For You
The first song on the record, the first song we wrote, the first single - everyone’s introduction. This was the template for the genesis of R U N, and it started with some pretty complicated ideas that can ultimately be boiled down to simply crossing Deafheaven with The Amity Affliction. I think we nailed the brief and created a perfect base level platform to build our sound off. There’s a few cheeky things going on with double meanings and unexpected turns, but for the most part I am trying to express myself in a way that others might be able to connect with and benefit from. This song refers to such seemingly universal topics as suicide, heartache, fear, and mental health - fairly standard stuff for heavy music. I spun that into a statement also about how I don’t sing for other people’s bands anymore, and perhaps how this music is not for everyone. It’s a reminder to live for yourself, but to also look out for the people around you.
Will Never
This was the last song to come together, and we were struggling with it until one day I was hit by the seizure that started my brain cancer journey. We already knew that the song was meant to be an angry belter with nods towards Slipknot and Satyricon, but it just didn’t come together until my tumour shook everything up and got the recording deadline enforced. Lots of unexpected influences revealed themselves along the way with this project in general - turns out we actually shared a deeper bond through '90s metal, and the intro is 100% Fear Factory worship. Anyway, the experience of being in hospital and finding out you have a life threatening condition can be pretty inspiring, in a really aggravating and terrifying way. I just wanted to scream “fuck” at the top of my lungs, so I did so several times. My agency and all my plans and potentially eventually even my life was all in question. You are going to fucking die. This is a reminder that plays in my mind regularly.
Find Peace
One of the fun things with this band in trying to establish the sound was that it was all new - a wide open canvas. Armed with a genius producer/guitarist/bandmate who had only a vague familiarity with the majority of this band’s stated influences, this meant we could take the base level sound we had come up with on For You and begin mixing it with other stuff without needing to feel constrained to any particular shade of metal. While the first two songs have a very strict verse/chorus structure, this is where the record gets weird and angry on a much darker level, and we wanted to make an unconventional song. The Ocean, Killswitch Engage, Harm’s Way - these are some of the influences pulling the patchwork quilt together. Fun fact: the breakdown at the end is allegedly the first ever breakdown that Mike’s ever written. When he first sent it through it absolutely crushed me, much like the broken hearts that inspired the song’s lyrics.
Within
This record is littered with little love letters to my favorite bands. The post-metal band Rosetta is the main one here. Structure wise we knew this song didn’t need to be a fully fleshed out song - it is intended to be a movement to take you from A to B. We took the Rosetta sound and put it into a format inspired by interludes written by metalcore bands. Once we started to get a bit deeper into fleshing it out we sampled the wormhole scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, from which Mike created the whole experimental part in the middle before shit gets hectic. Lyrically I think it’s a reflection on my struggles with my own queerness and identity. I also blatantly repurposed some of Rosetta’s lyrics for it. Bong on.
Your Quiet
This song is the sister song to For You. The record starts off positive, we shove you into the dirt and go for an adventure, and now that we’ve been through the deepest depths and taken some time to think about it all, we’re ready to come back up for another positive slab of feel-good summertime black metal - this time fully formed. We’re proud of all the songs on here, but agree that this is our best work. This song starts off as another mission statement much like For You, and kind of drifts off into a stream of consciousness on the experience of life, and while writing I expressed my frustration with feeling like I couldn’t grasp the punchline. Mike jokingly responded with something like “who cares, just get high”, and turns out that was actually it. I love smoking weed, I love performing music. Ultimately, through all sorts of means, I think most of us are trying to get high somehow, to feel a rush, to change our state of mind, to become bigger than we are, to win, to be rewarded, to feel power, to satisfy an urge, to lose ourselves in the moment. Apparently when you die a large amount of DMT is released from deep within your brain. That’s when absolutely everyone is getting high. This song is about building more good memories to take towards that final moment of kaleidoscopic reflection.
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Stream For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet in full here.
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