Kam Lee is one of the pioneering figures who has been part of American death metal since its earliest days of formation and evolution. His distinctive growling vocal style, Lovecraftian and cosmic horror-themed lyrics, and horror-obsessed concepts have played an undeniably influential role in shaping the death metal genre. Ever since he fully took the reins of Massacre again and assembled a new lineup, he has been highly active with the band. Ahead of their Asia tour and upcoming show in Istanbul, we had the chance to conduct a detailed and insightful interview with Kam.
You were there when the term “death metal” was still being formed in the underground—what did the music mean to you personally in those early Mantas/Death rehearsal room days?
It meant to me then what it still represents and means to me now.
It’s an extension of self ( myself) that I use to metaphorically describe the human condition and perspective through the expression of horror, the macabre, and the grotesque.
It’s an esoteric level of understanding. So with that being said, it’s not for everyone, even those who prefer the style or sound of the music that death metal represents.
Existentially it is a look at humanity from a nihilistic perspective. A more cynical view point in which one can express an outlook of dreadful outcomes based upon the overall personal experience and view points.
It’s a raw unhinged style of music that represents angst and anger as well can expressive the brutal reality that is death and horror.
– Massacre’s demo days from Agressive Tyrant to Second Coming became cult classics, almost a five-year run in the tape trading circuit. What do you remember about the underground’s reaction when those first demos started circulating in the 80s?
There’s always been this “underground” movement that has been the lifeline for the band. It’s where the true fanbase exists and where those who truly appreciate and understand this band still reside. Massacre is forever bound by underground aesthetics, because that is where I stand with my core base values.
Forever Underground!
-How did your upbringing in Florida, with its raw punk and metal hybrid scenes, shape the vocal and lyrical direction you took with Massacre and Death?
It wasn’t the music as much as it was love of horror movies and the supernatural and macabre that shaped my taste for creating music that could showcase these certain things through the music.
An esoteric standpoint that only a few select people could relate to or comprehend.
A way to express lyrically the admiration of the bizarre. A way to express morbid curiosity through an extreme style of music to represent those views.
– You’ve often cited H.P. Lovecraft as a key influence—how do you approach transforming cosmic horror into guttural, brutal music? Is it a lyrical process first, or do the riffs come with their madness?
As I said above, it’s an expression of self.
H.P. Lovecraft just happens to be a writer who writes from a very misanthropic and nihilistic point of view in a lot of his fiction, and that’s what I adhered to when I wanted to write lyrics from my misanthropic standpoint.
It was easy to relate to a lot of his writings because of the way he wrote the characters’ turmoils.
Sometimes he would’ve expressed his characters as being so out of touch and different than their surrounding and the modern society that was part of the horrors he was expressing.
Or at other times, he would make the situations his characters would endure to go through difficult and bizarre. Feelings of being strangers in a strange land, being utterly isolated or alone. Being shunned or looked at as being different. All of things that he wrote a butt, but I could relate to.
Even at the time, many of his characters always had peculiar quirks about them, many very much, probably like himself, had to adjust to attempt to “ fit in” with society.
He was always feeling like an outsider, and many of his stories expressed this viewpoint as well. I feel like an outsider. A good example is growing up here in Florida in the 70s and 80s, and how difficult it was to adjust to the prejudices many of the whites and blacks both would display daily. I had to endure a lot of hatred in my youth just because I didn’t fit in.
Being part Pacific Islander, Asian, and Irish mixed race was also frowned upon by other cultures of my own heritage’s so it was always a situation of felling outcasted and exiled. So my childhood and youth was always coming g from an isolated place. I could relate with many of the stories that Lovecraft would tell that shared these same sentiments.
– You helped invent the growled vocal style—how did you develop that sound before it was even a “thing”? Did you have any particular vision for how death metal vocals should feel rather than sound?
I wanted to do something that was different from what was being done at the time. A lot of the vocalists at the time, like Jeff Becerra of Possessed we’re doing more of a screechy, high-pitched screaming type of vocal, and I wanted to do something that was a bit different in a little Bit more primal. Something I felt would be expressed by primitive man, perhaps my Polynesian upbringing has something to do with that.
But what made me want to growl was trying to express the same intensity and hair-raising feeling of being between extremely aggressive dogs. When I was younger, I was around dogs like Rottweilers and don’t remember how a few of them would get aggressive during feeding time And the sounds they would make when they got into dog fights and the hair raising intensity of hearing that growling going on that that’s what I wanted to bring to vocals I wanted to express something that made your hair stand down and the same way that when you hear an animal growling.
I was a tape trader, so I remember a lot of early demos, and one of the first demos that I got that impressed me was the Hellhammer demo. It wasn’t so much the way that Tom G was singing, but the way that he was using phonetically his vocals with his English pronunciation that made me want to utilise that style, so his vocal patterns and the way that he annunciated his English were something that influenced me. He had a certain way he did little nuances that he put into the music, kind of like his “ ugh!” and his death grunts. I wanted to take that and fo my version of it.
– Looking back, would you say Massacre’s early work was more a product of frustration, rebellion, or horror obsession, or something else entirely?
I would probably say it was a horror obsession with a mixture of teenage angst. At least for me, it was that and just someplace to put all this love of the macabre and bizarre stuff.
– You’ve witnessed every phase of extreme metal—from tape-trading to Spotify. What’s something the digital-era bands are missing that the underground of the ‘80s had in abundance?
I truly can’t speak for others. I don’t know how others feel about it and then you’ll have different generations either bitching and complaining about something or defending something to excuse it. I can only tell you from my point of view what I miss about the tape trading days, and the original underground was it was more of a movement. It was more of an actual movement in the sense that it was more of an actual thing that you were a part of, rather than just being some bystander. People were involved more, and the fans were proud to be a part of it and not so narcissistic and opportunistic the way they are today. Now it’s not about a community in the sense of building rather than it is about selfishness.
It’s not to say that everything and everyone out there is doing it this way, it’s just that there’s a lot more prevalent, those being narcissistic and opportunistic make up a majority of the scene today. It’s very toxic, even more so nowadays than it ever was back in the day, and that’s sad and pathetic. You even have people who weren’t born until the 2000s attempting to educate others on how it was in 1985. How?
I hate to use the term poser, but there isn’t any better way to express how the scene is now because it is so filled with people pretending to be something that they’re not, and that is the exact definition of the word poser.
– With side projects like Bone Gnawer and The Grotesquery, you’ve tapped into everything from grind to horror metal. How do you mentally separate each project’s identity from your work with Massacre?
I use a Rolodex! 😆
No seriously, I’m full of ideas and I think my ideas out way the bands that I have.
I don’t have enough bands to completely fill all the ideas that I have in my head and so I try to put them into a bunch of different bands. However, in the past five years I decided to condense everything and just try to put it into one band and that band being Massacre… and we’ve done so many releases in that time and then people complain about that too – they say I’ve done too much in Massacre now!
I swear some people are really stupid!😅
They piss my off – it’s why I hate most humanity and I’m a true misanthrope!
And so you see – you can’t appease everybody.
So I don’t try – Fuck most people!
It seems there’s always some asshole that wants to complain. They either say you don’t do it enough or they say you do it too much. It’s ridiculous.
I mean, really – where are the rules that say a band can only do one album a year?
So why can’t a band release as many songs as they want?
Why does it all have to be on an album?
Why can’t a band release singles? Where are these rules that people keep following?
I’ve never saw the rulebook and no one ever walked up and said this is the rules of how to do metal.
Why must I adhere to a rule? If anything, metal should be is to go against the rules – it should break the rules! That’s metal as fuck!
– There were moments when you stepped away from Massacre due to conflicts and direction—how do you protect your creative integrity in a scene that can often be chaotic or commercially pressured? You’ve revisited Massacre several times over the decades. What kept pulling you back? Was it unfinished business, legacy, or something more personal?
A bit of everything. Unfinished work was my main reason. I felt that Rick took Massacre in a shitty direction when he tried to make the band into a Pantera/ Type O Negative type band with that shit album “ Promise” I couldn’t go along with that. I had to quit the band while it was still in the studio. I didn’t think that the band Massacre should be called Massacre anymore because it was no longer a death metal band at that point.
People wanna defend it / but it’s it’s fucking awful and I hate it – the people that only want to defend it just doing it to be douche bags and colostomy bags full of shit!💩
I think they are only doing so because they know that it gets under my skin. They’re doing it just because their fans of that Jack ass 🫏 character Rick Rozz, not because they’re fans of Massacre. True fans of Massacre
know that album as a joke and they agree with me when I say that that album is pure shit!
So what was my explanation for doing why I did it??
Well, you must know people make mistakes. I made a mistake in agreeing to go along with his idiotic idea.
A good example is – think about all the people you know that have been married and they get divorced. That’s because they made a huge giant major mistake in their life, by getting married – they regret it – so they divorce.
Now, you don’t hold the divorce over their head.
So same-thing – why hold it over my head for agreeing to go along with an idiotic idea for the bands album, but I realized my mistake and quit the band.
I’ve admitted that I made a mistake when I did that album… I can admit that it was a mistake. I felt like crap while I was doing it. It was like being forced to do something that you absolutely didn’t wanna do.
That’s how terrible it was for me. That’s why I quit the band while it was still in the studio.
You don’t quit something or end something when it’s something you like – you quit something and walk away from something when it’s completely turned around it becomes something that you don’t agree with.
That’s what I did!
During that time, I didn’t agree with the direction the band was going in. I hated everything about it and so I quit.
It wasn’t death metal – it was SHIT!💩
I can’t say it any clearer than that.
So when I finally decided to come back to Massacre, I decided I was gonna do it right first! I was gonna return the band to the true OSDM style of death metal, it was always meant to be! Secondly, I was gonna make sure, regardless of who played in the band, regardless of who the musicians were, that they would not try to change this band‘s direction, and that they had to understand that this was a death metal band. It was an old-school death metal band, and that’s what it needed to be – and not try to be some pseudo goth metal thrash poser band.
I also needed to make sure that the band went back to the true original retro sound that it originated – and so that meant NO DOWN TUNING to B – that meant tuning back to standard D tuning, the way it was on the demos and album…
It needed to go back to it’s original roots and not try to do what the band did without me when they tune to B and try to be just like another Cannibal Corpse or Suffocation or something else that it’s not – the band lost its identity and I had to come back to retrieve and maintain it. Return it to its proper sound.
-How was the songwriting and recording process of your latest full-length album Necrolution, for you?
For NECROLUTION it was a lot more difficult than RESURGENCE. The main reason was because I didn’t want to repeat Resurgence.
I wanted to do something different. I didn’t wanna do another album that sounded like that. I didn’t wanna do another FROM BEYOND either!
See, I wanted to completely go back to the start, to go back to 1985. It was a decision to go as far back in style and be as retro as possible, and that was a lot harder than one might think.
Because it wasn’t just about being retro in the style of the music, but it was meant to be retro in the sound and the way the music was done to keep it as close as possible to the aesthetics of how it was supposed to sound.
Tried to make it like it was from the 1980s and not something that was modernised, trying to sound like it was from the 1980s.
– After Necrolusion full-length in 2024, you released an E.P. and a single in 2025. Could you give insights into these newer releases? Recent Massacre material sounds as ferocious as ever. What does Kam Lee and Massacre still want to prove or explore musically, after four decades in extreme metal? Could you tell us about the insights of your upcoming album?
It’s an easy, simple answer, honestly, and it’s because I love death metal. Especially because I love the old-school retro style of death metal – the stuff I helped create the stuff from 1984 to 1994. That’s the decade that I enjoy the style and sound of that type of death metal, and that’s the stuff that I want to preserve and keep doing because it had a significant way of being played in a significant sense of style and sound. The simple caveman riffs and growling but coherent vocals.
Not the muffled elephant farting vocals that are completely incomprehensible and just one low rumbling noise.
Because there are so many new modern death metal bands that forgo that old school sound or only use bits and pieces of that sound and style, now, too many just don’t play in that way anymore. Traditional way!
Instead you got thousands that sound the same. they go more for the grind gravity blasting pig squealing vocals, technical math metal… stuff.
They’re not groovy anymore!
– Massacre is hitting the road for an Asian tour. What can you tell me about this upcoming tour? Do you have other tour plans?
Well, for starters, on this upcoming tour, we’re going to be going to places I have never been with the band that have never been before, especially Asia. This will be the first time the band is going there, so it’s pretty exciting, yes, and there are plans right after this tour to go right back to Europe again? Europe is our strongest fan base – they always support us there, especially in Germany, and that is always good for us and always makes me feel good to know that we have a fan base. That’s very strong there.
So who knows maybe the fan base in Asia will be so good it will out fan that Europeans and maybe we have a very good strong fan base in Asia so I can return in 2026! I can only hope so.
– Are there any obscure horror stories or mythologies you haven’t yet touched that you’re itching to incorporate into your future lyrics or projects?
I always have a ton of source material that I want to delve into that is all horror related and its roots are in horror.
So yes, I always have plenty of ideas inside my head that I want to eventually get out into the music one way or the other.
-If you could sit down and have a beer with your 1985 self, what warning or piece of advice would you give him before the chaos of underground metal fame hit?
Yes, I would’ve warned my younger self of certain people to not trust to not believe in and to not fall into with.
I think we all have those regrets in our lives, but what can we do about it in reality? See time travel isn’t real. It’s only a fantasy so the best thing is to not to live in the past, not live in a fantasy – but to keep moving forwards and doing the best you can do with what you got!
People who exist and live in the past are trying to relive a past glory that they’ll never receive again – I try not to do that. I try to move forward. That’s why I keep doing new music with Massacre because I don’t wanna rely on living in the past. Why should I keep repeating the past? See, that’s what the losers that left this band of doing – they’re playing in cash cow clone bands because they don’t know how to move forward. They live in the past because that’s all they can do is go backwards. Live off a dead man’s legacy.
They are Legacy Leeches!
I don’t wanna go backwards. I wanna move forward. It’s good to be retro. It’s good to be nostalgic. It’s good to salute your past, but it’s never good to continue to try to exist there.
-Thank you so much for taking the time, for your detailed answers to the questions, and for all the effort you put in. It was a great pleasure for me to sit down and talk with a legendary old-school musician like yourself. Is there anything you’d like to say to the fans and readers before we wrap up?
Thank you for the interview, and thank you for the support.
I will always appreciate the people who support us and believe in the way I will always maintain the true integrity of the band as a brand and representation of the true death metal sound.
