Trivia / Job for a Cowboy

• Artist Disillusionment: The gist of why they stopped touring after 2014. Between 2007 and 2010, they were on tour for the bulk of the year (at their peak, they played 250 shows one particular year), and if they weren't touring, they were writing or recording. The money that they were making was decent for a bunch of people in their late teens and early twenties (none of them had day jobs at the time), but the schedule was already too much for Ravi Bhadriraju, who realized early on that that lifestyle wasn't for him. By the time Sun Eater was released roughly seven years later, Jonny simply just didn't want to tour any more; there was some interest in 2015 and they had a few offers, but life ensued and all of it fell through. Furthermore, they also weren't as big as they used to be and knew full well that their late 2000s glory days were something that they were never going to get back, their old peers had either eclipsed them in popularity or had broken up, and while they really stood behind Sun Eater and were proud of what they had put out, the lives that they had started once they realized that they had made as much off of the band as they were going to and could not depend on it as a livelihood now prevented them from even pursuing it as a hobby. Money was also a big issue; while they were still able to operate in the black even up to the end of their active days, they were consistently less profitable overall, could not reliably predict how much they were going to make on a given tour (not too much of an issue when you're all between eighteen and twenty-one and living with your parents, but a HUGE issue when everyone is in their late twenties and early thirties), and were still financially insecure as an entity despite having cut down costs to an acceptable bare minimum (by the end, they were touring in a van, seldom, if ever took out a merch guy or tech, and would sleep in the van or in someone's house as much as possible while on tour), all of which played a huge role in the decision to go quiet.
• Black Sheep Hit: Doom as a whole, but especially "Entombment of a Machine" and "Knee Deep". They hate that album, hate that it still defines them many years after the fact, hate that people still shit on them and call them a deathcore act because of one EP that they released when they were teenagers, and hate that a reasonably large portion of the fanbase only cares about that album and nothing else (aside from maybe Genesis if they're lucky) and continues to loudly (and often extremely rudely) demand that they return to that style. While they finally managed to scrub their setlists of everything from Doom and Genesis in 2016, they had been dropping increasingly less subtle hints that they really wanted to stop playing that material well before that, as Jonny repeatedly said things like "here's "Knee Deep" so you Doom fans can leave" onstage. If anything, they have grown even more transparent about their hatred for Doom in their hiatus, as a fan who made a post requesting that their eventual new release return to that era stylistically was greeted with an eye-roll .gif. Over the years, Jonny has at least grown to understand why people still like that release (and Genesis, which he also isn't a fan of) and why those fans don't like the later material, but he still has no love for it.
• Creator Backlash: They don't like anything that they made prior to Ruination and straight-up hated Doom for a while (though Jonny has softened on it over the years, despite still not being a fan), and they're also unhappy about their name itself and the fact that it's far too recognizable and iconic for them to ever be able to change it. As per Jonny, part of the reason why they chose the name was their assumption that it was just going to be their high school band that never went anywhere, only to have the exact opposite occur.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Sun Eater is unanimously their favorite release as a band, and the first album where they really toiled over every last detail to ensure that it was their best work. Jonny even said in no uncertain terms that that would be the only album they would ever do a full-album tour for.
• Dear Negative Reader: After the hiatus, they became increasingly transparent about their disdain for Doom fans who keep demanding a return to that style, and have openly and publicly mocked at least one fan who has made a post of that sort.
• Development Hell/Extremely Lengthy Creation: The ten-year gap between Sun Eater and Moon Healer can be blamed on various factors. Jonny, by his own admission, was the biggest one; he went back to school, got married, had several kids, and started a non-musical career, and he had neither the time nor the desire to tour for quite a while. Tony, meanwhile, went back to school, got accepted into med school, and moved over to Ireland for his schooling, and therefore was unable to tour himself or devote much time to the band. Al and Nick were still up to tour, but with the other two unable to commit, Al toiled away at his day job (and destroyed their van by accident after he repurposed it as a work vehicle) and brought back Goratory as a local and fest band, while Nick joined Havok right as they got significantly bigger and was tied up for the next four and a half years. The one show they did in 2016 ultimately went nowhere, as they still couldn't tour and could barely make time for anything else, and Jon Rice joined Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats sometime after and became unavailable after that. There was some work that was quietly being done in the shadows (mostly by Al and Nick), and they all stayed in contact, but the new album was mostly just talk. It wasn't until 2019 that any sort of meaningful development occurred, as the Serpent of Gnosis writing and recording sessions got Jonny, Al, and Tony back into a creative headspace, and they found themselves seriously talking about Job for a Cowboy again and decided that, with the band having turned into something of a legend over the years, now was as good a time as any to get the album done and play some shows again. They were ready to hit the studio in May of 2020, but COVID-19 took the wind out of those sails (along with at least one comeback tour that they had planned), and it pushed the album back by another five months, which turned into several more years due to pandemic-era woes plus delays in tracking the album. By the time the last tracks were turned in so the mastering process could begin in mid-2023, Navene Koperweis' session drum tracks had been done for over three years, and according to Nick, there were tracks that had existed in some form since 2015, while the album as a whole had been fully written since 2019.
• Doing It for the Art: The reason why they stopped playing deathcore. As per Jonny, they could have been making boatloads of money for much longer if they had just stuck to the style on Doom, but they never liked deathcore, never wanted to be a deathcore act, and would have been living a lie and making music that they did not enjoy for a paycheck. As a band, they all decided that being happy playing music that they wanted to play and felt in their hearts was more important than churning out material that they hated just so they didn't have to get day jobs.
• The Pete Best: Staples.
• Popularity Polynomial: At their original peak of 2006 to 2009, they were one of the biggest extreme metal acts in the world, and were a consistent headliner or high-level support on tour. From 2010 onward, however, their sales and draw steadily crept downhill (thanks in no small part to the deathcore fandom largely abandoning them as sellouts and the death metal fandom still refusing to give them the time of day because of Doom), and while they accepted it as the price of playing what they wanted to play for a while, they quit touring after 2013 and wound up going on hiatus (despite not originally intending to) at least partly because their popularity had plummeted. While Sun Eater was a critical success, it was not a commercial success, and they genuinely believed that they were old news and they were destined to fade away. Instead, their fanbase quietly grew over the hiatus between tech fans jumping on board with Sun Eater and younger fans who weren't around for their original era discovering them, and by the time 2020 rolled around and Jonny confirmed that a comeback was indeed happening, they were roughly back at the same status they were at their peak.
• Reclusive Artist: Jonny Davy, apparently. To paraphrase various friends of his, getting Jonny out of the house is hard.
• What Could Have Been: Al's old Goratory bandmate Zach Pappas (who is locally renowned for his extreme technical skill as a bassist) was originally asked to join after Brent Riggs left. He was out on parole at the time and absolutely could not tour (and, by his own admission, also turned it and separate calls for Despised Icon and The Black Dahlia Murder down because he was afraid he would do something stupid again and ruin it for himself and everyone else), however, and so Nick got the call instead.
• Write What You Know: As per Jonny Davy, Sun Eater and Moon Healer are conceptually inspired by a good friend of the band's whose belief in Higher Understanding Through Drugs led to increasingly problematic use of psychedelics until they suffered a psychotic break that they never fully recovered from.