Realistically, back in 2000 you wouldn’t have put money on Electric Wizard still being an ongoing concern in the year 2020, even in somewhat different clothes. Half the time they’d get beyond stoned and jam out their songs forever at gigs. The other half they just wouldn’t bother turning up. Three years previously, they’d set a new benchmark for heaviness with their ungodly Come My Fanatics… sophomore album, and established themselves as masters of a sleazy, grimy underbelly of doom through filthy production, dedication to weed, and a self-confessed bad attitude. “At the time, we were pretty bad people,” frontman Jus Oborn told Kerrang! later on the making of third album, Dopethrone. “I got arrested for arson of a car outside a police station. Tim [Bagshaw, bass] went to nick a crucifix off a church roof so we could use it onstage, then slipped, fell off through the window and sliced his arm open. He got community service for that. Then Mark [Greening, drums] got nicked for robbing an offie. He smashed the window, nicked a bottle of whiskey, then sat there drinking it outside! We weren't very nice people, to be honest. We were feeding off that shit at the time. It made us feel like we were more of a heavy metal band.” Fittingly, the tagline on the inside of Dopethrone proudly reads: “Legalise drugs and murder.”
In Funeralopolis, you can hear all of this. Searching for oblivion, rather than the blissed-out good times of the then-current stoner boom, the psychedelic intake was a purposeful bad trip, and the song’s hateful lyrics and nasty riffs are both mighty and repellant. As it reaches its crescendo in the faster second half and Jus repeats ‘Nuclear warheads, ready to strike / The world is so fucked, let’s end it tonight,’ it’s a testament to the power of misanthropy just how spectacular it can be when harnessed by people who really mean it. Ironically, it only made people love Electric Wizard even more.