Talking about Satanic Planet requires a little background: the band features Lucien Greaves (co-founder and spokesperson for The Satanic Temple), Luke Henshaw (Planet B), Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Mr. Bungle, Dead Cross, etc.) and Justin Pearson (Planet B, Dead Cross, etc.). The project, which blends industrial, incantations, film scores and a whole host of other elements, serves notably as an extension of the philosophy of The Satanic Temple, an organisation that is both religious and political and which campaigns in the United States for various causes such as religious pluralism, whilst using its status as a religion to champion issues such as reproductive rights. This struggle is, in fact, at the heart of Sam Alito’s Mom, the lead single from the album Dead Deities, due for release on 30 October via Relapse Records (pre-order), whose title refers to the Supreme Court justice who drafted the 2022 crusade against reproductive rights.
Getting to speak with the project’s two voices, Lucien Greaves and Justin Pearson, is therefore an opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics with their characteristic blend of satirical irony and serious condemnation of absurd and dangerous forms of oppression. We discuss, among other things, the evolution of their music that led to the mutant monster that is Dead Deities, the dual role of singer and religious leader, the freedom artists need, the importance of defying conventional boxes, as well as cannibalism and Sam Alito’s mother’s genitals!
Photo credit: Becky DiGiglio
Your new album, Dead Deities, feels much more organic, powerful and confident than the first ones. After all your experimentations, did you have a better sense of what you were doing as a band?
Lucien: With the original album, we started out with the idea of me doing a spoken word album, just recording some of the things we've used for The Satanic Temple rituals or invocations, things like that. The background music would be done by Luke and Justin's band, Planet B. We were doing all these kinds of concepts with the different tracks. Some of them we thought would be ritual accompaniment, some of them started out as spoken word, and then became more musical as we realized how boring spoken word tracks are... But when we got in to do this second album, we really didn't discuss it so much because there was already a tacit understanding.
I think if you're looking at the order of the tracks as we actually recorded them with the first album, the last one we recorded being Stranger, you'll realize that we were drifting from spoken word with Passage and then into ritual accompaniments like Unbaptism, and then up to Stranger which is just a musical track. We carried that on going into the second album. We just came in as a band and started to work immediately on our music. I feel like that kind of freedom opens a lot of ways. We weren't considering the broader implications or usage of the tracks we were doing, we were just listening for what sounded good to us. We were a lot more comfortable. I was a lot more confident because I went in not even sure what kind of vocals I was going to be doing. And then we did a show at a State Capitol where it wasn't even available to me to use the kind of processing and filter manipulation that I do and just rely entirely on the vocals, and I think it gave me a lot more confidence to work on our second album too. I think that's reflecting into the album itself.
Justin: With the first record, we didn't really know what we were doing stylistically. It's sort of all over the place and I think now it's more like what you would expect a horror film score to be. Luke is a genius at what he does, there's a ton of strings and it adds a more eerie and scarier vibe. Some of the first album is like bubbly synth lines and funky bass lines... We didn't want any of that shit. We just wanted it to sound like you're gonna fucking die!
With some bands, like Laibach for example, the context is so strong that we talk more about it than the music itself. Do you feel like The Satanic Temple is sometimes overshadowing your music? Is it frustrating?
Lucien: I was just just thinking about that before we got on the call! I was messaging with friends that I was doing an interview with a French outlet and they were actually asking: "Do you think they want to talk about the music or about the politics?"... Neither are less important, either are fine to talk about. It's important to have multiple avenues in which we are able to put out our message. I might feel bad if I were only doing one thing or the other. The music is also a different expression of means that speaks to people on an entirely different kind of level. When I go to universities and give a lecture on what we're doing, I'm speaking purely to logic, whereas I think music tries to speak to people on an emotional level, and a level that they can really identify with at their core and carry with them. It's nice to be able to have that overlap between the two.
I mentioned that we played at a State Capitol and that was an instance where we used the band for very clear and direct protest purposes. We played there because a Christian nationalist performer had been allowed to go to a State Capitol, which is a public area and the government is supposed to remain neutral. They played a show, praising Jesus, declaring a Christian nation and things like that... So the government really wasn't at liberty to deny us the opportunity to do the same. We thought they would and we'd have taken it to court! But we ended up playing. To me, that elevates us beyond the level of a standard band, we openly identify as Satanic, and do so in ways that contrast and oppose the intrusion of Christian nationalism in government spaces. I think that puts us in a league of our own, really, even amongst satanic bands.
Justin: I think your question is very wide, very large. Let's take a genre like punk : there's punk-rock and there's punk, you know. I feel like Satanic Planet is inherently, ethically, morally, esthetically punk... But we're not a punk-rock band, obviously! I see a lot of criticism even on a musical level where people criticize the band, saying we're not metal, we're not industrial, we're not musical or whatever. And they're right, we're not. And I think it's cool. Personally, my resume has always been kind of trying to redefine what people think is an acceptable genre. Once someone asked "what kind of music is it?" and I just said "annoying," you know! And it is musically annoying. I think that's a good angle.
Satanic Planet is not supposed to be fun or sweet or cute or musical, necessarily. It's jarring, definitively thought-provoking. But even going back to the concept of punk, I think a lot of it has to do with politics and social politics specifically. We recently had the James Hetfield bullshit where he's denouncing politics in music, which is kind of ironic because early Metallica seemed fairly political, anti-war and stuff. So I think music and politics can go hand in hand... And also, fuck any critic out there that's gonna say, "Don't do this, don't do that"! We can do whatever we want. Even if there isn't an obvious message, most music still is a way to convey, a way to have some sort of connection with a personal or emotional energy with the audience. So we're saying something, we're allowed to say whatever we want and I think that linking it to things like The Satanic Temple or other political organizations which we align with makes a lot of sense. Especially in the world that we are living in right now.
Ok, so let's talk a bit about the music! It's true that even if we see how Satanic Planet can be classified as industrial, for example, it doesn't sound like any band: you're not like Skinny Puppy or Author & Punisher, for example. Did you have any conscious influences while you were doing Dead Deities?
Justin: I think that we have subconscious influences that we don't even realize. The four of us have pretty eclectic tastes in music and so you're gonna get a sort of "to the left" version of whatever our influences are! Citing Author & Punisher and Skinny Puppy, you're spot on, but I think you can also cite all kinds of different styles of music, even non-industrial or non-abrasive music. Protest music or folk music from the 60s that was used for protest are things that were also influential. We're trying to say something that we think is important and punctual and it comes out in a different way. We also have non-musical influences such as horror films. Especially for Luke Henshaw, that dude is super into film scores and very much into horror films and you can hear that. Are we more influenced by Skinny Puppy and Author & Punisher or by Cannibal Holocaust? If you limit your influences to music, it might do a disservice.
Can we say that you're making religious music?
Lucien: Yes. Actually, we had that conversation too when we were talking about the logistics of dropping digital music online. How do we categorize it? Sometimes, we think it's funny to categorize it as religious or gospel, but the label would be like, "Yeah, but that might really prevent your market from finding it, so we might want to call it something else"! That kind of thing is accurate, given how it's situated in the musical world and how the rest of those categories look. But maybe that's not the best place! And again, if you put us in metal, people are mad that we're not following the metal doctrine or whatever, and they might feel the same about industrial... But it's not like we're gonna sit in the studio and ask, "Well, this sounds great but how do we conform it to genre standards?".
Justin: Even in the metadata, when you're uploading your album to a digital distributor, you have a genre and occasionally there's a sub-genre. So let's say that for the sake of stupid genre considerations, industrial and religious would be the two that I would go with. But you can't pick those two! If you pick industrial, the sub-genres are gonna be like metal or something. It's not gonna go from industrial to religious, or vice-versa. If you pick religious, you're gonna get things like "folk," "rock," it's never gonna be brutal noise! The algorithm is bullshit and the metadata is not suitable for things that are a little bit out of the box.
Lucien: Whatever category would be the most accurate, we would own it, because I think we're the only ones!
Does making religious music change the way that you write it?
Lucien: I think that the first album, for me at least, was an exercise of trying to speak for The Satanic Temple, trying to put lyrics that I thought were appropriate as someone recognized as the head of a bigger organization, focusing more at first on our affirmative values and activities. I feel like I had a lot more I was trying to consider than just making the music. I think this second time around, I came in with a different attitude, more about whatever works best for the music. I felt I've kind of abandoned that posture that I'm speaking for a larger community here. I'm speaking more on a personal or artistic level. But when it was all set and done, I didn't feel that any of it was any further removed from how intertwined I am with The Satanic Temple. My mistake was to think that I needed to do that consciously. It's already so much what I do and who I am that there was no chance it was going to be extricable from it in any way.
Justin: I also think that when we started the band, it was odd because there was the entity of The Satanic Temple, which is massive, and then there's this concept of this weird, offshoot band project thing that didn't have a name yet. We gradually went into something... Even adding Dave Lombardo on drums to the first album came after we already started. I hit up Dave because I worked with him in Dead Cross and I thought, "Hey, maybe he'll play on a song". And he played on a song. And he was like, "Let me do another one!," and another one, and next thing you know he's in the band. It wasn't like, "This is what we're doing, we are a band, we are Satanic Planet, we'll write this record." We didn't know what we were doing, we were just making a thing! And then it evolved into what it is now. With that being said, I think that the new record is definitely like we found our home, our sound, our skin or whatever you want to call it.
Do you sometimes have discussions between yourselves about what you should or should not say given the fact that Lucien is basically a religious leader? Do you fear that being too personal could interfere with The Satanic Temple?
Lucien: I think about these kinds of things and I've actually brought them up to Luke and Justin while we were in the studio, asking if they're comfortable with these things... And they're always pushing to go harder! You know, I just feel that way in general. When I go out, no matter how pissed off I am or something like that, I really don't have a right to grandstand in ways I might if I were just a guy not representative of a broader community. But when it came to Satanic Planet, I liberated myself from that a little bit, just thinking that I don't do our philosophy any service if I compromise the art. I mean, some of what we're about is about not holding back, about allowing that kind of artistic expression and allowing people to make statements that are cathartic, even if they might seem that they go too far. There has to be an emotional place for that kind of thing.
We shouldn't always be moralizing the people with heavy-handed preaching like, "This is the way you should act." We should be able to separate our art from our preaching or other narrowly defined messages! Music is a space that should be available for that kind of thing. For example, when we were working on the Burning Church track, I had the idea that "Burn, Church Burn" was a great chorus. But it was a big question for me, I was also thinking, "Well, that's controversial!", right? That could be misinterpreted. That could be interpreted as we're actually calling for people to go and burn down churches. I like that kind of messaging in music, though. Don't go burn down the Church, but also "Burn, Church, Burn" is a powerful refrain! I'm glad that we ultimately decided to go with it. I contextualized it as being a song about somebody burning down our own Church. People can doubt that and sure, it can mean different things to different people, but that's what the power of music is, right? It has some ambiguity. I'm not just doing this spoken word telling people exactly what to think. They can internalize it, make it their own. "Burn, Church, Burn" can mean many different things to many people and all that matters to me is that it’s powerful to them when they listen to it.
You've made a short film for the song Antichrist, with a lady who is "cannibal curious". Are you cannibal curious? (editor's note: you can watch this delightful film at the end of this interview)
Lucien: I'll wait 'til they can lab grow the human meat to give it a try so we know it doesn't contain any kuru or things like that! I'll see how favorably it does compared to pork, because that's what I've heard!
Justin: I'm not, I'm plant-based so I'm good without eating any kind of meat.
Lucien: Even for a special occasion? Well, here is the thing: there're two types of cannibals. There’re the cannibals who would eat their enemies and there’re cannibals who would eat their ancestors or comrades out of respect. If you had to choose Justin, which one is it gonna be? I'm doing the interview now!
Justin: I think if I had to eat a human, it would have to be if we wrecked our plane on a mountain and I'm starving and I'm gonna die if I don't eat this dead body. Otherwise, I'm good, I'll figure it out. I'd just grab some berries and call it a day!
Even if we also have a rise of religious fundamentalism in Europe, it's not the same as in the US. A lot of bands use satanic imagery and it has become mainstream. Do you feel that satanism in music actually still frightens people?
Lucien: You know, we do! A friend of mine messaged me after the Sam Alito's Mom video came out and he said, "Congratulations, this kind of outrage over a music video hasn't happened since the 1900s"! I think he was right. I didn't necessarily anticipate it because you're right, there's a lot of satanic bands and nobody cares. But then we did the Sam Alito's Mom video and it's more focused on an issue, it's focused on our fight for reproductive rights, where we are actually making gains and going into litigation in trying to advance our exemptions and religious privileges so that we can defend reproductive rights for our membership to be able to get them abortions if they need, regardless of what the rest of the federal law says. I think that scares people.
The fact that we are actually attached to tangible actions rather than just ranting about how we've been wronged, I think is really terrifying for some people. You can see that reaction with Sam Alito's Mom: oddly enough, no real press picked up on the controversy to talk about how insane that was but there was a ton of Christian and pro-life outlets writing articles about Sam Alito's Mom and this right-wing site, The Post Millenial, even wrote a piece and they oddly quoted the end of the song: "A cruel Christian stunt, a cultural war bomb, dropped from the cunt of Sam Alito's mom". They've put it right into the article... I don't know who they thought they were protecting from the video! And after you read their description, you might find the video a bit tame because they act like it's this grotesque bloody horrific affair... And as far as I know, there still are petitions to have Sam Alito's Mom removed from YouTube. I'm quite proud of the reaction we provoked because that's not easy for bands to do anymore!
Justin: I'm a huge fan of negative press! I think we achieved quite a lot with that video! It's a win for us, for sure.
Yeah, it's cool, fur sure, but also scary to see so many people still being pissed off by topics like reproductive rights.
Justin: Yeah. Well, that scary thing is weird because we just released another video for the track Antichrist and everyone was talking shit, saying how it's not scary or whatever... But it's a comedy! It is really a comedy. People may have missed the point. I don't know, human brains are thrashed from social media right now, they just don't have any processing anymore, and they just shit the bed when they comment... You mentioned earlier the elder woman in the video who is cannibal curious and she's like, "Let's see the cop," to eat him because there's no more priests to eat. Those are things that should be upsetting to the same people that are upset about the Sam Alito's Mom video, but that one kind of missed the point, maybe because it's done in a slapstick cheek-in-tongue way.
Lucien: Antichrist has a real disadvantage because it's age restricted on YouTube. Anytime I check YouTube, Sam Alito's Mom and Church Burning show up but Antichrist is nowhere to be found. YouTube is apparently never going to recommend an age restricted video! And then also when you have a fifteen-minute video for a four-minute song... I mean, it's a great film but I feel like it needs to get out to its market whereas Sam Alito's Mom found the people who would be pissed off. I guess we'll have to see when the album actually gets released, starts getting reviewed. Some of that background will start coming out again and getting its exposure.
You were saying that Dead Deities is a scary, jarring album. It's also cathartic... But would you be mad at me if I also found it really funny sometimes? A song like Satan Spawn could be from some weird cartoon!
Lucien: I'm actually happy that people see that! Sometimes when we work on stuff I feel like this is very dark and unforgiving almost to the point that if you've smoked enough weed, you might think, "That's too much"! But then we get silly and slappy too and we do some tracks that kind of reflect that to a different degree. That's a good thing to have that kind of rage and also that kind of relief.
Justin: If you take yourself too seriously, you're gonna fuck up, you know. You should be able to find not only humor in yourself but humor in the world that helps you digest the serious things. Satan Spawn was meant to be this silly "fuck you" kind of song. It is supposed to be fun. It's like a surf techno song! It's weird and yeah, goofy.
Lucien : Lyrically, it is mocking our opposition, to a certain degree. At least, the real superstitious hardcore. Satan Spawn is a direct continuation of the track Satanic Planet on the first album, it's like its mirror image. Both those tracks take satanic panic tropes and incorporate those into the lyrics. There's not really a way to do that without being obviously sarcastic and silly! It still has an important message, but having an important message should never prevent anybody from having a sense of humor.
Justin: It's a good question. Even in Sam Alito's Mom, with this last line about the cultural warbomb dropped from the cunt of Sam Alito's mom... I wasn't sure if I wanted to say the word "cunt". But I think it's fucking hilarious, that line is hilarious! I actually totally want to sing that, that's funny as hell! Not that I think reproductive rights being stripped away from humanity in 2026 is not a fucking serious huge issue but I also want to be able to laugh and talk about Sam Alito's mom's cunt. It's fucking hilarious. Look at the world we're in. It makes total sense to have a song like that. Even in the video, at the end, Andy Wallace, who did the editing, added the cart with the lyrics and then zoomed in on Sam Alito's face... It's fucking funny to me!
Lucien: It really punctuates the end of the song. It shows a kind of disinhibition and underscores the unrestrained outrage and humor. However you take it, something that shocking can go either way.
You're using a lot of dark humor with The Satanic Temple and Satanic Planet... What is the most frustrating: when people take your jokes seriously, or when they laugh about serious issues you're talking about?
Lucien: They're both bad. I like people to enjoy the humor and I like people to have fun with what they're doing. Sometimes, we get people coming in and they feel like we need to more seriously present ourselves and then pretty soon everything becomes academic and administrative and nobody's having fun. What good is that? It doesn't make us any more effective either. I think it's better to be able to have fun with the serious things that you're doing. What we're plagued for the most part is doing things, making it fun, making it something people want to engage in, and then other people discredit our deeper message in some way. Like, "Look at them, they're clearly just having fun, they're trolling". We are not trolling. We're just trying to get a reaction out of our opposition and don't really care what the outcome is. I feel like at this point, thirteen years into The Satanic Temple and six years into Satanic Planet, and all the kind of grief we've gone through, all the lengths we've gone to actually address some of the issues we're involved in, it makes those kind of arguments that we're just a group of pranksters without a deeper purpose a little outdated.
What if we woke up tomorrow on a satanic planet. Would you be happy or the cheeky side of you would be a bit annoyed?
Lucien: I think everybody would be disappointed by a satanic planet. Because I think everybody's disappointed with diversity and democratic pluralism. They want to live in a world where everybody sees the world the same way they do, everybody behaves the same, and our philosophy is different. We're not going around telling people they need to be satanists. Satanism might not be for you! You might not even like us but we respect your rights! All we need to do is respect those differences and give people the space to exercise them. I think that's what a satanic planet is. It's a place where people can have their different faiths and things like that. We don't necessarily care if somebody believes in God or in the second coming of Jesus. What we have a problem with is when they try to impose those beliefs on everybody else, impose their morality on everybody else based on those beliefs, and try to shape our social environment to accommodate their specific view points. I think that every time you have diversity and competing points of view, there's going to be disappointment, there's going to be tension. The satanic planet is a world where people learn to live with that and that's why I say it's disappointing to everybody... But I do think that's optimal!
Justin: Obviously, that's never gonna happen but I think that the idea of a satanic planet is the opposite of what we're dealing with right now in America, which is a Christian nationalist planet. We're not saying, "We want this other thing"; we're just here to fuck with those people and maybe strip them of their power and let there be some sort of equality and have some civil discourse, some actual real progression in the name of humanity, not in the name of capitalism, or fucking oppression, or whatever.
Lucien: We're one fucking family.
In France, it currently really feels like we are sliding towards fascism, and it's really scary. You have some experience of that, with Donald Trump and people like that. Do you have some survival tips to deal with those dark times coming?
Lucien: Being an organizer for a broader movement and its spokesperson, I'm also confined to a certain degree, since we're recognized as a non-theist church in the United States, which prevents me from getting too deep into certain politics, like endorsing certain candidates. I've often had to walk a line and I've often been very critical of activist tactics. To that end, I would say stay on focus, have a clear message when you're going out protesting, and have clear solutions in mind. When you generate a crowd to go out and take the streets, don't just leave it at that. Put petitions with specific demands out. Let people know what the solutions are, educate people on what the problem is and how this would help. Try to put pressure on specific actions. I think that's something that gets lost far too often in far too many protests and activist movements, when there's very proximate needs to be met in the moment and start getting ignored because so many conflicting interests are trying to take it over. You really need to focus on what you're doing and make specific demands. That would be my advice.
Justin: Either way, congratulations on all your protests, it's really empowering. It's exciting to see that. In America, no one gives a fuck about anything, so that's cool. People are fucking lazy here.
Is there any chance to see you in Europe some day?
Lucien: I think so, because I honestly feel we've been getting a lot of requests from Europe. Maybe Dead Deities will do better in Europe than in the US...
Justin: If we can get a decent guarantee.. It's so expensive to get over there and that's part of the problem, especially now with the war in Iran.
Lucien: There's a fun fact: in The Satanic Temple, we've noticed in the past six months that we're getting a huge amount of outreach from Germany and France. People interested in TST, documentary groups who are interested and want to do documentaries about us, or just come and film interviews and things like that. I feel like it's because of the rise of the AFD in Germany and the potential direction of the next election going poorly in France. The people are feeling that and are scared... It's similar to 2016 when people did not expect Trump to win the election but he did and immediately we saw a massive influx towards the Satanic Temple. A ton of outreach, a ton of membership signups, the website just flooded, and I feel like Europe is going through that kind of things right now. They're trying to consider where the opposition is and how to sign up.
Is there any chance to see a TST congregation in France some day?
Lucien: I think there's active discussions about that right now. We've really raised the bar in starting congregations. We've set up a massive infrastructure in TST when it comes to training and guidance and ministerial ordination and things like that. It's part of what makes us an unstoppable force in the United States because religious protections are really quite intense over here. Religions can get exemptions from quite a lot, they get a good deal of privileges. There's been many times where we've got into court and our opposition has argued that our case is moot because we aren't a real religion. That's come out in our favor like four times now in federal court, making it really difficult to argue against our religious status again. I feel like that makes us kind of a horrifying presence over here.
Would the security issues be a problem if it comes to touring in Europe?
Lucien: I get so many death threats that I don't even know what to think of them. It's such a constant thing... Sometimes I think I could have done something else with my life rather than kind of live in fugitive style and things like that. It's almost comforting to work on something else, to work on Satanic Planet and still getting death threats! It sounds odd to say but that's comforting because it makes me think that maybe I didn't really fuck up my life as bad as I think... Maybe there's nothing I could do of significance at this moment and time that wouldn't have people wanting to kill me! Everybody is so extreme about anything, they either love it or hate it and you see that in the comments to our stuff. People or either "this is the best" or "this is the worst"... They either want to fuck you or they want to kill you! That's about it, there's not much space in between anymore. I mean, in reality there is a vast space in between but those people aren't as compelled to leave comments!
Our security is a consideration anywhere... I mean, that's certainly a consideration in the US! I'm worried more about our status in the United States than I'm worried about our security in Europe, for sure! I don't think we have to consider this issue any more in Europe than here. I'm just thinking that I couldn't bring my dog... I have a trained protection dog and she comes with me everywhere. I got her on the advice of law enforcement actually, after somebody tried to bomb our place... To be honest, it's more that I'll miss the dog if we're in Europe for a couple weeks than anything else, she's more of an emotional support dog now than a protection dog! But knowing she could take somebody's arm off is good for your emotional state too if you're worried about the crowd around you!
It makes more props for your next video!
