Ask any fan of punk rock their favourite bands, and more likely than not, Strung …
On New Year’s Day, the Melbourne metalcore scene was slapped out of its hangover by a new band making its presence felt. This wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill metalcore band, for Death In Bloom boasted members who had previously been part of scene heavyweights Confession, The Broderick and Jack the Stripper to name a few.
What most fans weren’t aware of, was that the quintet had been quietly devising their debut album, A Means to Disappear, in the lead up to their arrival. Now completed and ready for release, the album is a monster that combines dark and technical riffing with uninhibited melodic and atmospheric colours and Hysteria is proud to present the exclusive album stream for you right here.
Listen now below.
A Means to Disappear is out on October 14 here.
We spoke to axemen Arron Parker Richards and Russell Holland.
HYS: Where did the name Death In Bloom come from?
Russell: [laughs] Well, Arron is obsessed with Adventure Time and there’s a super metal episode of Adventure Time where they all go crazy and they go through all these labyrinths of metal, and it’s called ‘Death In Bloom’. I think he has a hundred of the toys. He has all those little ones with the big heads you can get.
Arron: Surprisingly no one has picked up on it, or said anything. Maybe it’s the inner child in me.
HYS: How long have you guys been playing together?
Arron: Me and Russ had been throwing the idea of the band around for a fair amount of time before it came to fruition. We were writing for about six or seven months before the band became a full band with all the members. It wasn’t until sometime after when we had written a bunch of songs that Logan stepped in. It was a long process, I think, but when the band really came together it definitely kind of just kick-started from zero to a hundred. We had ten songs and when we released the first song, we had the whole album close to done. We wanted to come out strong, we didn’t want to put a song out and wait until we recorded another song. We did a lot behind the scenes and we didn’t have a lot of pressure to do anything. That gave us time and if things went wrong, we didn’t have to worry and we could take it easy and figure it out and work through it.
HYS: What motivated that, getting together and saying let’s do a new band in the first place? You cut your teeth in a few other bands.
Russell: Arron filled in for a Confession tour and we got along really well during that, and Confession was kind of slowing down a bit. So, we were thinking about starting a side project and started writing some songs. We were like ‘this is definitely too much fun, we should definitely get this going’. We just wanted to get our best friends involved.
Architects has always been a big influence for me personally and Arron’s obsessed with them
[Russell Holland]
HYS: Have there been any moments where you’ve been banging your heads against the walls or people have butted heads over certain things?
Arron: I’ve known Jai [Morrow, drums] since I was fifteen, so our relationship is cruisy as hell. I’ve known Russ for a long time as well. It definitely works, all being mates. It’s been pretty smooth. Every band has their shit they have to go through, but nothing major sticks out. There were probably times during this recording when we didn’t get things done when we wanted them to, and trying to keep to deadlines that we’d set. It was all pretty chill, I can’t think of anything. I wouldn’t want it to be any other way.
HYS: It’s one thing to want to play with your mates, but was there a kind of objective? A sit down perhaps where you said ‘we want to head towards this sound, an Architect’s sound?’
Russell: Yeah, Architects has always been a big influence for me personally and Arron’s obsessed with them [laughs]. I was in a band a few years ago where we were trying to do that sound called Lover’s Grave and we ended up breaking up. I always wanted to continue on that sound path and these guys are all guys I met back in that band a few years ago. I was keen to get them involved because they all knew and liked my old band, so it was a pathway to that.
HYS: What are some of the things you’ve learned from those past bands that you’ve taken into Death In Bloom?
Arron: It was a fairly new experience, apart from working with Confession for a bit. I think just growing up and listening to Architects, they’re a massive influence. I like to listen to the way they structure songs. I guess just listening to that music for so long is where I drew my inspiration going into it. With the melodic side of it as well, Our Solace was based on a lot of nicer sounding aspects compared to the heavier music and that helped a lot with coming into this.
Russell: With doing Confession for ages, I was able to do a whole bunch of touring. I learned how hard you’ve got to work and that was bit of a revolving door towards the end. I was kind of teaching dudes a lot of guitar and stuff like that. It made made me work a lot harder and just having Crafter to learn stuff from as well was good. Somehow, he’s a genius with his marketing and he’s pretty clever in his own way.
HYS: What was it like working with Crafter and what were the main things you learned from him in terms of running a band?
Russell: He’s definitely not always the easiest to work with, but that’s just because he wants to get things done. You could only survive in it if you wanted to get things done and that’s why there were only a couple of us who’d really get as far as touring in the band. It cost a lot of money, all that kind of stuff. It taught me what it’s really like to be in a band and that you can’t expect to be a rock star instantly. You’ve really got to pay your dues and just get out there and work hard. The main thing I learned from him was not to take it all too seriously and try and have some fun. Every tour we did, we’d just try and do as much stupid shit as we could and go to water parks and go-karting. I always found the dudes I toured with in that band wanted to have fun and made it fun. Other people would stress too much and stress themselves out on tour.
HYS: Working together, who drives the rhythm or lead guitars?
Arron: It’s been fairly fifty-fifty. There’ll be times where I come up with a lead idea, or a heavier idea and he’ll do the same. Just depending on the mood, the day, and how each of us are feeling, we’ll bring the same aspects to different areas, which is good because we both kind of have broad ideas for the whole thing.
Russell: We kind of just sat around and mucked around with structures at Arron’s house. He’s got a little set up at his house. We’d kind of just write and then re-write. One of us would start off with a riff and we’d get together and decide if we hated it. There was just a lot of chopping and changing of parts until the structures flowed really well. I’ve definitely worked with a few guitarists in the past who were really good influences, like Dan Brown from Confession, Clint from Getaway Plan and Cal from Dream on Dreamer. They were really helpful dudes who gave us hints and pointers if they thought were going in the wrong direction. That helped too.
HYS: Arron, I saw you and Jai played in Our Solace together.
Arron: Usually, with writing, we try not to clutter it at the start of writing a song. I’ve just got a shitty little set up at home with Cubase and some fake drums. We’ll come up with the idea and we’ll just send it to everyone else. Me and Jai, we have a friend that has a studio and he hooks us up with a good rate. We’ll just go in and we’ve got the template of the song, but that’s where we’ll focus on changing bits up and writing bits. Jai’s pretty creative, he likes to get a bit crazy.
HYS: What about Logan’s vocals? Did he come up with all the harmonies, or he’d have a line and you’d drop something in?
Russell: Because I do the clean vocals in the band, he writes all the lyrics on his own and he’d just kind of leave a patch for me to do my thing with these lyrics he gave me. So, I’d do the harmonies and all that stuff. Usually, we just got lucky and it worked out. Cal’s really smart with that stuff, the guy who recorded us. He’d make sure we didn’t do anything that sounded like shit.
HYS: How does it pass the litmus test, not overdoing the melody with the heavy?
Russell: I feel like it’s an emotional thing when we write. Some of the darker songs will sound dark because we wrote riffs like that when we were feeling that way. Some of the brighter songs, we wrote when we were having a happier day. I think that’s why you can feel the up and down, because it’s kind of real as to how we were feeling during that time. That’s why it balances it out and it doesn’t feel like two different bands. It feels like the same guys making those kinds of sounds, balancing the harmonies out in that way.
Arron: I guess we all draw inspiration from a lot of different areas. I used to play in a melodic hardcore band, so I think that aspect of it comes fairly naturally to me. Honestly, it’s just always how it’s worked out. If we’ve been writing a track or something like that, say you’ve got your verse and pre-chorus or stuff like that, it’ll be a lot darker. Then it’ll get to the chorus, but the chorus has always turned out, I hate to say it, ‘pretty’. It kind of just worked out that way, unintentionally, but we all draw influences from that kind of stuff.
HYS: On the second last song Animal Kingdom I can hear the tech influence. In future, do you want to push yourself more towards that area of songwriting, or more towards the melodic? Or keep on balancing the two and keep going as it is?
Arron: I love that song because it’s still in the same ballpark as the rest of the album, but it’s definitely a darker and industrial sounding song. I think having the balance is perfect. You might get people who love the singing and the choruses and stuff like that, but you get people who might not necessarily gravitate towards stuff like that and prefer something like Animal Kingdom. I think it’s kind of balancing the two. It’s fun, because you get to play the more brutal songs like Animal Kingdom and then you get to take a break with the nicer songs.
HYS: What does the future hold for the remainder of this year?
Russell: We’re definitely hoping to get across Australia this year. We’ve only been to New South Wales so far, we really want to get up to Queensland, over to Adelaide and to Perth as well in the next few months. That’s definitely on the radar, and abroad hopefully after that. We’ll see how it goes. We’re really interested to see what the response is to the CD and we’ve got some people trying to help us out with doing that, so fingers crossed.
Arron: We want to go full speed ahead, but we don’t want to put ourselves out. Music is our passion and our life, but we want to make sure we’re all one hundred percent comfortable with the choices we’re making. Overseas would be amazing, but we’re happy to take a step back and wait for the perfect time for that to happen. It’s good, since we’re all on the same page with stuff like that. We’re in the process of booking our album launch show, which I think will be early November.
A Means to Disappear is out on October 14 here.
