Pallbearer, who are set to release their fourth album, Forgotten Days on October 23 via Nuclear Blast, have released a second track from the nine-song album: “Rite Of Passage”. Pre-order here.
“’Rite Of Passage’ is both a reflection and a confessional,” explains bass player/songwriter Joseph Rowland. “The toll that loss has taken on my life often finds ways to remind me that I may never feel whole, and the song’s purpose is to express and embody that emptiness. It felt totally appropriate to wrap it in reimagined trappings of our earliest doom-leaning material.”
“Forgotten Days is us exploring what is natural to us,” says bass player/songwriter Joseph Rowland. “The songs tell me where I need to go when I write. We wanted to focus on songs that were visceral and enjoyable to play live – that our audiences would enjoy experiencing. We’re also getting back to more of the groovier and heavier elements of Pallbearer. Heartless is fairly uptempo and technical. This one is a little more open, it hammers you.”
“This record has a lot of thematic ties to our first record,” Rowland continues. “When we were writing Sorrow and Extinction, my mother was terminally ill. It’s been 10 years since she passed. It’s taken me all of this time to take a really good look at myself. While we were writing Forgotten Days, I knew, ‘Now is the time to sit down and begin to understand who I have become.’”
“Joe and I have always written lyrics separately,” adds singer/guitar player Brett Campbell. “But we always end up with lyrics that are connected by threads. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because we’ve been in close proximity for a long while. Between Heartless and Forgotten Days, we were home for an extended period of time. I think we finally had time to reflect. Memory is a big aspect of the new record. The passage of time. How things change as perspective changes. Was the past truly the way that you remember it at all?”
The Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Johan Johannson) produced album was recorded at Sonic Ranch Studios in West Texas. Michael Lierly, drummer Mark Lierly’s brother, once again created the album’s artwork, crafting images that were roughly hewn yet heartbreaking in their expressive heft. The striking cover, by Michael Lierly, is the ideal foil to Pallbearer’s thick musical and lyrical melancholia.
I'm the lost one chasing colors to the sun
Colors bleed but never fade
Pallbearer, indisputable masters of emotionally insightful and stirring heavy music, return with their most raw and heartfelt album to date: Mind Burns Alive (May 17, Nuclear Blast Records).
“These songs are a deeper exploration of dynamics and sonic color than anything we have done up to this point,” vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell explains, shedding light on the band’s decision to strip everything back on the forthcoming nearly hour-long album. “I’m of the belief that true heaviness comes from emotional weight, and sometimes sheer bludgeoning isn’t the right approach to getting a feeling across.”
A preview of Mind Burns Alive arrives today with the release of “Where The Light Fades” and its Dan Almasy-directed video. Lyrically, the song eludes to what are the overall themes on the six-song album, as Campbell describes the tracks as “vignettes that tell the stories of people who deal with myriad sicknesses of the spirit… illnesses communicated by the world we live in, and the subjects are the symptoms of the disease.”
Five years in the making, with recording initially slated for 2020, and thwarted yet again in 2022, it was 2023 that saw the band members living locally to one another in Little Rock for the first time in nine years. As a group, they self-produced the album in their own, newly constructed studio (Idlewild Audio) and at Fellowship Hall Sound. Reflecting on this, bassist/vocalist Joseph D. Rowland remarked, “It’s ironic given that the album is largely centered around isolation, but it felt like it summoned us into being back together again in one town, after so long apart.”
I'm the lost one chasing colors to the sun
Colors bleed but never fade
J'aime beaucoup ce groupe mais je n'ai pas été plus emballé que ça par ce titre très (trop?) calme à la première écoute... cela passe mieux à la seconde mais j'espère que tout l'album ne sera pas ainsi
