KINGDOM OF GIANTS // We Are Passengers

Kingdom of Giants have been grinding away for years, and have just released their latest heavy offering, Passenger.

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It’s the fourth album for the Californians and their first under the Sharptone Records banner. Following its release, we caught with frontman Dana Willax to chat all about it.

Hysteria: How’d the album come together?

Dana: We just wrote it (laughs). It was the right time, we had signed to a new label and we were excited to write. We all sat down and brought riffs to the table and started building songs off that. We probably started twenty songs or so, but we took the best twelve and ran with them.

Getting it finalised was challenging due to the pandemic, especially getting everyone together safely to wrap it all up. Working with Matt Thomas at AshTone Audio made the process smooth, and he made it all fun so we were really able to enjoy the writing process. We knew we were in good hands.

Tell us more about the impact of the pandemic.

Luckily we had a lot of the album done before the pandemic started. The writing process was mostly finished and I usually track my own vocals anyway. Jonny (Reeves, bass/cleans) actually works at the studio we recorded at, so he was able to work on tracking the guitars and bass when we weren’t all there to help.

Thematically, what inspired the record?

Sometimes we’re not in control, and we’re not in the driver’s seat of our own lives. No matter how hard you try sometimes you can’t get back on that track and you feel like someone else is driving and taking you along for the ride. This album is about taking back control and saying, I need to start steering for myself. The double meaning is that we wanted the listener to be a passenger, coming along for the ride of listening to the album with us.

How did you feel this record compares to your last ones?

Each record that we’ve written has been what was needed at the time, so I can’t look back and say that this record is better than Ground Culture because I’m happy that album exists for that time in our lives. I think that’s the most important part of making music, making what you want to hear rather than what people want you to make. That’s one of the best things about Passenger, we knew what we wanted to do and we were going to do it, regardless of how it was going to be perceived.

This album is about taking back control and saying, ‘I need to start steering for myself.’
[ Dana Willax ]

What are your favourite parts of the record?

One of my favourite things is those reaction videos of people listening to a song for the first time. Wayfinder is one of my four favourite songs on the record, and I’ve watched some reactions to it. When I was watching them, and knew my favourite part of the song was coming up I was excited to see how the fans would react. They just pause it and go on about it, that’s the reaction you want. It feels so good!

You’ve got some killer collabs on the album, tell us about them.

Having Michael Barr from Volumes on the record feels so full circle because we went on our first tour with them and haven’t done anything with them since. It was also their first tour so we bonded really hard for five weeks on the road, we were grateful to go out on the road and be with them.

We kept in touch with Michael after he left Volumes. He did all these side projects and I loved those but it was really cool that he happened to get back in the band at just the time we were putting together the album. It just felt like the right time to collab, the cards were all there and he crushed it! It was something that should’ve happened a long time ago but it needed to happen now. And Courtney Laplante is such an inspiration. We’ve been fans of her band SpiritBox from the beginning, it’s been really cool to see how much they’ve blown up since that feature was recorded. Both those collaborations meant a lot to all of us.

Tell us about the new signing to Sharptone Records.

We’re super grateful, I feel like Sharptone has all of my favourite bands at all times. They’re always signing bands that are on the come up, instead of the biggest bands in the world. Shawn Keith is always looking out for the potential in bands and he just signs what he likes. I respect that because we just write what we like. We’re super grateful to be on the label, he’s been so good to us and to sit on the same level as some of the other bands there feels so good.

What’s next for the band?

We’re all at home, everyone is visually involved more now than ever before with their phones and computers. I don’t know if we’ll be doing any live streaming type of thing, we like to think outside of the box and find something interesting that hasn’t been done yet. We don’t necessarily know what that is yet, but we’re just going to try to be creative and learn from what other bands have done.