a fourth album for the humorous heavy metal band from Nantes Ultra Vomit

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Monday September 30, 2024: Nicolas Patra, singer and founder of the humorous heavy metal band Ultra Vomit. He has just released a fourth album: “Ultra Vomit and the power of power”.

Nicolas Patra is the singer of the Nantes humorous Heavy Metal group Ultra Vomit. Its particularity is parody, the power of the valve. Basically, its formation in 2000 was almost a joke, that’s how the members of the group had conceived it among themselves. Just like the title of their first album: Mr Potato. In short, they like to laugh, also provoke laughter and where the joke is successful is that at the moment, Ultra Vomit is one of the biggest sellers of heavy metal in France. Today, they release their fourth album: Ultra Vomit and the power of potency.

franceinfo: How do you experience this success and the support of the public?

Nicolas Patra: Pretty good. It’s true that everything that’s happened since the beginning has been quite accidental. We did a first concert, it was in 2001 and what if we said to ourselves: “if the concert works, maybe we’ll do another one, but if it’s shit, we’ll stop everything“. In fact, it continued like that every step of the way and we find ourselves here, which is a bit amazing. Sometimes, we look back a little, we say to ourselves: “This route is crazy” for indeed what can be described as a joke originally.

We still have the impression that it is first and foremost a group of teenagers with this desire to have fun, to be together, to play music, to experience emotions.

We definitely like each other a lot. There was a refusal to grow. All four of us have a bit of that syndrome. My teacher in CE2 was the mother of Fabien, the guitarist of the group and in fact we were just a year apart, so we were in primary school together. We saw who we were, but we didn’t talk to each other. Later, at a music festival in Nantes and I hear loud metal on a street corner. I said to myself: what is this thing? It looks huge. And there, I see a boy with old dreadlocks, a guitar on his knees, shirtless, riffing. I realize that it is Fabien, the mistress’s son. And immediately, I said to myself: I don’t know what happened, but we both went wrong in the same way. I think it’s because of the school.

How the group was really born in 2000.

I founded the group with a friend in high school who very quickly said: “Ooh, I don’t like playing in a group, it pisses me off“. So he left it to us a little bit by telling us: “Deal with it“. He was the one who came up with the name Ultra Vomit.

“It’s funny, Ultra Vomit, it’s a name that took me a long time to accept. At first, I was a little ashamed. With the family, it was a little difficult.”

Ultra Vomit

at franceinfo

And then, I met Manard, the drummer of the group and we had a few metal bands in common, but it was mostly humor actually. The SimpsonsLes Inconnus, Louis de Funès, things like that, where we really had a lot of fun. Horror and comedy films were basically that. Afterwards, in music, we didn’t really listen to the same things. There was a metal base, but we only had a few bands in common, like Cannibal Corpse, Sepultura etc.

You actually have a very cinematic side. Isn’t that also a response to how you see life?

Yes, for sure. We are big cinema enthusiasts, Back to the future, Jurassic Park for my part, films like that! Tanned people go skiingnothing to see, but it’s my favorite film so I’ll say it. Cinema has inspired us from the start. With Manard, at the beginning, we met more to watch films than to listen to music. The basis was gory films like Brain Dead and everything. For me it was a side like that, hypergenerous, with lots of blood everywhere. It influenced us a lot. So the starting point is Tanned people go skiing with “forget that you have no chance on a misunderstanding, maybe it could work“.

You have become Kings of Poop. It’s what ?

The reference is Michael Jackson. He is an artist who is one of the pillars of my existence in terms of music. There were the Beatles, Michael Jackson after Nirvana. Kings of Poop is like King of Pop, except it’s crap. So. Basically, to summarize.

I would like us to talk about Metal Fingers. This song perfectly defines who you are, the vibe, the state of mind, even in the lyrics. Tell us about this song.

“‘Metal Fingers’ suits us well because it’s a super childish expression and it becomes less serious.”

Ultra Vomit

at franceinfo

Already clearly, this is a huge tribute to Orelsan. I’ve been a fan of it from the start. When I listen to it, it’s as if we grew up together, as if we were friends from middle school or high school. It’s just that we went wrong but differently. So clearly, in my head… I do a lot of characters, it’s rarely the real guy who sings, it’s a bit of an imitation… And in this case, it was a sentence that comes with Orelsan’s voice: “I always thought that metalheads were… In fact, they’re big teddy bears, they’re so nice“, it goes like this. Metal Fingersit’s a bit of an expression, for example, in concert we say to the public: “show your metal fingers“, it’s also such a stupid expression.

Finally, who are Ultra Vomit then? For those who don’t know yet.

It’s Emmanuel Colombier on drums, it’s Fabien Le Floch on guitar, it’s Mathieu Bausson on bass and it’s Nicolas Patra on vocals. That’s it, if we had to summarize them.