Why They Need To Keep Pushing Their Limits

Venturing into a new market and playing such extreme music as Black Cobra can be problematic. Especially when there are regional dates littered throughout the itinerary, such as when The Music first caught the US pair a half-decade ago, punishing the eardrums of a modest gathering during a non-capital city show on their maiden Australian trek. 

It’s a scenario tub-thumper Rafa Martinez is accustomed to. “That’s just part of the game. It doesn’t matter how big of a band you are, there’s always gonna be a night that you play where Motörhead’s going to be playing up the street,” he laughs. “We love playing and you’ve got to do the songs justice, no matter how many people are there. Obviously when there’s the energy of the crowd and they’re going ape, it’s a little different because they have that enthusiasm, they want an encore and are more involved. Then sometimes if there’s not that many people there you try a new song, or try something different.”

It’s all inherent in establishing a following, and San Francisco’s doom-laden duo will seek to capitalise on their third jaunt Down Under, accompanied this time by fellow sludgy two-piece, Jucifer, from Georgia, on their inaugural Australian tour.

Black Cobra will be roadtesting a song from their newly completed, forthcoming full-length, recorded with Jonathan Nuñez of Torche. “Every album we learn something new as far as what we can do, technically. I usually try to write… I don’t limit myself by what I can currently play, so I sometimes write technical things that are challenging or that I can’t play right away, so it forces me to apply myself to the instrument, to take a couple of months to learn new patterns and new beats. After every album tour cycle, after playing the songs a couple of hundred times, I better myself that way.

“I couldn’t play on the first album the things that I’m playing right now. I just physically wouldn’t be able to do it… If we start playing things that sound maybe too similar, then we’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve done that before.’ You’ve gotta keep your identity too. Every band has an identity, and you definitely want to keep that. The guitars, it’s the same tuning, and we use a lot of the same pedals and amps. I’ve added one cymbal in nine years, so it’s not very different from what we started with,” he laughs.

"The sound is always like that, but you got to keep things interesting and we’re just that kind of band that does stuff like that... We’re a proto-metal band… I’m definitely a purist as far as, like, thrash-metal and ‘80s bands like Exodus, Testament and stuff like that, but there’s new stuff like High on Fire, Mastodon and Gojira that are pushing metal in new directions.”