At Hellsinki Metal Festival, we sat down with Germain Bodeus (bass) and Griska Lutgen (pitched vocals) of Brutal Sphincter — a band that proves grindcore can be chaotic, clever, political, joyful, and completely unhinged all at once. Between jokes about song titles, deep dives into conspiracy theories, and the art of vibing instead of “acting angry,” the duo gave us a brutally honest look at how their sound is evolving and why chaos on stage is absolutely essential. Buckle up — this one’s as wild as their live show.

Your music and stage presence are full of absurd, over-the-top humour. Where does that creative spark come from? How do you balance the provocative and comedic elements with the deeper messages behind some of your songs?

Germain Bodeus: Wow, you took your information before the interview.

Griska Lutgen: How we do it, actually, is pretty difficult to say. We try, we have a lot of ideas, but then in the end, we discuss what is ok, what is not ok. And it’s an hour-long discussion. 

Germain Bodeus: Actually, yeah, it’s because we are driving and we are making like 10 stupid hours to play half an hour. Musician’s life. And we are next to each other in the fucking car, so we have to speak to each other. And it often goes in absurd thematic or political thematics, and we start to joke about it. And I think that what is Brutal Sphincter in the lyrics, it also reflects who we are in some way. So, it’s through discussions and sometimes changing our minds, and we try to make a concept out of it, more or less.

Griska Lutgen: And we are looking for certain members, what topics are important to them. And actually, the humorous aspect behind it is a bit like a betrayal horse. Because a lot of subjects we have nowadays, they are sick of it, they are fed up, they hear it in the news the whole time.

But when you pack it in a stupid joke, you have a way to give it to people and to talk about that subject, which is more and more topical in my opinion nowadays.

Actually, it’s usually been stupid ideas in the cars, but for myself, I am often surprised that it works that good, that we can bring those topics close to people that would otherwise…

Germain Bodeus: But I think that we have some triggering topics, and I think that’s also why we start to speak about them, is that we wanted to make a go-grind draw triggering. You know, before, even in the old school death metal, Cannibal Corpse, people were triggered by the pictures and whatever, the gore, it was like, wow, at that era. And now I think that the gore is not shocking everybody, it’s not making anything good. We are just used to it. “Ah, okay, it’s a new T-shirt with someone dismembered.”

Griska Lutgen: Now we would like (to talk about) the sexist poop topics. We were also fed up with that, and then we came up with the idea. Well, it seems that when you openly talk about your opinion and about saving human rights, people are triggered. Yeah, maybe that could be interesting, where we follow the approach of gore-grind.

Have you ever come up with a song title or idea that even you thought it was crossing the line?

Germain Bodeus: Yeah, basically the previous album, Analhu Akbar, started as a joke in France with another singer. I said “Analou Akbar” — he was big as fuck — and we thought it was really funny. We kept talking and realized it might be a catchy idea people would remember, but it was also pretty provocative. At the time there were a lot of terror attacks in Belgium and Central Europe, so it was provocative. In the end, though, we never had any problems with it.

Griska Lutgen: We had to convince him for a few months that we could use it, at least as a song title, because he was really paranoid — like, “No, I can’t go that far…” But I think your question was whether we ever had something where even we said, “No, we can’t take this.” And it really depends.

Germain Bodeus: Let’s say we’re still trying to approach every topic. For example, on the new album there’s one song about Jews, and antisemitism is definitely not an easy subject to handle. And now I’ve completely forgotten what I was trying to say.

Griska Lutgen: Yeah, but the thing is — maybe I can say this — for this album we also tried to find a song that was as shocking as “Analhu Akbar“. And then we noticed that if we stick to the idea of criticizing religion, we ended up with the song title “The Jews Did It,” but written like “orange juice.” We discussed it a lot, wondering whether people might misunderstand it as antisemitic. But then we focused heavily on the lyrics, because they actually talk a lot about conspiracy theories.

And in the middle of almost every conspiracy theory, there’s some form of antisemitism — like when people talk about the New World Order or whatever, and somehow it always becomes “the Jews’ fault” that your life is shitty.

So we picked up that idea. We told ourselves, “Okay, maybe we can get there again with a triggering song title.” People might look at something like “Make Going War Great Again” and assume we’re from the far-right spectrum and think, “Oh, maybe they’re one of us.” But then when we play live, people see that this is not the case — we’re actually pretty woke. And that’s what we try to do with the lyrics: we trigger people, that’s what counts. And in the lyrics, we try to differentiate, because in the end — and even now with the situation in Israel, it’s the best example — not every Israeli, not every Jew supports what’s happening. Not everyone supports the genocide in Gaza or Netanyahu. There’s a big group in Israel protesting against it. That’s what we wanted to focus on: taking the jokes, taking the conspiracy-theory examples, making fun of them, ridiculing them — but also showing that, like with any group (Muslims, Jews, whoever), we often create a simplified image. And in the end, when we put everyone into one box, we risk harming them, because it’s never “all of them.” That’s just the sticker people slap on.

Your new album blends goregrind with death metal, hardcore, and groove – what was the main vision behind this mix? And Which song from the album best represents the current sound of the band, and why?

Germain Bodeus: The thing is, the lineup changed between Analhu Akbar and Sphinct-Earth Society. Before, I was the only writer, and then we added a new drummer and a new guitarist — who is still in the band — and they brought their own inspirations. Sometimes it leaned more toward modern metal; for example, the introduction of the album sounds a bit like Meshuggah or something in that direction, and there are also some nu-metal influences.
We just make what we like, and we wanted to push the boundaries of the goregrind genre a bit — to make it, I don’t know, maybe a bit more accessible. And I think it actually worked, because quite a few people came to me saying they got into goregrind because of Sphinct-Earth Society. So that’s cool. It seems to work.

Compared to your early days, how has your playing, songwriting, or production approach evolved? Are there any techniques or equipment changes that have made a big difference in your live sound or studio recordings?

Griska Lutgen: Well, for the lyrics, we’re trying more and more to do everything in a professional way, and we’ve done it step by step. Back in the day, we were just sitting on a couch writing lyrics, trying to figure out what we were doing. But for the last album we actually had meetings.
All the singers, Jim and I, live about two hours apart, so we were hanging out on Discord most of the time. We prepared ideas beforehand, but in the end the songs were already written instrumentally, and we tried to put the lyrics on top of that.

Sometimes, like with “Unvaxxed Lives Matter”, we even did research together — we had watch parties for documentaries, shared texts with each other, talked about everything afterwards, and then tried to create a really professional structure.

I think we can still improve a lot, but compared to the last album there’s way more structure, at least for the lyrics.

Germain Bodeus: I think it has evolved a lot, and in that regard we really have to thank our guitarist Eric. He’s a professional musician, so he knows a lot of the technical side of things. He’s a really good guitarist, and he had way more knowledge than we did about recording, the whole process, and all of that. That’s what helped us become much more professional on that level.
And yeah, even with the production choices and everything — another thing that improved the production quality is simply that the band has gotten more popular. When you have more income, you can pay for better production. The income meaning money that we don’t touch, obviously.

Griska Lutgen: Ah, musicians do not have income.

Germain Bodeus: Yeah, but I mean, capital in the society.

Your live shows are high-energy and physically intense – how do you prepare physically for that level of performance? Do you follow any particular routines, fitness habits, or diet on tour to keep your stamina up?

Germain Bodeus: No, I don’t do anything special for that, and honestly most musicians have pretty low stamina simply because we don’t get enough sleep. I think half the people here slept five hours last night and five hours the night before, so… yeah. For me, the energy just comes from the fact that I’m doing a show and vibing with the crowd. The more the people vibe, the more I vibe. And we also want the show to be high-energy because that’s what we’d like to see from a band ourselves — that they’re really invested in what they’re doing on stage, not just going through the motions.

Griska Lutgen: And we enjoy it. I think the key to getting a crowd that moves and vibes with you is to be attentive — to play music you actually like and enjoy. Every show we play, even when we’re really tired, we still enjoy it. It’s what we want to do, we love doing it, and there’s no “trained” or scripted show. Sometimes it even gets a bit chaotic, because in the middle of enjoying ourselves, we kind of forget ourselves. But that’s also the grindcore approach.

Germain Bodeus: I mean, grindcore should be chaotic, and we wanted to push that into our music as well — to keep those grindcore roots a bit angry. And some parts are even happy, because we don’t look super angry on stage; we’re just vibing.