Band Member Answering: Hunter Young
Content Angle: Behind The Scenes of new album death fetish
- Originally the album artwork was completely different and I trashed it all because it was generated by something. Not everything’s AI, but it was very bioorganic-looking. That was cool for the Fear Factory-ish, Spineshank-ish vibes that kind of appear on the record sometimes. But with how personal the record was, I really just wanted the art to be film photographs, and also I wanted to use the BDSM aspect of it. Not like, “this is a sexy album”, but more as a metaphor for pain. That all worked out, and the photographer we used for it, Natasha, she’s fucking amazing. She does a bunch of work for Julia Wolf, she recently worked with Drake…she’s blowing the fuck up, I don’t think I could afford her anymore that’s for fucking sure!
- For the videos, Olli [Appleyard] from Static Dress actually flew to LA and shot the B-roll for the videos in Natasha’s studio with her models. The point was to keep it really cohesive. We differed a little bit with the visualizers because I didn’t find them as important, but it largely threads together.
- In terms of the album itself, about five songs didn’t make the record. I actually recently sang over two of them, I plan to put those out at some point. Not as a deluxe or anything, I just want to keep moving forward. This album took over three years to come out and I’m really just ready to move on. I’m used to finishing it, wait for manufacturing, all that stuff then you set a date six months later. For this one it was finished a year and a half later. And then you leave it with me for that long, I’m going to pick at it so that the dates keep getting pushed further and further back. It just needs to be taken away from me at this point!
- We went into this knowing it was going to be a full-length album. We started it in early 2023 before the last EP was even released yet. At the time we still had the last EP on our brain, and were fucking around with the idea of not using guitars on the album at all, just bass and making them sound like guitars. And a couple of the songs on the album are that, some did survive. But I realised that tuning didn’t work with my voice very well, so we went back to guitars at a certain point. When we started, we started with the concrete idea of completing a record. And unfortunately during the first studio sessions I was diagnosed, so that kind of put a wrench in the works. Austin [Coupe], the producer, also made a big transition out to LA to work with larger clients, so I was watching his career go up and not wanting to be selfish; but still really wanting to finish the album. I’m very happy, he’s one of my best friends and his success means more to me than this album does, honestly.
- We always knew this was going to be a dark record, and then it just kept spiralling. And then there were times where I got bored of it being dark all the time where I’d be like, “okay, can we have some type of fun now?!”. There’s a lot of personal stuff on the album, and surprisingly with all of the press that I’ve done and all of the talking about this record that I’ve done publicly…I don’t actually like talking about it in this broad spectrum thing where I’m just like, “yep, everyone in the fucking world needs to know I’m sick”. But on the flip side I feel like if I don’t, I end up having to explain myself so much more later. I have to leave pinned posts up on my profile and the band’s profile so that every time someone asks me to do something, or asking why something took so long, I can just be like, “refer to this”. And maybe by doing all of this, not only do I mitigate some of that, but maybe someone else sees it and they go, “oh shit, I also have this thing” and they can relate to it. I hope that’s not the case, but maybe that does exist. And people will read into it however they want to. I thought about that for a while before it came out, but you should just let people get to where they want to get with it. And if they like it or love it, it doesn’t matter. Every single time I’ve taken the approach to writing for other people, I’ve ended up hating the song.
