Throughtout their career, Wolves In The Throne Room have harnessed a spiritual element capable of transcending musical boundaries, drawing many listeners from across the musical spectrum, some not remotely interested in black metal. After their show in Birmingham, England, Steve Jones decided to really dig deep into the ethos and mentality of the band.

Here’s a revelation for you, and one that might threaten to undermine everything you once believed. Despite all the outward signs, despite the near-unreadable logo, despite the ethereal riffing that lacerates like barbed wire rain, despite the sheer otherworldly transcendence they conjure up with mere instruments, Wolves In The Throne Room are not a black metal band. Yes, right here, after a triumphant show in Birmingham where they transformed the upstairs room of a pub into an ethereal sweatbox, drummer Aaron Weaver is stating how WITTR are not a black metal band. “I still think we’re a punk band, when you come down to it, rather than a metal band. Because we’re really committed to the DIY ethic, we’re really committed to the underground.” Which is a statement that makes perfect sense, given punk’s proud history of independence, politically, socially and spiritually; attributes that WITTR have in spades. As Aaron states: “there’s some confusion when I say we come from a punk background in Europe, because it means something very different sometimes. When you think of punk culture in Europe, you think of Mohawks, that sort of thing”. This commitment, this spirit of independence, and control over their own destiny (to the extent that flash photography is forbidden at their gigs, so as to maintain the atmosphere), is something that comes across the more you talk to Aaron – he outlines a long term plan for the band to buy their own truck and play gigs in warehouses and barns – and also in his home life, where he lives simply on a farm, tending the land, growing his own crops, and generally living a simpler lifestyle, shorn of much modernity as he can. “I think that modern people and modern civilisation has just discounted all wisdom of previous generations,” he says, “And me, a lot of my friends, and a lot of my peers are very interested in going back to those traditions and finding things that are relevant to us. In no way are we talking about going back to the Stone Age.”

Aaron’s previous band, with bandmate and brother Nathan, laid the foundations: “a hardcore punk kind of band, but it had some of the elements you see in Wolves In The Throne Room; it had an occult element and the psychedelic drone element as well.” – attributes that certainly come to the fore in WITTR’s sonic assault on the senses. As for the band’s affiliation to black metal, Aaron is unequivocal. “Black metal’s hugely important to us. That’s the music that I think that’s the most relevant to me, and to a lot of people, in our modern condition. I think black metal is a crucially important artistic form that puts voice to emotions and feelings and sensations that need to be expressed”, citing Fauna and Negură Bunget as bands he admires, and pushing black metal from “cartoon Satanism sort of thing”, and if there’s anything that sets apart this band apart, it’s their lyrical content. ‘Two Hunters’ tells an almost gothic tale of the titular two huntsmen clashing in epic battle, one an interloper in the other’s forest home. Such a concept is a heady enough tale in the right hands, filtered though the anarcho-spiritualist lens of WITTR, it becomes something more allegorical, and Aaron’s answer reveals, something that can only be explained in a pure fashion through the musical stylings him and his bandmates have chosen: “[It’s about] wildness rising up inside yourself. That’s what black metal is: a human attempt to reawaken wildness, and reawaken a feral spirit. Because we’ve become very civilisised, and in becoming civilised we’ve lost something very important, something’s that very crucial to being fully human.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that as talk pertains to spiritual matters, of gods and spirits, that shows the thought processes that drive WITTR are the most distinguishing feature of band in a genre where the first things that spring to mind are the “cartoon Satanism” (“a part of it that’s never been interesting or important to me”, according to Aaron). Instead, he describes various gods – both Norse and Hindi – as “expressing something that is human. I think they’re a poetic allegory, it helps human being understand themselves”, with Christianity being most objectionable on environmental grounds: “According to the Bible, so a lot of Christians tell me, God gave dominion over all the animals and the land to do with what we wish, and so that justifies the cutting down of the forests or the polluting of the oceans. I don’t make it my objective to be anti-Christian like a lot of black metal people. The Sermon on the Mount is a fine message, I have no problem with that.”

As the interview draws to a close, you don’t doubt this is one band that won’t sell out their principles in order to become the next metal superstars. By the time you read this, Aaron will be back on his farm, on the outskirts of Olympia, Washington, and writing the follow up to last year’s ‘Black Crusade’ - a process that is intimately tied up to the landscape: “We’re really trying to capture the essence of the place we live in the music, and we succeed in that. To me, it sounds like our home, it sounds like cedar trees and fir trees, and the rain and the gray skies and the mountains”. And ironically enough for a band who profess to not be a black metal band, they are perhaps the ones that most encapsulate the initial idiom: a purity of independence from the modern world.