In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Kyuss drummer and founder Brant Bjork revealed he saw Metallica as the type of band he didn’t want Kyuss to become.
“Our guy at the label would always say, ‘You guys will be the next Metallica,’ and that bummed me out,” Bjork explained. “I wanted to be this Kyuss!”
“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,” he added.
“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.”
Though Kyuss disbanded in 1995, Bjork admitted in a 2021 interview with TotalRock’s Hobo On The Radio show that he is open to a reunion, and even reopened communication with former bandmate and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme.
“I was really bummed by the way that Kyuss broke up in ’95 – I didn’t want it to end that way,” he said.
“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.
