Aden Young – Gravemind 'Rising Above A Perfect Storm of Things Going Haywire'
Playing in an independent original band is hard. Damnably hard. Most casual fans have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. Most casual fans only see the ‘glamorous’ side of being in a band - studio time, releasing the album, jumping on a plane and/or a bus and heading off on tour, the triumphant live shows. But what goes on in between all that is where the real work, grind and often heartbreak happens.
Forming back in 2014, Melbourne-based heavy outfit Gravemind released their debut album, Conduit, in 2019 (even that’s five years of hard grind before an album sees the light of day.) After that album’s highly successful release and subsequent live shows, the shit really hit the fan for this band, circumstances way beyond their control tossing an almighty spanner into the heart of their plans (including Covid and a change of singer, which is always a massive disruption to any band’s activities.)
They have risen above adversity however, to release their long-awaited follow-up album, Introsphere, and guitarist Aden Young recently filled us in on exactly what went down between their debut and sophomore.
“We had this album done before we had (new singer) Bailey join,” Young explains. “Having a vocal change right at the end, we had already completely done the album, ready to go, we’d finished it in 2021. Then we had the vocalist change, so it was definitely the big task of, ‘Hey Bailey, here’s an entire album, can you write to it?’ Obviously having written the songs with a different vocalist, and hearing the songs for the first time in a different light, with Bailey instead, was very jarring at first, but ultimately, working with him and him coming into it fresh, with all these new ideas and approaching it from a different viewpoint, definitely elevated it a lot. And it made us hear the songs in a different way, and I think we got to a better spot than what we were before.”
So, to unpack that, the band’s second album was virtually ready to hit the presses and roll out the door within two years of the first. However, all manner of shit then went down, and delayed the album’s release for no less than another three years. Young goes into a little more detail as to what actually caused such a massive delay and so much heartache for the band, and it’s a long and harrowing story.
“There was a multitude of reasons,” he says, “it was a snowball of everything, a perfect storm of things going haywire. We started writing maybe the month after Conduit came out, straight into it. We’d done Conduit with Scotty Simpson from Alpha Wolf, he was the producer for that and the single 'Lifelike' that we did in 2018. So we said, ‘This is sweet, we’ve got a good thing going,’ so we went straight back into the studio and hit the ground running. We’d released music every single year since we’d started as a band, and we decided that 2020 was going to be the year that we didn’t, we were going to take that time to tour, and do whatever we could on that front, and spend time writing the second album.
Obviously that whole touring thing didn’t happen. We had some European tours booked, that got cancelled (due to Covid), so we just spent that time writing. We finished writing the album at maybe the end of 2020, and recorded it at the beginning of 2021. It was all basically done, mixed and mastered and sent to us by May or June of 2021, then we had the member changes.”
It was at this point where things became really difficult for the band. Writing, recording and releasing an album of all-original songs is a tough enough thing to do at the best of times for an independent band, let alone when the universe intervenes in such an intrusive way.
“Giving Bailey an entire album of stuff to do, it’s pretty difficult, especially when we then had some touring commitments coming out of Covid. Then, of course, there’s the cost involved in completely re-doing an album. We’d already filmed two music videos entirely.
We were so close to releasing, I even have a test pressing of the original album, on vinyl (laughs.)
Then obviously paying for the recording of an album, and not being able to recoup any of the costs of that album, and then having to re-pay, and we had these two videos that we had to try to make work. Half of 'F.E.A.R.' and 'Terminal', those videos were filmed in 2021, and other parts of it were filmed last year.
“So it was a multitude of things that delayed it this long, and if we were re-doing this album, it was our second album and we thought, ‘this is incredible’, we were super happy with how it turned out. Then it was pretty demoralizing to have to take that step back so close to release and do it again. So three years, it took a while to get the ball rolling again, but when we did it made it back to where it was even better than it was before.”
Luckily, the band and their production crew were able to salvage most to all of the music from the earlier sessions and use it for the release. Only the vocals and lyrics had to be redone.
“We kept all of the music,” he says, “all the underlying instrumentals were the same. But we completely re-did, bar one song, all of the lyrics, and all of the melodies. The sound and vibe of the songs, in some instances, definitely changed a lot. Plus Bailey has more actual singing involved. That’s something we already had on this album anyway, with our previous vocalist Dylan. But we leaned into it a bit heavier, because that was part of Bailey’s skillset. We wanted to show that off, and it became a valuable part of this new sound.”
Not that Conduit was a lightweight effort at all, but the band have really stepped up their game in terms of the brutality of the new record, the crushing heaviness within its grooves. Young feels that at least some of the anger and aggression inherent in Introsphere emanates from the adversity of the times the band, and indeed the world, went through during that tumultuous time.
“Oh man,” Young laughs wrily. “So Damon, our main writer, I’d say that probably comes from being locked inside! Actually, everyone else being locked inside and he still had a job that he had to go to and do stuff. I lived with him at the time, and it was just, stressful. The dude was doing hard work, so I think that came out on the guitar!"
“We lost certain opportunities for the first time. We were doing a regional tour with Northlane at the beginning of 2020, and we’d announced our first Europe tour with Fit for a King, Silent Planet and Gideon. That was incredible, we announced that while we were on that (regional) tour, and a few weeks after we got back was when everything went into lockdown. That was pretty crushing.”
With all of the adversity of the last few years now behind them, and the album now unleashed upon the world, the band are now focused solely on the future.
“We have a tour coming up, pretty soon after the release. The album drops on the 2nd of August, and we head out on tour with In Hearts Wake on the 5th of September. So that’s pretty sick. Beyond that, we don’t have anything booked. Obviously we want to do a tour for the album, our own headline thing is the idea. We want to do that, and get some cool bands we know to come out with us."
“We also want it not to take another five years for more new music!
“We’d love to get overseas again. Hopefully, that avenue opens up again and we get some more offers coming in. We’re down for it, we just had to reprioritize. But hopefully we can make the overseas debut, that’s the plan.”
Interview by Rod Whitfield
Introsphere is out now via Greyscale Records. Get your copy here.
Gravemind – Introsphere Tracklisting
1. >_TERMINAL
2. Deathtouch
3. House of Cards
4. Rorschach
5. Anhedonia (Ft. Reba Meyers)
6. Failstate (Ft. Mick Gordon)
7. True Life
8. Aloy
9. F.E.A.R. (Ft. Jamie Hails)
10. Pranic Lift
