ORPHEUS OMEGA // Bleeding the Way

Melbourne melodic death metal band Orpheus Omega are currently on tour with compatriots Be’lakor.

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It’s their second time out on the road this year after finally celebrating the 10th anniversary of their debut album earlier in 2022 with an oft-postponed run of shows that farewelled original guitarist Joao Goncalves. The band’s latest single Within These Walls is a showcase of the new line-up teaming up with British musician Andy Gillion, who is also part of the tour. Chris Themelco is singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer with Orpheus Omega, and eager to explain the origins of their latest work and the excitement around their current tour.

Is this the precursor for more tracks, or is it a stand alone single?

It’s a bit of both. There will be more tracks, but this one is the pebble to start something growing. We’re sort of treating it as its own thing at the moment, and then when we have more to say after the tour, we’ll get some more stuff going.

It’s a good way to lead into the tour, and have something to go out on the road with, because it’s been a while since the last album, and you’re touring with Be’lakor, whose album is a bit more recent. It must be great being back out there again.

The first two shows have just been awesome. We haven’t played with the guys since 2015 when we released our third album. After all that time it’s been like, well, let’s see how it goes. But you can tell both bands have grown a whole bunch and come into their own. Be’lakor is an impeccably polished unit and I think, for us, we’ve found our niche a bit more especially in our live shows. It’s a really good combination that’s worked really well. Then having Andy Gillion playing his first ever live shows on his solo stuff has just been icing on the cake.

Having him play on that song really adds even more to it. Within These Walls is only a short song, so it’s not epic in length but it is epic in scope and he brings even more pizazz. Is it correct that you have worked with Andy before?

There’s been nothing official that’s been out. We’ve been friends for ages and helped each other out with things, but this is the first thing we’ve really worked together on. I came to him about it when I had the bones of the song down pat. I knew what I wanted from this song and it sort of leads into the other songs we’re doing, but this song, specifically, is pretty much my song. I knew that I wanted Andy on it. Originally I wanted him to do orchestrations and stuff because I wanted that epic scope and feel in such a short song, and then it kept growing from there. It became him doing a guitar solo – because that’s his thing – and then having him do vocals in some of the parts, as a trade-off. That came later on. He’s never had anything released where he’s had his full-on growls and screams. So this song kept growing and growing and growing. We kept having more ideas. I really intended to keep it as a digestible song, but pack it with a lot of stuff so when you get to the end you think, ‘I need to listen to that again to really hear everything!’ Because there are a lot of things happening. It was fun to make them all work, but not clash. That was really fun.

I think that’s one thing we’ve learnt just by working with so many awesome people. How I work with bands from a producer’s perspective has been so hard to apply to my own music. It’s always been like that.
[ Chris Themelco ]

There is a lot going on, with many, many layers, but you’ve been able to make a track that still sounds coherent and that’s a credit to you as a songwriter but also to the band because you were able to pull back and not go too far.

I think that’s one thing we’ve learnt just by working with so many awesome people. How I work with bands from a producer’s perspective has been so hard to apply to my own music. It’s always been like that. This time around, entirely self-producing this group of songs we’ve been working on – and intentionally so – it’s been really fun going through those iterations and going, ‘This part sounds too busy. What’s the focus of this section? Is it the guitar part? OK, we need to pull back on the synths’. Or, ‘The vocals can be a bit laboured so let the rest of the band to have a moment’. So it was a little stressful, but in a good way, to challenge ourselves to have that in mind. That we can’t have anything that’s too packed. And I feel like the songs are at 100, but they have valleys that go to 50 or 60%. Like, the song kicks in with this huge opening melody, and that’s the chorus, and then we get to the verse and we have to strip it back. Because we’ve already hit it so hard, it needs to come down. It can’t be that into it. That was really fun. For me it was a bit different, because I do think that I write a little bit more sparsely in some things. Obviously I’m more guitar-driven, and this one was like, guitars aren’t the main element. Everything has a different section to be the main element, so it was about picking which element needed to be heard at which point. That was really fun.

What is it like producing other bands compared to your own music. With others you’re standing outside the circle, whereas you’re much closer to your own work. How do you find that?

If it’s not my song – if I wasn’t the songwriter – I can step further back and be the producer. If another band member comes and says they have this structure, my mind will go immediately to producer mode and be like, ‘Ok, what did I hear that stuck out? What are the intentions of the song? How do we get there?’ Then I’ll inject my writing ideas after that point, because I don’t want to get too mixed in there and then fall too far into it. I want to make sure my first thoughts are a production standpoint, and from there I can contribute my parts as if someone else is producing it. So I work backwards now. If someone else comes to me with a song, I’ll play producer first instead of playing band member, so I don’t get married to any idea that’s not going to work. I’ve found that’s worked well over the last couple of years, but that’s taken me forever to get to that spot. Whenever we’re working with someone else who’s producer, I’m always so much happier! I just get to play my instrument. It becomes someone else’s responsibility at that point. It’s nice.

You sound something about pebbles before – what are you building towards, with those pebbles?

This whole experience has been the first time we’ve got this current line-up touring together. We did the Bleed the Way ten year anniversary tour earlier this year after four or five postponements, or whatever! Joao was on those shows and that was sort of his swansong, so these shows right now are all about getting all the people that are in the band right now togethering in the touring sense and to really understand each other outside the studio. There are other songs in the pipeline, we have a plan for all of it, but we didn’t want to commit to them being done before the tour because we wanted the experience of touring together to help inform these songs when we go back to them. We’re already happy with them, but I feel that we always have the best outcomes after we’ve been on tour. We did Dark Tranquillity, Children of Bodom and our Archways Across Asia tour in 2014, and after that we wrote Partum via Mortum. After that we did Trivium, Lacuna Coil, Insomnium, a whole bunch of other stuff, went back to Asia again, and then we wrote Wear Your Sins. So we always find touring with other bands so much more inspiring. I think we have our sound at this point. People like to point it out even when we don’t think it’s there! But we’ve never been shy of loving and incorporating our influences, because we’re always listening to different stuff. Every album of ours has a different vibe because we’re not scared to let those influences in. I wanted that. And, we haven’t played with Be’lakor in ages and the opening acts on this tour are frigging incredible: Dyssidia, Snake Mountain, Besomora… Black Lava in Melbourne and Immorium in Canberra. All these awesome bands that we get to play with, and I just want to soak that in. That’s how we’ve always operated as a band best, just being sponges to our peers.