DEVIL ELECTRIC // A Godless Mindset

Heavy Melbourne four piece Devil Electric mine a long tradition of dark riffs, crashing drums, towering vocals and demonic imagery.

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Drawing from the influence of Black Sabbath and the likes of Coven and Pentagram for their 2017 self-titled debut, for their current release the band has aligned their sound even closer to that of their forebears.

“We worked with a different sound engineer on this album, Julian, who was incredible, and we decided to go a little more lo-fi in terms of trying to do less but still creating that sound we can do live,” says vocalist and lyricist Pierina “Pip” O’Brien. “Part of that was also writing some stuff in the studio. I actually rewrote a full song in the studio on the day – I scrapped it and went with something else. We had that idea of going in there with what we’ve got, we’ll make something and we’ll capture it. Like, Your Guess is As Good As Mine seems like we didn’t know how to end it, but that’s how it came out, and we liked it and it was good.”

The recording philosophy was simple: ”We didn’t want to overthink anything. We didn’t want anything that was so written, it was rigid. We wanted to make sure we had flexibility to work with other ideas and influences and things like that.”

Such immediacy and chemistry takes time to ferment, and Devil Electric has the benefit of retaining the same personnel since the beginning.

“We’ve become way more comfortable together. I first met Tom the first day of band rehearsals for Devil Electric, so we’ve had all this time together now,” O’Brien says. “We recorded that first album relatively quickly from when we started playing together to when we recorded that. Playing together has formed a tight bond as a band and as friends and almost as a little family.”

Devil Electric’s monolithic rifferama is provided by Christos Athanasias, who recently also celebrated the release of the second album by his other band, The Ugly Kings. As O’Brien makes clear, though, four-stringer Tom Hulse has just as important a role to play in how the riffs go down.

“Christos is an incredible musician. His thought process and his way of thinking things is one of my favourite things to listen to. He can hear things in colours, and all that kind of stuff, which is so cool to me, but the other great thing about it is that Tom is a guitarist also. Even though he plays bass in Devil Electric, he plays guitar in other bands, so he and Christos together as a writing team really feed off each other, because they’ve got different musical backgrounds and influences, so they bounce really well. It’s just like the perfect marriage together.”

In a combination of fascination and self-declared laziness, O’Brien has managed to find inspiration for her role as singer and chief lyric writer by staring at the books on her living room bookshelf. The titles of works by novelists like Stephen King and Paul Tremblay then end up in her songs.

Like, Your Guess is As Good As Mine seems like we didn’t know how to end it, but that’s how it came out, and we liked it and it was good.
[ Pierina “Pip” O’Brien ]

“It was kind of by accident, it wasn’t deliberate,” she says. “I’m a massive night owl, and I sit up late at night on my couch, and there’s this bookshelf in front of my couch that’s full of all these books my husband reads. I’d always be stupidly disorganised, so it was always the night before band rehearsal, I’d never have the song done, I’d just be sitting there staring at this bookshelf.”

She goes on explaining her process: “Normally when I rehearse songs, and I have a melody, I’ll have the things that are in front of me and I’ll sing them out. There might be a cup in front of me, or a book, or anything, and I started thinking up these titles. Then I thought it would be a cool idea to pick those up and start singing about those as lyrics, and they started to work, so I just incorporated those lounge room books into all of the songs. It was kind of a coincidence, and also laziness on my part, as well!”

It’s not just straight-up plagiarism though. Those titles provide the fuel for the metaphors and analogies O’Brien brings to her lyrics, stories she brings vivid life to with her rich and dynamic vocals.

“The difference between the first one and now, even though the first one was a lot of analogies as well, this one is more grounded in my personal experience, lyrically, in these songs. There’s a lot of personal moments told through analogies. All My Friends Move Like the Night is inspired by The Great Gatsby, but also all this out-of-control partying and all this stuff that I normally do. It’s a bit of a reflection on me through analogies. The great thing about the titles of books is that they’re always so well thought out. There’s another song that I’ve written that includes the lyrics ‘a head full of ghosts’. That’s a Paul Tremblay novel, and I’ve always thought what a great title that is for something. It’s amazing that they have to come up with such great names and first lines, and I try to incorporate that into lyrics, but without just stealing it. Repurposing it, so it’s my story told through these titles.”

COVID held off the release of Godless, which the band completed early last year. The launch for the album’s first single, All My Friends Move Like the Night, was in March 2020. Devil Electric haven’t played together since then. It’s been a drag for them, but with live music creaking back to life, O’Brien and the band could finally do an album launch show in the near future.

“For me personally, not being able to play live has been one of the hardest things. It’s a whole side of yourself that you can’t express. I’ve really relied on it for anger relief and stuff. It’s part of who we are as a band and we all enjoy it and it’s obviously something we want to get back into and start doing again. As soon as we can we’ll tee up a launch show.”