Full of Hell’s catalog if you listen attentively and start hearing the fingerprints. The connective tissue.
Long story short: Gabe and Zoe broke up. Gabe exited the band. Spencer was left holding a bunch of songs that he couldn’t quite go forward with anymore.
"The way Gabe played bass was so integral to the vibe of the band, I felt like I was doing a disservice to the songs to try and turn them into something else. But I liked them and didn’t want to throw them away," he said.
This is a running creative theme with Full of Hell: the refusal to discard something just because it no doesn’t fit neatly in a pre-labeled box. Since forming in 2009, they’ve released between one and five new recordings every single year. That’s not just work ethic, that’s compulsive creation.
But Broken Sword, Rotten Shield? It’s a mutant born from grief and artistic salvage. A Frankenstein that works because the lightning bolt hit in just the right place.
Love, Loss, and Alchemy
At first hearing Broken Sword, Rotten Shield sounded like a logical continuation to Full of Hell’s monster 2024 record Coagulated Bliss, but Spencer assured me that the only link between both albums is that he wrote them. Maybe he’s just compositionally at the same place, but he also insists that the band has been dabbling with noise rock since their earlier days. “We’ve been getting better at playing our instruments over the years. It allowed us to include more influences to our sound,” he explained.
Before this became a Full of Hell record, Spencer had already commissioned the artwork. He’d discovered an Instagram artist, The Incredible Amoeba, who randomly drew one of his dogs, Ernest, without even being asked.
"Ernest is a striking, strange-looking dog as is. His painting reminded me of the Swans’ album The Seer and I thought it was inspiring. So I contacted him and commissioned an artwork that was between that and Swans’ other album Love of Life.”
Image provided by The Incredible Amoeba.
The inclusion of animals in the artwork and overall theme of the record was another happy accident, but it took a more personal turn last November when Spencer rushed home from tour as his other dog Kiwi had to be put down. “I never really asked Dylan what his lyrics were about. It’s not that I’m uninterested, but I like that it’s esoteric and mysterious. From what I gather, he took the pain of losing a loved one and was able to take the fantasy element and mix it with the personal and equated it to losing someone in battle,” he said.
Spencer wholeheartedly admits that fantasy’s not his thing. Full of Hell’s vocalist is the one into Dark Souls, Lord of the Rings and whatnot. He also launched a medieval-inspired print shop that has the most badass LOTR shirts you’ve ever seen.
“He was pretty jealous of the artwork initially. When Reaper’s Gong fell apart, I didn’t want to lose that artwork because it felt personal. It was perfect for him.”
And yes, Reaper’s Gong lives on, but their sound had to evolve. Spencer mentions Swans and Oxbow as new guiding stars, suggesting a more expansive future.
I’ll admit it: I had Spencer Hazard all wrong. From the records and interviews, I imagined him as an extreme music philosopher: a guy sketching diagrams of pain and transcendence in the margins of Bataille. But he’s more like a sonic architect. A builder. Someone who assembles stray bricks of noise and emotion into cathedrals that make sense only after you’ve walked through them.
He can transmute post-punk and classic noise rock influences into forward-thinking, grind-inflected soundscapes that shouldn’t work, but somehow do. But Broken Sword, Rotten Shield was an amalgamation of chance and communal efforts, it took more than musical genius to pull it from nonexistence.
“We’ve been doing it DIY for so long, you take adversity and you take something that could be bad and take it in stride instead of letting it destroy you,” he says.
The Endless Creative Cycle of Full of Hell
It’s tempting to think of Full of Hell as an engine: unstoppable, unfeeling, mechanical. But that’s not quite right. They’re more like a virus (in the best, most adaptative possible sense of the term), always mutating, always adapting, occasionally infecting unexpected hosts.
In 2023, they collaborated with shoegaze veterans Nothing on When No Birds Sang, which sounded like a cosmic paradox: delicate grind. The project earned a glowing Pitchfork review and introduced Full of Hell to people who probably think Converge is a mindfulness app.
"The material was originally released for a collaborative performance at Roadburn in 2022. None of the bands were touring because of Covid so we figured we should get in the studio and record these,” Spencer explained.
Covid and contractual obligations were a common theme to Full of Hell’s fantastic 2023 where they released two high profile collaborative records and one split with Gasp, a Los Angeles-based experimental band they were highly inspired by. When 2023 came and Covid was winding down, they were a loaded gun. They were sitting on tons of fantastic material recorded when the world was shut down.
"I love bands like My Bloody Valentine and Jesus & The Mary Chain, and it doesn’t always show in Full of Hell songs, but I could display it there,” Spencer says.
He’s proud of the Primitive Man record Suffocating Hallucination too, even if it got overshadowed by the dreamier, more accessible Nothing collab. That one was more classic Full of Hell: two bands, one studio, eight days of writing and recording under the eye of Andy from Weekend Nachos. The resulting sound? An appropriate level of claustrophobic obliteration.
The Shapeshifting Beast Keeps Going Forward
"People are giving us shit because in the Audiotree interview we did last fall, I said we didn’t have anything planned and we’re coming with an album now, but we truly didn’t have anything planned then! We taped this prior to the whole Reaper’s Gong ordeal!" Spencer said.
By the time you read this, Full of Hell will be back on tour (again) with Harm’s Way, Kruelty, cousin band Jarhead Fertilizer (with Dave and Sam pulling double duty every night), and Clique. They’ve got dates stretching into 2026, but they’re also allowing themselves a creative break.
Of course, Spencer doesn’t mean he’ll stop writing. That’s not how his brain works.
"I was reading an interview with Self Defense Family once and they were saying: if you’re a musician, why aren’t you constantly creating? It’s something I take to heart."
Hazard and the rest of Full of Hell will never stop. But they might change shape again. Maybe more Sore Dream material (his noise duo with Dylan). Maybe another unplanned, gut-wrenching masterwork forged out of discarded parts and deep psychic residue.
Whatever it is, I’ll probably misunderstand it at first. I’ll get the narrative all wrong. But that’s part of the fun. That’s the tradeoff. Full of Hell gives you art you can’t quite explain until it’s already crawling under your skin.
And when you finally do get it, they’re already somewhere else.
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One thing I had right about Spencer is that he’s a musical encyclopedia. Here’s a list of bands he mentioned in our conversation that I didn’t previously know. They’re all awesome. Don’t judge if you knew them already.
The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die