Brought up in Franconia, Germany, in a family of musicians, Lille Gruber learned to play drums and guitar from a young age. His father, Wolfgang, a founding member of Defeated Sanity, was a multi-instrumentalist himself. Wolfgang acted as a mentor to Lille in his formative years and continued to guide Lille through the beginnings of Defeated Sanity until his untimely passing in 2010.
In the early 2000s, Lille moved to Berlin to attend the conservatory “Universität Der Künste” to study classical guitar while finding new members in Jacob and Jens to continue Defeated Sanity in Berlin. He is now, the only DS member remaining is in Germany.
Besides DS and occasional session work, he teaches classical and electric guitar and drums.
Pre-order & Pre-save: https://orcd.co/defeatedsanitythecroniclesoflunacy
2025 ‘Chronicles of Lunacy’ 2025 European Headlining Tour
23 January – Wolfburg, DE @ Jugendhaus OST*
24 January – Hambourg, DE @ Bambi Galore*
25 January – Copenhagen, DE @ Temple of Doom*
26 January – Dyestad, SE @ Dyestads Bygata*
27 January – Stockholm, SE @ Kollektivet Livet*
28 January – Aalborg, DK @ Studenterhuset*
29 January – Tilburg, NL @ Hall of Fame*
30 January – Lille, FR @ The Black Lab*
31 January – Paris, FR @ Glazart*
1 February – Basel, CH @ Kaschemme Basel*
2 February – Milan, IT @ Slaughter Club*
3 February- Graz, AT @ Explosiv*
4 February – Vienna, AT @ Escape^
5 February – Zagreb, HR @ Klub Močvara^
6 February – Budapest, HU @ Dürer Kert^
7 February – Belgrade, RS @ Dorcol Platz^
8 February – Sofia, BG @ Oldskulls Club^
9 February – Varna,BG @ Club Smile^
10 February – Bucharest, RO @ Quantic^
11 February – Cluj-Napoca, RO @ Flying Circus^
12 February – Košice, SK @ Collosseum Club^
13 February – Prague, CZ @ Modrá Vopice^
14 February – Bielsko-Biala, PL @ Rudeboy Club^
15 February – Berlin, DE @ Orwohaus^
* with Iniquitous Savagery, Strangle Wire
^ with Asylum, Embryonic Devourment
Hear their new album two weeks early during tonight’s Bandcamp Listening Party!
About Defeated Sanity:
DEFEATED SANITY is one of the most unique, boundary-pushing, and crucial bands in the history of extreme death metal. Their music is as technically coherent as it is mind-bending and memorable. Endlessly replayable and full of discovery, their maze of riffs and musical passages is inspired by infamous classic bands in the extreme metal genre, heavily steeped in jazz and progressive classical elements.
The band consists of four members. Drummer Lille Gruber, the son of deceased co-founding member Wolfgang Teske, leads them. Gruber is joined by bandmates Jacob Schmidt (bass), Josh Welshman (vocals), and Vaughn Stoffey (guitar).
As well as being the drummer of Defeated Sanity, Gruber is the multi-instrumental songwriting mastermind behind the band’s deep and compelling catalog of songs and compositions. He possesses a bag of tricks seen nowhere else in the genre and a musical prowess that is on full display throughout their new album, Chronicles of Lunacy.
“We love experimenting,” explains Gruber. “But we realized that some of our oldest fans might have gotten lost after our last couple of albums. With Chronicles of Lunacy, we wanted to focus more on neck-snapping brutality.”
Chronicles of Lunacy punches you right in the face. Press play and “Amputationsdrang” already has you pinned to the mat beneath its non-stop blasts. Get comfortable, too, because Defeated Sanity doesn’t let the album up for air until the very end of Track 4. But turns out that acting like knuckle-dragging cavemen isn’t so easy for a band that has a Mensa-level maestro like Gruber at the controls. Whether he’s hammering his snare, pinging between cymbals, or riding a colossal groove, Chronicles of Lunacy flows like a never-ending stream of filth.
“Lille’s drumming is just ridiculous”, Jacob Schmidt says. Schmidt – who toured with Obscura behind Cosmogenesis – joined as the other half of Defeated Sanity’s chaotic rhythm section for the band’s beloved second album. His nimble, belching bass lines give the new album’s lead single “The Odour of Sanctity” an oddball bounce. “He’s the face of the franchise, so we’re never going to abandon those head-scratching moments that set Defeated Sanity apart”.
Indeed, Chronicles of Lunacy isn’t Defeated Sanity for dummies. Heck, the lyrics are wrapped up in the twisted ways that delusions can rot the human psyche. This heady concept was made flesh by none other than Jon Zig. Drawn in painstaking detail by his wicked right hand, the album’s cover shows that the birth of some ideas look an awful lot like a gory and sex-crazed nativity scene.
“Each song on Chronicles deals with a different form of mental corruption”, Josh Welshman says. “Odor” stinks of religious fanaticism. “A Patriarchy Perverse” cracks open the mind of co-ed killer Ed Kemper, while “Extrinsically Enraged” practically foams at the mouth with squealing hammer-ons. “That one’s more literal,” says Welshman with a hearty laugh. “It’s about contracting rabies”. If it weren’t for Disposal of the Dead / Dharmata, then Defeated Sanity would’ve chewed through as many vocalists as they have albums, but after a brutal showing on their last one, Welshman is back with more guttural vengeance. His growls ooze from the pit of his gut on “Temporal Disintegration”, stomped out like the innards of a cockroach by the gravity-defying slams.
While it still hits from every odd angle, Chronicles of Lunacy does draw a jagged red line back to Defeated Sanity’s brutal origins. After all, the band now share a label with their namesake. In true, DS fashion, the first song written for this album was “Heredity Violated”, a headbanging grand finale that never stops chugging. “This album isn’t as tough on the brain as the last two”, says new guitarist Vaughn Stoffey, whose chunky riffs whip “Accelerating the Rot” into the fastest song in the band’s canon. “It’s rawer and more straightforward, which gets back to what fans love about Psalms of the Moribund.”
To dig up the sheer brutality that long-time fans have come to crave, Defeated Sanity returned to Thousand Cave Studios. New York City’s most vile underground hotspot also served as the excavation site for the Billboard-charting The Sanguinary Impetus, which shoveled a fresh layer of dirt over the “polished” production of Passages into Deformity. But the band encouraged producer Colin Marston to get down and dirty with Chronicles of Lunacy. “We still wanted some of the high fidelity that you hear on modern death metal records”, Schmidt says, “but this album has the same crushing low-end as Psalms or Chapters of Repugnance”.
The band execute this two-headed approach to monstrous effect on “Condemned to Vascular Famine”. At just under six minutes, the song delivers the longest ass beating on Chronicles of Lunacy. At times, all four members sound like they’re climbing up the walls in separate asylums, but after slipping in a brief nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the band come slamming down into the album’s ugliest breakdown.
“That’s one of our favorites,” the band says. “It lands at a crossroad of the DS sound that we ended up with on Chronicles of Lunacy. Even though it gets pretty fucking weird at times, there’s still an emphasis on heavy, straight-up slamming.”
None of their albums are ever going to follow a straight line, but on Chronicles of Lunacy, Defeated Sanity return to sheer brutality.
