Riffs, rot, and raw honesty — Jack Owen breaks down Next to Die and the evolution of Six Feet Under.
Watch the full interview with Jack Owen at the bottom of this article.
There are moments in heavy music where the air changes — thickens — like something rotten has crawled up from beneath the floorboards and started breathing again. That’s the energy surrounding Jack Owen right now. Not nostalgia. Not legacy. Something uglier. Something alive.
Because Six Feet Under aren’t coasting on bones — they’re digging new graves.
Next to Die isn’t a polite return. It’s a blunt instrument. A rusted shovel to the face. And somewhere in the middle of it all is Owen — calm, calculated, and quietly responsible for steering the chaos back into something that actually bites.
You can feel it immediately when you talk to him. There’s no myth-making, no inflated rock-god theater. Just decades of scar tissue from the trenches of death metal — from the early carnage of Cannibal Corpse to the long, strange evolution of Six Feet Under — distilled into a guy who still gives a damn about the riff hitting harder than your last bad decision.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Because this record isn’t just another round of gore-soaked storytelling. There’s a shift in the bloodstream. Owen isn’t just the riff machine anymore — he’s in the guts of the lyrics too, shaping the tone, pushing the themes, dragging the band’s voice somewhere darker, meaner, maybe even a little more focused than people expect. The kind of shift that doesn’t scream for attention — but you hear it if you’ve been around long enough.
Meanwhile, Chris Barnes remains the unmistakable snarl at the center of it all — a voice that’s survived trends, backlash, memes, and the endless churn of a genre that eats its own. The chemistry between Barnes and Owen isn’t some neatly packaged reunion arc. It’s weirder than that. Older. Less sentimental. Two veterans who’ve seen the machine from the inside and decided, for better or worse, to keep feeding it.
And that’s the real story here.
Not just a new album. Not just another interview.
It’s about longevity in a genre that doesn’t believe in it. About staying dangerous when the world expects you to become a parody of your former self. About finding that thin, razor-wire line between groove and brutality — the place where Six Feet Under have always flirted, sometimes stumbled, and now seem hellbent on reclaiming with intent.
We talk about all of it.
The writing. The shift in lyric duties. The push and pull between old-school death metal violence and that swampy, head-nodding groove that defined early SFU. The misconceptions that cling to Barnes like smoke. The reality of surviving multiple eras of a genre that reinvents itself every five minutes and forgets its heroes just as quickly.
And Owen? He doesn’t dodge. Doesn’t romanticise. Doesn’t pretend this is anything other than what it is — work. Relentless, obsessive, sometimes frustrating work. The kind that either sharpens you or leaves you behind.
There’s also something else buried in there — something subtle but important.
Excitement.
Not the fake, PR-fed kind. The real thing. The kind that leaks out when someone’s still chasing the perfect riff after all these years. The kind that suggests Next to Die isn’t just another entry in a long catalogue — it’s a line in the sand.
So yeah — you could read about it. You could skim the headlines, nod along, pretend you’ve got the full picture.
Or you could drop into the conversation and hear it straight from the source — the riffs, the scars, the stories, and the strange, stubborn fire that keeps this whole thing moving forward.
The grave isn’t quiet yet.
👇 Watch the full interview with Jack Owen below.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
