Gravemind revealed some new album secrets with us at UNIFY Gathering...

It's no secret metal/deathcore legends Gravemind are currently tearing up the ranks of Australian's heavy music echelon and fans just can't seem to get enough of them. Following the release of their super impressive EPs The Deathgate (2017) and The Hateful One (2015) plus, their fan-favourite 2018 single 'Lifelike', attention has now turned to what the guys will do next now that their debut album is on the way in 2019.

We grabbed the band backstage at UNIFY Gathering for a chinwag on our podcast and tried to score some more info about what we can expect with it, the band kindly revealed:

"We have got the album written and now we've got it recorded, we're waiting to get it mixed... We're all very stoked, we all put in a lot of effort and we're very stoked with the result."

"We gave it literally everything we had and so if it comes out and no one likes it, I'm not gonna lose any sleep over that" - frontman Dylan Gillies-Parsons

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP-y3gLDuX4&w=640&h=360]

The boys also added that we'll be waiting a few months until the first signs of new music start to rear their ugly heads, but until then, they elaborated a bit more on the idea behind the forthcoming release:

"The album is a bit different to what we've done before it's a little bit less metaphorical and it's a bit more direct... it's just a little bit easier to kind of understand exactly what each song is about and this album is kind of tailored around the start and end being something a bit more observational, a bit more the plight of being alive and it ties itself together really personally"

"Each song is kind of its own separate isolated thing with a few shared ideas between the music. But we do have one mega concept song, one big boy concept song."

The album was written with help from producer Scottie Simpson of Alpha Wolf (and we all know how that band's new direction is going), so we can only hope Gravemind adopted some of their sound ideas to make this their biggest and heaviest release yet. Dylan also revealed the band recorded the album's instrumentals first and he came into the studio, heard the tracks then wrote the lyrics when inspiration struck:

"Sometimes you'll write a song and it's very apparent what it's about while you're writing it... There's a few songs on there, one called 'Phantom Pain', I think 'Volgin' as well, it kind of wrote itself in a couple of hours."

[gallery ids="https://wallofsoundau.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Gravemind-1.jpg|,https://wallofsoundau.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/unify-5.jpg|Gravemind,https://wallofsoundau.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Gravemind-3.jpg|" type="square"]

And for those of you who have frothed over the band's merch ideas over the years, while they didn't reveal too much about what they had planned for this release, they did talk about the ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor (including gravy flavoured chips with collectable tazos) amongst other things:

"There's two things, we were actually working on doing a video game for The Deathgate, like a side scroller, and I was actually doing a video game course at uni to assist in doing that and I remember speaking to a few guys (one of the guys even worked for EA) and he's like 'just fucking give up!' He's like 'that's $200,000 [and] a year's worth of work, even for something really simple like to make sure it's all bug tested' so we didn't really go ahead with that."

"The second one was Gravemind: The Gathering... logistics didn't really pan out, unfortunately"

[gallery ids="https://wallofsoundau.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Gravemind-Merch-Darcy-Lock.jpg|Gravemind Merch by Darcy Lock,https://wallofsoundau.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gravemind-merch.jpg|Gravemind 'Likelike' Boxset Test Press " type="rectangular"]

You can also find out why the band will NEVER be allowed to wear shorts on stage by checking out the full interview in our Wall of Sound: Up Against The Wall UNIFY Podcast Special right here. Then check out our review of their performance at the festival here

Words by Browny @brownypaul
Photo Gallery by Bree Vane

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL21ORcGFQk&w=853&h=480]