Morsrot sucks: An interview with Kieran Brannon

Kieran and I got to the venue about four hours late.

“When was the last time you were at a music festival in Malta?” I asked.

“A while.”

We made our rounds with occasional stops for overpriced beer. No one good was on. No one good was going to be on for a while, but I remember asking Kieran whether he thought the Maltese music scene had ever been so alive.

“Not in my lifetime,” he replied. “Man, do you remember how bored we were when we were young? There was nothing going on... but that’s how scenes start! Everyone’s bored, so everyone starts making music. There were no gigs, so we started a band. Boredom is the most important factor in creativity, and Malta has a lot of that.”

“That’s for sure…”

“But that creates originality! When something is isolated, it creates its own identity,” Kieran said. And who’s more isolated than Malta?

“You think that’s happening?” I asked.

“Somewhat, but people don’t take it seriously enough. Scenes have an identity; Malta doesn’t have that. Not yet. For a culture to create its own identity there needs to be a lot of artists taking it seriously. People don’t do that here, and those who do aren’t around each other enough to inspire each other.”

By the way, you should probably know that Kieran Brannon is, himself, a full-time musician, which is why you should care about what he has to say about all this. He is the vocalist, ex-guitarist, and now bassist for Morsrot, an ex-metal and now undefinable Maltese band.

He is also my brother.

Kieran learned how to play guitar when he was six. Being at most four feet tall, he played a red SG to be like Angus Young. He attended his first metal concert that year to watch Forsaken, ironically, at Beerfest, which Morsrot is headlining this year.

After that, he took a brief seven-year hiatus to focus on his career as a midfielder with Fgura United, before picking up the guitar again when he was 13.

I remember Kieran playing guitar all day back then. He still does. Kieran also still rarely goes anywhere without it. Two years ago, he almost paid €900 to buy his guitar a seat on a flight to LA because the cabin crew wouldn’t accept it as a carry-on.

“My fingers would bleed. I wanted it so bad. I didn’t care about improving. I didn’t even care if what I was doing was good, to me it was good,” Kieran said. “I’d wake up, have breakfast, and play. I didn’t care about anything else.”

A little-known fact is that Morsrot didn’t start off as Morsrot at all. It began in a shitty basement in Ħamrun, where three teenagers, including Kieran and Gabriel, Morsrot’s current guitarist, started making grunge music under the name Pandora.

“I stayed up all night after Gabriel told me. The next day, we went to the basement. I kept thinking to myself: this is going to be my career; this is going to be my life.” And he was right.

Kieran lost another night’s sleep the next day after all of us got stoned on a beach in Mellieħa. The then-Pandora members gushed over song titles, album covers, and fantasised about what the band could become someday. Kieran fell asleep on the bus back and almost never made it home.

Pandora became Morsrot sometime during the COVID lockdown. Soon after, the band released its first EP, Septicaemia, which has since been removed. They made their live debut mid-pandemic at Metal City, a seated festival in Valletta.

“I don’t even remember what happened, it’s a blur. I was acting purely from intuition. Purely. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or my age, maybe the beer. There were no inhibitions.”

I remember having to wear a mask while a crowd of about a hundred people sat five seats apart. Social distancing killed the mosh pits, but that would soon change.

For the band, each performance is meant to be a surprise. Morsrot never wants people to know what they’re going to get. Every single thing they do should leave people thinking: What the fuck are they doing?

“Wait a second,” I said. “Where did the name Morsrot even come from?”

“Well, I was reading this amazing book called Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss and was hit by an idea. I decided to highlight the second letter, because two is a funny number, for the first seven pages of the book, because I was born on 7 December. It spelled out Morsrot.”

The night Morsrot won Malta's Wacken Metal Battle that allowed them to qualify for Germany's Wacken Open Air Festival

So, there you have it. Let’s move on.

Four years later, Morsrot won Malta’s Wacken Metal Battle, becoming the first Maltese band to qualify for Germany’s Wacken Open Air festival. Although the judges somehow managed to misspell ‘Malta,’ the band felt immense pride at being the first to represent the country on an international stage.

Kieran says he was terrified for days before the show. Shivering.

“I got a text from my dad: ‘Ignore the noise and focus on the signal.’”

So he did.

According to Kieran, one of the biggest strains leading Maltese musicians to leave the island for mainland Europe is the financial burden of hauling all your gear onto a flight to be able to tour.

Geography is not the only thing holding a weight down on the local music scene. Throughout his life, Kieran has heard Maltese people tell one another that making it in music is impossible, especially if you’re Maltese.

Not long after Wacken, Morsrot packed their bags and moved to Berlin.

“I wanted to be surrounded by creativity and art,” Kieran said. “Berlin is exploding with that energy. It’s everywhere you look.”

Apparently, he had not liked Berlin very much when he first visited. But then, he walked into one of his first open mics.

“A woman got on stage with no instruments. She just had a book, a box filled with pieces of metal and her voice. She started making sounds with them, flipping through the pages and clicking her tongue to imitate a horse running. Then, she looped the sounds through her pedals and sang a harmony over them. It sounded like a scene from a movie.”

As Kieran began attending open mics more regularly, he discovered that this kind of experimentation was not unusual in Berlin. Actually, everyone was like that. The city gave him the sense that anything was possible, rather than reminding him of what could not be done.

“I didn’t want to be held back by the place I came from,” Kieran said. “But it shouldn’t be that way for Maltese musicians.”

Morsrot performing at Wacken

He pointed out that Ronaldo came from an island in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa while Kurt Cobain was born in a logging town. Even Napoleon was originally from Corsica.

“He wasn’t even French, and he built a French empire,” Kieran said.

Hitler also came up, being that he was Austrian, although Kieran suggested this might not be the best example.

“If there’s one thing the Maltese music scene needs, it’s confidence. Maltese people have this idea about ourselves; that we’ll never be good enough no matter what we do. There’s a shame that needs to die.”

Confidence requires discipline, and Kieran’s military creative process is simple: “I sit down and do it.”

“So, you’ve played Beerfest before,” I said. “What’s different now?”

“Everything.”

And he’s not wrong. The band’s entire line-up has been reshuffled three-times over. They got a new drummer, then brought the old one back. Kieran is exclusively on bass. The growling vocals are over. Screams and melodies are in. Their sound is unrecognisable. Morsrot is recording an album in Kieran’s kitchen as inspired by ABBA as by Black Midi’s Schlagenheim. Radio songs. Arrangement and distortion. Math. “The metal-band label is going to die.” It’s the same people but, as Kieran puts it, totally different artists.

Morsrot plays Beerfest on 23 July, and anyone familiar with the band can expect to be left thinking: “What the fuck are they doing?