FUTURE STATIC // Riding The Wave To The Top

It’s been a huge couple of months for Future Static. The Melbourne alt-metallers have signed to Wild Thing Records, announced their new frontwoman Amariah Cook and most recently, have shared the jaw-dropping Waves.

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Add to that their upcoming festival appearances, and we’ve got no doubt these heavy-hitters will break out in a big way. We caught up with Cook to chat about the band, the new single and their plans for 2022.

Hysteria: Let’s dig into what inspired the new single Waves.

Amariah: It came from lockdown ending and everything being so overwhelming, just getting back into it and trying to get as much done as possible. And trying to make life as good as it can be, but that being quite difficult to do as well. So feeling very overwhelmed but then also adding in physical illnesses. I’ve got an autoimmune disease, which makes everything very difficult to jump back into really quickly.

And being in a band as well. I only joined Future Static in January. And it escalated really quickly. So it was like, oh, wow, we’re doing a lot of things and trying to balance that with my full-time job of hairdressing. It’s really hard to take days off when you’ve got things that have been booked in for months. It was also inspired by being full of guilt and not having enough time to do everything you want and give your loved ones all the time they need.

Was this the first track you worked on with the band? Give us a view of how it came together.

I think this was the second one we worked on together. There was another one, but we decided to release this one first. It just felt like a really good one to debut me on. And it was really fun to write as well.

We’ve read that you grew up with music, got out of it and are now jumping back in. That must be such an awesome feeling.

It was really awesome to find this out of nowhere. I looked on and off for bands; it was quite hard to find one that suited what I wanted. And to also find people who were committed and wanted to get somewhere. And then I’d find that a lot of the responses were like, all the songs are written in a male register. So it would be really hard for a female to sing these things because it would be too low. So when Future Static popped up, it was just like, I need to be in this band.

There wasn’t really a narrative that we came up with, but we thought it would be cool to add to the story and have me get up at the end and breathe. Like hey, this is not actually that bad, you can just take a break, get up and breathe and then everything’s fine.
[ Amariah Cook ]

The music video is such a great fit for the epic vibes of the track. Tell us about your experience putting it together.

We kind of just came up with a few ideas. Just really winged it and went out on a whim. One of the ideas was to put me in a fish tank. And thank goodness, I’m like, really small and five foot nothing. We were able to find a four-foot-long fish tank and do that. And then we ended up filming it in just one location. And doing all the scenes with us playing and the fish tank in the same place.

There wasn’t really a narrative that we came up with, but we thought it would be cool to add to the story and have me get up at the end and breathe. Like hey, this is not actually that bad, you can just take a break, get up and breathe and then everything’s fine. So we kind of added a nicer ending to the story through the music video.

You’ve got a bunch of huge shows coming up. What are you most excited about?

Knight and Day is going to be our first festival. So that’s pretty amazing. Well, I mean, for me anyway. I’m actually not quite sure if they’ve played festivals before. They’ve done one that they put on ages ago called Static Fest, but I don’t think they’ve played a proper, big festival before.

Besides the Adelaide one, all the shows coming up are part of a festival. So that’s really fun. We’ve got Uncaged as well. We’re playing all dates, so Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. And then we’ve got an Adelaide show. So we thought, this is basically a tour. We can make it the Waves tour.

We hear there’s more music on the way. When might we expect to see it?

So we’ll probably release another single at the beginning of next year, somewhere in the first couple of months. We’re not sure; we don’t have a date yet. We also plan to release a full-length LP sometime next year, like later in the year.