In a recent chat with Metal Hammer, Kyuss founder Brant Bjork said he didn’t want his band to be like ‘the next Metallica.’
“Our guy at the label would always say, ‘You guys will be the next Metallica,’ and that bummed me out,” the drummer shared. “I wanted to be this Kyuss!”
He went on to say, “I felt like we f*cking rocked and had hit the peak of our chemistry at the time, and Metallica were super-cool guys and really supportive, but seeing it all on that scale, it was just like, ‘This isn’t for me.’ If that’s the epitome of success in a rock band, it just seemed unrewarding.”
“They got up and played the same things every night, said the same things… I could tell it’d become a traveling circus, a machine. I was still 20 years old, and more attracted to what we were doing in terms of improvising onstage and being loose. I wanted Kyuss to go more in that direction,” Bjork further explained his approach.
Kyuss started in the late ’80s and signed with Elektra Records in 1991. Metallica had joined Elektra in ’84, and by 1991, after releasing their ‘Black Album,’ they were huge. As Kyuss gained popularity in the early ’90s, Elektra expected them to reach that same level but Bjork didn’t want that.
Kyuss supported Metallica on tour in Australia in 1993. However, by then, Bjork was losing interest in the band, and seeing metal’s big success didn’t help. He left Kyuss after recording their 1993 album ‘Welcome to Sky Valley.’ Josh Homme, another member, later formed Queens of the Stone Age.
Bjork shared with TotalRock’s Hobo On The Radio show in 2021 that he had tried to reopen communication with Homme, but he was unsure about a full reunion. He responded after Homme said he was open to a Kyuss reunion, “It’s an interesting comment. I can totally relate to his feeling, because I was really bummed by the way that Kyuss broke up in ’95 – I didn’t want it to end that way.”
“Had we known how to keep a band together, we could have just had that band moving all along and taking breaks from time to time to pursue other things. But, yeah, it has this kind of stop and rebirth and reinvention… I share his frustration. But there’s always a way to do it, and it just takes communication,” he added.
After Kyuss broke up in 1995, they had legal battles. In 2011, Brant, John Garcia, and Nick Oliveri formed Kyuss Lives! and started performing. The next year, Homme and Scott Reeder sued Garcia and Bjork when they tried to trademark ‘Kyuss’ and release music under the Kyuss Lives! name.
