Band Member: Jeremy Bolm
Angle: Key creative influences behind Spiral In A Straight Line
Spiraling Inspiration
The song Altitude was the first song that I wrote lyrics to for this album. And it happens to have the line “spiral in a straight line”, which I felt pretty good about. But then I had played the demo for a few friends and they all kind of clocked that line and wanted to know more about it. So then I was like: okay, that, to me, now seems like it could be an interesting, provocative, thought-provoking – I’d like to hope – title for a record. So once I presented that to Nick [Steinhardt], who does all of our graphic design, et cetera – he got excited about it. Then we started implementing things surrounding that when it came to the process. So for instance, I was really thinking about the idea of cycles and spirals and how that plays into things, and it made me find my way to repeating things in songs. I’ve never done that before, I’ve never been the kind of lyricist or vocalist or whatever that uses a phrase and has a repetition behind it. But I found myself doing that more and more throughout the record. I think for people listening, they might be able to clock that and be like, “oh, I hear when he’s using this”. The idea of repetition in a way that we’ve never done before is based off that line.
Nostalgic New Wave
Always, and especially when we’re around Ross [Robinson], these sort of 80s/goth/new wave sort of influences creep in. That’s very much his wheelhouse. Lament (2020) had quite a bit of that, but it’s still definitely on this record too. It’s funny because people might think of Ross as the guy that does metal and that kind of stuff. But as much as he likes all of that, he’s always referencing Siouxsie and the Banshees, that’s all very much his thing. For this record, I know there were a lot of references to The Cure, The Church, bands like that who we love and try to pull from as much as we can!
Trauma Bonding
Another influence is trauma bonding, honestly. Going into the record, most of us were all going through a lot of pretty big life changes, just big events for most of us. And without going into detail on those, because a lot of them are personal for different members, but once we got into the studio: it was like we found a commonality amongst each one of us, and we used that to influence our choices and the decisions we were making every single day for the album. And Ross being someone who very much believes in that kind of spirit for making art, I think it only amplified things further once we got to work.
The Return Of The Leonard Cohen Tarot Card
And for the last one, there’s this Leonard Cohen tarot card thing. Ross had some rockstar tarot card set, and he’d had it since we did Lament. I went through it back then, and I saw that there was a Leonard Cohen card, and Ross pulled it and put it in front of the vocal booth. So it was just there in front of me all the time, it was this thing that I would look at every day, making the Lament record. When we came in to do this record, four years later, I walked into the vocal booth – and he had the card sitting out already. He had held onto it. This is kind of a little bit of a safe space for me, this card. The deck itself is weird, their heads are all seemingly real heads, but the bodies are drawn by the looks of it. It’s really interesting. And the quote for Leonard’s one is: “When it comes to art, all that matters is telling your story well. Travel lightly through darkness. Learn to live in the intervals between events”. That feels pretty spot on, and it also definitely sounds like something he would say.