Manufacturing success

The last time I spoke to Green Death, almost exactly two years ago, they were a band freshly formed and looking forward to the release of its first EP. The ensuing 25 months have been good ones for the band.

The Green Death “Manufacturing Evil” album release party is at Wooly’s on Friday, May 29, at 6 p.m. Tickets are $7 in
advance, $10 day of show.

Green Death released its EP “The Deathening” in January of 2014, and response was overwhelmingly positive. The band parlayed that success into a spot on the 2014 Lazerfest roster (though their set would be washed out by rain), all the while putting the finishing touches on their next release, “Manufacturing Evil.”

“I didn’t expect people to like [‘Manufacturing Evil’] as much as they liked ‘The Deathening,’ ” admitted Green Death frontman Sol Bales. “At the time, ‘The Deathening’ felt like the top that we could do.”

If “The Deathening” served to raise the bar for what Green Death was capable of, “Manufacturing Evil” has raised the bar for metal music in Des Moines. Released online at the beginning of May, “Manufacturing Evil” shot into the upper echelons of the iTunes and Amazon sales charts, cracking the top 20 on the metal charts for both services.

“The Deathening” was a fun, well-crafted experience, but “Manufacturing Evil” tops it in almost every sense. That is in large part due to the confidence and cohesiveness within the band itself.

“Like most bands, you try and do the best you can at any given moment,” said guitarist Erich Tran. “So I think it’s always hard to look at [a finished album] and think, ‘We can’t top that.’ But then you start working, and as the songs get closer to being finished, you start to think, ‘Yeah, we can.’ ”

“This album, at least in our opinion, kills ‘The Deathening,’ ” Bales agreed. “I felt like, since ‘The Deathening’ was done kind of in pieces, it was difficult to pull it all together. It wound up fine, but for a while I wasn’t sure it was going to sound cohesive enough. But this time we were able to do it all together. We already had the title decided pretty early on, so once that was out of the way, I tried to tie every song into that.”

Green Death has come a long way in two short years. And if its newest album is any indication, the band has an upward trajectory locked in for the future. CV