New Music

Earthbound 'Immortalising Life Experiences in New Realms'

Sep 2, 2020

7 min read

Victorian upcoming metalcore act Earthbound have been quite the busy band throughout the year amidst COVID-19. The guys have been perfecting their sound for their next EP release, Evergreen (our review here). With the follow up to the band's 2018 release, Liquify, the progressive metalcore five-piece wanted to challenge themselves musically and gauge their inspiration through new avenues.

Evergreen is a neat 4-track EP consisting of tasty breakdowns and riffage, born out of the band's mutual interest in video games. Make sure you check it out during your next gaming sesh. The band have taken on quite an intriguing viewpoint and perspective, that I just had to grab a chat with the band all about their latest efforts. No Twitch membership required.

How did Earthbound form?

Jake, David, Rhys and Daniel all grew up in South Gippsland with 3 of us going to high school together and 2 of us bieng in a previous band. We were fairly musically connected before Earthbound and we formed in 2015 once all of us had finished high school.

We met Tom online during the recording process of our first EP Solstice. He auditioned for us with 'Quantum Flux' by Northlane and we knew we had to have him as soon as we heard it.

Evergreen is your first release since 2018’s Liquify. What were your intentions going into this release as opposed to previous releases? What message did you wanna send out to listeners?

We really wanted challenge ourselves from a writing and playing perspective. Evergreen has a lot of new techniques that we haven't used so far and the overall complexity of the songs far outweighs anything we did on Liquify. We wanted to include more songs that people could dance and groove to, rather than just being pit lords.

We just want our listeners to have fun with these tracks. Seeing people have a boogey to them really makes our day.

You guys sure love the whole gaming thing! How did you come up with the concept to create an entire EP based around your gaming experience?

As a band we probably spend far too much time playing games, and basing lyrics around them was a super fun way of immortalising our own experiences in our favourite games. It's also a pretty cool way of letting our audience interpret our music in their own personal way because games resonate with people differently.

There’s a song on your last EP that featured Thornhill’s Jacob Charlton. How did that collaboration for 'Aquamarine' come about?

We recorded with Nick from Thorny and just thought Jacob would be a cool feature to have. Luckily he was keen to do it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79EreRnL_HU&w=560&h=315]

After 3 EP’s, are you guys keen to record a full-length record anytime soon?

Keen for the concept of doing a full length, we think we could tell a pretty cool story over a full length, however pumping out EPs is a lot more fun and there's a lot more focus on a few good tracks rather than achieving a run time of a full length just for the sake of it.

That's a fair point. Listeners have a short attention span these days too! So who are the band’s music influences?

As a band we have a lot of different influences going across quite a few genres. Erra, Dance Gavin Dance and Wage War are big influences for our guitarists.

COVID-19 has changed the musical landscape greatly and with live shows off the market for quite some time, how are you planning to engage with fans and listeners to keep momentum?

We have a few cool ideas up our sleeves for when shows come back, in whatever format that is. For the time being though we do have a few more surprises to roll out to keep everyone engaged.

You guys could even get into streaming via Twitch, and spread your music into the gaming community. Let’s close out with this tie breaking question… who’s team Xbox and who’s team Playstation?

Hopefully this won't start too many fights.

Jake- PS4
Daniel - Xbox
Tom - PS4
David- PS4
Rhys - PS4

Looks like the band has spoken! We'll hopefully see you at a show soon, but in the meantime, we'll see you in the gaming realm!

Earthbound's new EP, Evergreen is out now through your fave streaming service.

Interview By Tamara May (@citylightstam)

Earthbound