Bonglord was a lore that floated around my group of friends for a while before the project saw the light of day. The doom metal project is the brainchild of my good friend Jack Kim, a South Korean native whose love for metal began with a high school obsession with some classic heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest before transitioning to an undying love for Black Sabbath after reading an interview with the frontman of Canadian metal band Anvil, where he claimed that Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality was the heaviest album he had ever heard.
The majority of Bonglord’s music was written during Kim’s mandatory service in the Korean Army. With no access to recording technology, he had to commit the riffs and structures to memory until he was able to return to school at the University of Michigan and record the tracks in the schools state-of-the-art recording studio with producers/engineers/friends Maya Chun — who plays guitar on the EP and provides an instant reminder as to the power of a guitar solo — and Mac Porter. The result is a self-titled four track EP mastered by Chris Fielding of Conan fame that will honestly blow minds.
Check out the EP in full, along with a quote from Kim about its creation during his time in the Korean Army, below.
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We had computer room but it was only about when I became corporal that I could go to the computer room without fearing too much about what my superiors felt about me going to computer room. In there, I listened to bunch of stuff on YouTube. And one day, it was summer I think, a typhoon came by and after the typhoon passed by, I found an Epiphone Les Paul just lying around in our computer room. Of course, I changed the strings and tuned it to C standard and started to make riffs. After I came back from my vacation, I brought Digitech RP90 from home with headphone and started to make more heavy riffs. I couldn’t download Guitar Pro 5 on any computers due to security reason, so when I discovered a new riff that I really liked, I had to play on and on for a few minutes to really memorize that sh*t in my head… In terms of the name Bonglord, well, we are all college kids who like memes, so we were all inspired by D Bonglord YouTube channel. I hope he’s cool with us using the name.
Download Bonglord for the small price of “pay what you want” here.
