Hinayana Speaks for the First Time after "Order Divine" Release

Hinayana, a name conquered the ears of a big number of Middle Eastern fans after “Order Divine” release. After many calls from my friends for getting closer to Hinayana band, I decided to interview those impressive guys to know more about their career, latest album, upcoming concerts and future plans.

Interviewed by: Rana Atef

(Originally published on 18/7/2018 at 2:58 pm) 

Firstly, thank you guys for giving me this honorable chance, so, many fans think that Melodic Death Doom Metal as musical genre is dedicated to Northern Europe bands, and the US is known with different musical genres, why did you choose to play this genre, and what are your main influences?

Thank you for taking the time to interview us!

I (Casey) originally chose to form a band of this genre because many years ago I absolutely fell in love with the raw power and deep, gloomy emotion of bands such as Katatonia, Black Sun Aeon (Tuomas Saukkonen), and Swallow The Sun among others, and just knew this was the kind of music I wanted to write, but in my own way, with my own stories and concepts, expressing that same deep emotion which originally captured my interest.

Hinayana is so impressive name, why did you choose this name, and Do you tackle certain themes through your music?

The word “Hinayana” is a Sanskrit word, meaning the “smaller vehicle” or “lesser path” to enlightenment. In the context of the band name, it was chosen to represent the inner struggle and suffering one must conquer to find the truth in every aspect of life, nature, the esoteric, and the universe – seeing both the beautiful and not-so-beautiful sides of it all.

As for themes, we tackle themes of nature, the spiritual, grim self-realization, and truth.

Let’s move to your “Order Divine”, Tell us more details about this release?

“Order Divine” is the band’s debut full-length album, and is a joint effort between founding member, Casey Hurd, and drummer, Daniel Vieira. 

The album is comprised of 7 diverse tracks, representing dark, gloomy moods in some songs, and hopeful, more uplifting moods in others. The album also has varying tempos throughout, which we hope creates a vast landscape with ups and downs and twists and turns for the listener. 

For us, it was a very fun and satisfying album to work on. The album is brief, but we hope it is just a taste of what will come in our band’s future works.

I saw the poster of your concert headlined Carach Angern, and Wolfheart, that’s really wonderful, How was you contacted, and what are your main concerns?

Thank you! We’re very excited to be playing alongside such great bands!

We were contacted by the amazing local Austin, Texas promoter, Anthony Stevenson, of Come and Take It Live/Come and Take It Productions to play the show.

We actually have no concerns about the show, we’re incredibly happy and proud to be on a bill with such fantastic bands who we enjoy so much, its actually very refreshing to be playing a show with some bands who fit so well with us genre-wise, and we hope with time we will be playing more and more of these types of shows with similar bands.

We have impression that the US Metal Scene conditions are somehow better than many scenes in Europe, Africa, Asia, or Latin America, Do you face any kinds of difficulties in your Metal career?

We feel that while there is a lot of amazing metal which comes from the US, the overall scene isn’t exactly tailored to our specific kind of metal. 

Sometimes getting onto a bill with bands who stylistically compliment us can be difficult. I think as time goes on we will find that more and more of our fans will be from different parts of the world, and we will end up touring in different parts of the world as well as the US. We also hope to be able to tour with more of the bands within our genre coming to the US.

As we are Middle Eastern Metal platform, What is you impression about the scene in the Middle East, and Africa, specially you have many fans in the region?

Firstly we'd like to say that we are not only surprised, but super grateful to find out that we have fans in that part of the world.  Any opportunity for our music to spread to fans outside of our backyard is always very humbling for us as a band to see that people care that much about what we do.

As far as music goes in the Middle East (and we want to preface this by saying we are not a political band by any means), it is really awesome to see women starting to gain a foothold in extreme music in parts of the world where women are barely allowed to have a face.  

Obviously this is a really charged topic, but what is starting to happen with women having a voice in metal is indicative of changing times and they have clearly more than earned their spot at the table.  It's about time.

We don't know a lot of middle eastern bands (educate us! Show us your favorites!), but a few that come to mind are Nervecell (Dubai), Crow Black Sky (South Africa), and Orphaned Land.  

It is sometimes tough to find metal from those areas, so we would say to those bands keep growing your scenes because you have a spot in metal too.

So, What are your future plans?

We plan to continue to write and develop our style with the rest of the band members, working to refine and improve on the band’s sound and live performance, and while not our ultimate goal, make an attempt to innovate within our genre.

We also plan on touring more and wish to play in many different parts of the world, Europe being our first target, but upon hearing we have some fans in the middle east, surely we will make our way there as well!

We are hoping to release an EP in the near future, so be on the lookout for something fresh from us within the next year or so!