“Country players don’t get as much credit as the prog guys. Shining a light on how cool country guitar can be was important to me”: Bilmuri are fusing metalcore and country using Strats, ‘fighter jet’ solos and tone tips from Sleep Token

Former Attack Attack! man Johnny Franck’s joyous rock project Bilmuri has exploded after the launch of last year’s ultra-polished, ultra-cool album American Motor Sports and tours with Sleep Token and Babymetal.

Franck left the band he founded in 2010, with Bilmuri originally intended as a country rock solo project. “My dad played in a bluegrass band when I was growing up; that’s the world that I come from,” he says.

The band grew beyond those ambitions as his serious-but-silly songwriting captured imaginations. But he had his work cut out with American Motor Sports. Designed to be “as low IQ as possible,” it came after his virtuoso dreams shattered on previous release Goblin Hours.

“I was like, ‘I’m gonna fucking flex, dude, with solos everywhere and crazy riffs!’” he says of the 2022 album. “It didn’t do as good as I wanted – so I stripped everything back to its most basic components.”

What survived the cull is slick yet contagiously numskull. It’s the kind of dumb songwriting only a smartass could write. Sitting down alongside live guitarist Reese Maslen, Franck dishes the dirt on the stories behind one of 2024’s hottest records.

Better Hell has been a smash hit. What do you think makes the song so special?

Johnny Franck: “I think it’s getting the simple things right. That main lead took four guitarists to get right in terms of articulation, even though it sounds simple.

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“I had a dude from Mississippi, Eric Woolard, put some really traditional country on there. The country guys are some of the best in the world, but they don’t get as much credit as the prog guys. Shining a light on how cool country guitar can be was important to me.”

There’s a great blend of modern rock tones and acoustic.

Franck: “Modern music can sound like a fucking computer – I hate that. It felt like a tightrope walk, but by blending organic instruments with the digital sound, I felt like I created a good middle ground between the two.

“You get the power and clarity of the low-end on the digital side, but you get the purity of the acoustics. I don’t feel like those two things have really been brought together before in a way that was as satisfying.”

Live, Reese, you do most of the heavy lifting on the guitar.

Reese Maslen: “I come strictly from the metal world. When I joined, the first thing that Johnny sent me was ACOWBOYSHEAVYLOAD, saying, ‘Can you do this solo?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t fucking know!’ I’d never tried to do chicken picking before. This band has forced me to learn a lot of different styles.”

Franck: “Oftentimes I’ll have something in my head that I have no ability to do, and I’m like, ‘Reese, can you do this?’ and he’ll figure out a way. We’ve been making interludes for this new tour so we can flex a bit; I was like, ‘Reese, can you do this thumping thing like I hear it in my head?’ He figured that out pretty quickly!”

I feel like every flavor of one through four serves the overall pie of Bilmuri. Except fifth position

You don’t make his life easy, then?

Franck: “I throw him in the deep end a lot! What’s really interesting is that a lot of these solos are written in standard, and Reese had to transpose them to DADGAD for live.”

Maslen: “We don’t have the infrastructure to do effective guitar switching, so it was out of necessity. It really does feel like you’re rediscovering how to play guitar; I’ve just figured out how to sweep in DADGAD. It’s so goofy, and it looks super-weird, but it’s really unlocked something for me.”

BILMURI – THE END (LIVE) – YouTube

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You’re both Strat players.

Franck: “Almost everything is a Strat in the fourth position. It’s still got aggression, but it’s got this jangle that I’ve been searching for my whole life. Single coils going through a heavy amp have this depth to them that humbuckers just can’t get.

“I feel like every flavor of one through four serves some sort of thing in the overall pie of Bilmuri. Except fifth position – fuck that; it sounds like ass! But 95 percent of it is that fourth position. I just get my guitar modded so that if it’s all the way down, it’s in the fourth position.”

And you’ve always whacked an EverTune on your Strat.

Franck: “No-one wants to see a singer tune a guitar on stage. Reese can go back and tune while I’m talking to the audience. Actually, there’s a lot of feeling that could get lost if Reese was on EverTune. I’m there to engage the crowd.”

What amps are you running?

Maslen: “We’ve just switched to Quad Cortex. We used Line 6 Helix on the Sleep Token tour in the UK and it was a nightmare. They were constantly buzzing and we were constantly troubleshooting, which Sleep Token never had to do. That was the turning point.

(Image credit: Hayley Mewborn)“We spent a weekend dialing in tones together, then a week later I opened it back up and it sounded like shit! I don’t know what we were on, but it was not good. So I fell back to what I know: a Mesa head with a Marshall cab. A lot of the clean tones are Matchless amps with Fender Tweeds, broken up with a little bit of gain and a lot of compression.

“I get sad when Johnny isn’t playing because it’s just mono guitar. Sleep Token uses a doubler effect for stereo with a latent plugin. I took it one step further by adding a chorus on it, so it’s super-wide. That was a game changer.”

Let’s talk solos: The End nails the simplicity philosophy.

Franck: “If you can’t hum the lead, it’s not going to stick in your mind. Originally, The End was what I’d call ‘fighter jet’ – just fucking Top Gun-type shit. We took four or five cracks at simplifying it.

“We were writing on tour and we’d set up in a room after soundcheck one day. The entire band plus our manager were all in there, and everyone was saying shit. And I was like, ‘Everyone, shut the fuck up!’ because I was humming out this little melody. It had to be stupid simple.

BILMURI – SPINNIN’ YOU AROUND (OFFICIAL LYRIC VISUALIZER) – YouTube

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“Then it was like, ‘Alright Reese, for the last four beats absolutely flex your shit.’ There is complexity – but it’s not at the sacrifice of a nice hummable melody.”

Spinnin’ You Around doesn’t follow suit.

Franck: “I think songs ask for different things. That was the last song we wrote for the record, and I felt we needed a banger of a track – something really loud and wide open with shock value. It doesn’t call for a pop solo.

I spent 10 years producing and recording – I’m good at zeroing in on what makes a take good

“We were in my basement and I asked my buddy Lee Albrecht to give me some fighter jet stuff. I went and took a nap for like an hour, came back, and he’d murdered it.”

Finally, how important is collaboration to you? You seem happy to throw it out to other players.

Franck: “The music would be nowhere near as good if I wasn’t around these guys. Genuinely, this project growing to the degree it has is a direct result of me bringing in people who are better than me.

“I spent 10 years producing and recording guitarists, so I’m really good at zeroing in on what makes a take good. That, plus great guitarists, makes a magic combo.”

American Motor Sports is out now via Columbia Records.