Melbourne metal outfit Banks Arcade today release their new EP Death 2, and what better way to get acquainted than by running through the EP track by track courtesy of vocalist Joshua O’Donnell?
Worship The Internet
Worship The Internet was recorded in the UK while we were over there for Download Festival, we had a writing session booked over there while we were staying in Brighton. And it was interesting because we went and we were working with this producer, he was a really nice guy and really welcomed us into his space – but nothing was eventuating. Our ideas weren’t really lining up and his processes and our processes weren’t that compatible. We were showing up every day, and it was proving to be quite a tough session that we were working through. Worship The Internet almost came out of frustration at the fact that we’d spent two or three days and we hadn’t really got anything. Eventually, I decided to go into the corner, put my headphones on and try to figure something out, to get a little song starter. I wrote that intro riff and a couple of lines, and it just started to grow from there. At the time, we were also really inspired by a lot of the sounds that we were hearing over in the UK, obviously, we were at a lot of festivals including The Great Escape which had a diverse line-up of musicians. So, a lot of the sounds and flows that you hear in the song are very inspired by what we were hearing from those artists in the UK. It pretty much all came together there, and it stayed the same from then onwards.
Sentimental
Sentimental was actually written during lockdown, me and James [Feekes] were meeting up all the time and writing music through that period. And as much as it was a tough spot for the world, I enjoyed the lockdown element of it because I was just creating all the time. There was one night where I was really drunk when I made that song. And I didn’t even remember making it, I just remember bits and pieces. When I was making it, it was almost like a joke, I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to what I was doing. I freestyled and just did one big vocal take over the whole thing, and I made a beat out of guitars and stuff, which loops throughout the song, it has way more of a hip-hop style. And it wasn’t until another night during lockdown where I was drinking with some friends when I put that song on. I opened up the project, and it happened to be Sentimental, and they were all like: man, this is so cool. So then I was like: oh, maybe we should put this on the record. It’s just a sassy song, a little flex track. It’s fun.
Roulette
Roulette is the most recent of all of the songs. With the whole recording process of DEATH 2, we had basically recorded everything in the UK – and then we scrapped those recordings and ended up re- recording it, it was a very long-drawn-out process. Roulette came probably about six to eight months ago, and I really wanted something fresh to have in the project because we were getting very burned out by it all. I don’t really know if Roulette is sending any good messages out there. It’s a commentary on a very fucked up time period and state of mind. I think that when you’re taking a lot of risks in life and always riding on the edge of stability, things can get pretty dicey at times once you mix in mental health issues and things like that. I’m someone who’s not very risk-averse. If I’m not doing music around the world, I’m fighting people in cages and doing stuff like this. There’s the side of that that’s good, but then there’s also the side of that that’s bad. And that’s what Roulette is about. I guess in some ways it sort of seems like it’s glorifying it, almost to the point that I genuinely spoke to the boys and was like: is this a bad thing to put out there because it’s saying all this shit? But at the end of the day, I think that things happen, people do bad things, and it’s just a commentary on that really. It doesn’t necessarily say: don’t do this or do this. It’s just talking about that kind of hectic space where everything’s going crazy, and you’re dancing a little bit on the edge.
More Want
When I recorded More Want, I was literally banging my head against a wall, losing my shit into the microphone. And then at every stage, from my recording it to playing it live through to the videos, it was kind of a trance-like psychosis that I went into. The whole thing around that song was actually pretty fucked up, and it very much just came out of me, it was almost just like a fit. And that’s what it sounds like. It’s meant to be perceived as a soundscape as opposed to a linear song like what most people are used to hearing.
Killing Games
Killing Games started while we were on one of our first Australian tours. James had made this electronic song that he was going to submit for a competition. And unfortunately for James, anytime he does anything like this or has an idea to do something for himself, like: oh, I’m going to make a solo electronic song – I end up hearing it, and I’m like: I want that. And that’s what this was. He showed it to me on a plane, like: oh, I finished this, I’m going to send it off. And I was literally like: you can’t send this off! We ended up pitching it down and messing around with it a bit. I wrote the band elements after that, but it really stemmed from the electronic stuff James had done. And it’s just a massive metal song, I reckon it’ll sound super good live, that’s essentially what it was written for.
Change
Change is probably my favorite song out of all the new stuff that we have coming up. For that song, we decided not to use a metronome, and we recorded the song with just me and James. James was playing drums and I was doing vocals with no instruments, and then we built the song around that. All of the takes had to be perfect because we couldn’t really sync it to a grid. It’s a point of difference, and this is really how all music used to be made. Now there’s way less of a barrier to record music, so a lot of people who can’t actually play these songs can just record them and fix it all up. But I’m sure a lot of people who go to shows have probably stood in the crowd and been like: why doesn’t this sound like it does on the recording? That’s just kind of the process that everybody’s fallen into, and it’s how modern metal is made, you can’t really make things sound perfect unless you’re heavily editing it. But for Change, we wanted to try and keep as much of a natural drum sound as possible, and keep as much of that natural tempo movement and feeling that you get with a live band. And that means too when we do play it live, people will hear it and be like: man, this sounds even better than the recording. We played it on the Highly Suspect tour in New Zealand in massive, massive rooms, and it sounded amazing, and the reaction from people for that song in those rooms was great. It’s different and one of my favorites.
