Aussie rock outfit The Butterfly Effect – to their fans at least – are a band who can do no wrong.
Even the small matter of fourteen years passing between albums did little to dampen the enthusiasm of a large portion of this country’s population when it was announced the gang was getting back together almost five years ago.
From the moment their self-titled debut EP graced the airwaves in 2001, The Butterfly Effect have been melting souls and mesmerizing sensibilities with their emotionally driven sonic landscape capable of at times working the listener into a frenzy, and at others soothing them to calm.
Frontman Clint Boge was – and still is – unlike any vocalist seen or hard in this country before, his vocal range and sincerity able to snap into bouts of aggression effortlessly and at will but also capable of exactly the opposite.
Never aggressive enough to be classified as anything more than a hard rock band, but also capable of unleashing the demon within, The Butterfly Effect have always been more than just a band.
They are an experience.
When Boge announced his departure in 2012 many – and rightfully so – foretold the demise of The Butterfly Effect, who respectfully attempted salvation with another vocalist. This was short-lived and always doomed to failure, with The Butterfly Effect flapping their wings for what was, for all intents and purposes, the last time in 2016. Not because of the lack of love and respect afforded to the remaining and new members, but more for the fact that a vocalist like Boge is impossible to replace.
Following a chance meeting between Boge and guitarist Kurt Goedhart the following year, the band unanimously agreed to hit the road again for possibly the last time, in part to see if the fires still burned but also more as a show of gratitude to the loyal legion of fans who could have justifiably felt robbed by Boge’s departure some five years earlier.
The rest, as they say, is history. The shows sold out in record time, vindicating the band’s desire to offer fans closure, but more importantly, the band members themselves found their own passion quickly restored and thus the caterpillar once more took flight.
The only thing that could have excited the now happy Butterfly army more was new material, and when The Butterfly Effect dropped the balls out rock number So Tired late last year it seemed the planets had finally aligned almost a decade after the walls fell crumbling inwards for many.
So Tired was followed by Nil By Mouth before the softer paced, but still meaty track Visiting Hours was released along with absolute confirmation that The Butterfly Effects’ fourth album – appropriately titled IV – would be released on September 2.
Even HEAVY was excited and we jumped at the chance to chat with the top bloke that is Clint Boge, who was in good spirits when we caught up despite only being one coffee into his day.
“Holy crap, yeah man,” he replied when I pointed out the obvious. “Look, you’ve had to wait longer for this one than you have a Tool album, so that’s saying something (laughs)! It’s crazy, but you know what, when we left off with Final Conversation Of Kings we wrote a whole bunch of songs, and Visiting Hours was one of them. So we had these five songs flapping in the breeze with all these other instrumental demos. I think it was like 20 or 30 songs, and we’ve got them on hard drives, so we just threw them into a drop box folder and started cherry-picking the best that we could find; or the songs that resonated most with us. So all of the songs that you’re hearing bar one or two, or maybe three, are old songs demoed. This was all written off the back of Final Conversation Of Kings and it was interesting to get Kurty to write new music, because he was kind of like I don’t know man, but after that reformation tour in 2018 – I think when Brisbane sold out in under ten minutes – he was like, okay, maybe we should do some new music.”
The Butterfly Effect have always layered their sounds with enough emotion and atmospherics to create a perfect contrast of light and shade. It is an identifiable characteristic of the bands sound and one which wouldn’t be easy to repeatedly nail, yet somehow they always do.
“I think some bands do it inherently,” Boge measured. “They just do it instinctively, and for us, that’s just what we do. The four of us playing in a room together really capture… there’s a depth to the music, and we really lock into the essence of what we are feeling. It’s my job as lyricist and vocalist of the band to translate what each musician is telling me. When you listen to the album, you’ll hear me drop in on Ben’s snare hit, so that’s intuitive after working together for 22 years – well I had a little break in between (laughs) – but you know what I’m saying? Knowing these guys for so long, when you drop in on these moments, or you listen to Kurt’s accents, or you listen to where the bass is going, and when we do that together it really does find a… it’s the musical glue I call it. And that’s those edges of those frequencies; that little bit of a dark edge that we get and that’s instinctive. Whereas some bands have really got to try and extract that, it’s very natural for us. And I think we’ve been lucky in that respect. It has worked for us, and against us at times, because we’ve butted heads many times in the band room, as I’m sure everyone can relate to (laughs).”
In the full interview, Clint talks about how he has grown into himself as a vocalist in the 14 years that have elapsed between albums, the opening track on IV and how it sets the whole album up, the three singles released to date and how they represent the album sonically, reconnecting with the rest of the band when they crossed paths again, what changed for him to come back, repaying the fans for their loyalty, the massive tour they are about to embark on and what to expect, future plans and more.
