Slow Pulp are great at piano ballads. The Chicago indie rockers proved this with the beautiful title track of 2023’s Yard, and now they’re proving it again with the second Melodie single “Not For Nothing,” which is out today.
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Blues Rock Review is exclusively premiering “Change Is Inevitable,” the latest single from A.J. Fullerton. The track is the second single from his upcoming EP Baretone, due out September 11 via Gitcha Records.
Built around Fullerton’s expressive baritone guitar work, “Change Is Inevitable” reflects on the constant evolution of music, culture, and life itself while paying tribute to the Delta blues traditions that first inspired him. The song balances classic fingerstyle blues with a modern approach, capturing both the roots of the genre and Fullerton’s own musical evolution.
Speaking about the song, Fullerton says, “‘Change Is Inevitable’ serves as both a tribute to the classic fingerstyle Delta Blues that shaped my early influences and a contemporary interpretation of the genre. The song reflects on the constant state of transformation intrinsic in all music, culture, and the human experience. Through life’s unexpected twists and turns, one thing remains certain: change is inevitable.”
Recorded at Mark Anderson’s Cowboy Cowabunga Ranch in Evergreen, Colorado, “Change Is Inevitable” features Fullerton on baritone guitar, slide guitar, and bass, alongside Tim Carman on drums and Lauren Frihauf on backing vocals. The song explores the relentless march of change and the way time reshapes everything, whether we are prepared for it or not.
Baretone also marks the first time Fullerton and Carman recorded together. Tracked with minimal planning, the session prioritized spontaneity and feel over perfection. The core performances were recorded live in the room, capturing the chemistry between two musicians creating in the moment.
Originally from Colorado and now based in Nashville, Fullerton has spent more than a decade building a reputation as an accomplished fingerstyle and slide guitarist, producer, and songwriter. Throughout his career, he has shared stages with Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan, Samantha Fish, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Charlie Musselwhite, Otis Taylor, and many others.
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For the past few years, PinkPantheress has been one of the most influential forces in global pop music. She’s the artist who figured out how to make retro-futuristic dance beats feel personal and intimate and catchy. Meanwhile, one of her big influences is Kelela, the singer who was delicately wrapping her voice around precise, architectural club production long before the PinkPantheress breakthrough moment. Today, PinkPantheress and Kelela team up for their second collab.
The post Kelela – “the bridge” (Feat. PinkPantheress) appeared first on Stereogum.
As Bloodstock gets closer, we delve deep into the line up to find out more about some of the bands playing the New Blood and EMP stages at this years event.
Today we chat with Atarka
Please introduce yourselves.
My name is Haydn, I play guitar and I also do backing vocals. The rest of Atarka consists of Alex also on guitar, Phil on drums, Adam on Bass and Jamie on lead vocals
How would you describe your sound?
We label our sound as Melodic Death Metal similar to bands like In Flames and At The Gates, we also blend elements of other subgenres including Metalcore and Groove Metal
How did you land your spot on the Bloodstock bill?
We got to Bloodstock through winning this years Metal 2 The Masses competition in Birmingham, originally the band participated in the 2019 edition in Wolverhampton but ultimately lost in the final.
How tough was the competition this year?
It was incredibly tough for many different reasons. Me personally, I hadn’t done many competitions in the past so I wasn’t used to the pressure. All the bands we played with each heat were all superb, so it could’ve easily gone to anybody on the night.
What does playing at Bloodstock mean to you?
It means the world to us and we cannot thank everybody involved enough for getting us here, whether it be the judges or our fans that have followed us up and down the country and sang every word.
For people who’ve never seen you live, what can they expect at Bloodstock?
Fast, heavy and chaotic riffs, thunderous drumming and a lot of crowd participation
What day are you performing?
We are playing on the Friday in the New Blood Tent, the same day as the mighty Lamb of God!
What other bands are you looking forward to watching at Bloodstock this year?
Me and Adam love Cryptopsy so we cannot wait to see them, I’ve always wanted to see Judas Priest too so I’m super excited to finally see them, I’ve also seen Skynd a few times and they always put on an amazing show, on top of that there’ll be some familiar faces for us in the form of Descendancy and Vanitas who we cant wait to cheer on!
Playing the New Blood Stage is just the first steppingstone in a bands journey. What’s next in your plans for world domination?
Prior to Metal 2 The Masses we were doing a lot more gigs away from our local areas which I would love to organise again soon, and hopefully our performance at Bloodstock will attract a wide variety of metalheads from different parts of the country and who knows, maybe even the world, who can help spread our name like wildfire.
Are you camping with the fans? Which campsite are you heading for?
We will be camping in the artist area but because this is my first time ever at Bloodstock I want to explore every last area of it and get the full Bloodstock experience, maybe even witness the infamous Bin-Jousting!
You’ve gotta keep hydrated at Bloodstock, what is your drink of choice for the weekend?
Plenty of water would be the sensible answer but knowing me that’ll probably turn into a lot of Dr Pepper if I find anywhere that sells it!
See you at Bloodstock in a few weeks!
Thank you for having us, see you there!
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Flotsam & Jetsam – No Place For Disgrace 2014 Re-Record Originally released in 2014, No Place For Disgrace finds Flotsam & Jetsam revisiting one of the defining […]
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Those who venture into the more eccentric waters of metal sometimes meet projects that defy easy labelling. This is definitely the case for Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface, released on May 8th via Prophecy Productions. This gargantuan “weird fish” of a release marks the return of A Forest of Stars, who had been silent since their last presentations four years ago. Almost eight years, in fact, if one goes by the 2018 release date of Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes, the group’s last record. Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is also, probably, AFoS’s highest point until now.
Although the album’s presentation describes the band as “the physical manifestation of what can confidentially be called ‘British black metal’,” those unfamiliar with their output expecting a traditional black metal album might be surprised. On the other hand, one listening to the album free from such expectations, with a disposition to let themselves be led by styles that fleet between prog, folk and doom metal, might be enchanted by a solid work of art. One both tormented and meticulously crafted.
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And yes: containing a considerable amount of black metal, be it the atmospheric variant or the blast beats and heavy, dissonant guitars of the genre’s more aggressive strains. It is but a matter of not being warded off by the two-minute violin-led intro: the heavy stuff is guaranteed and on its way.
A 73-minute ride, the sixth A Forest of Stars release is a true odyssey of courageous ideas, centered on matters of politics and philosophy concerning a humankind that devours itself, the whole planet as mere collateral damage. The most creative album of the band’s output to date, and also the most deeply rooted in the reality of the times of its release. And AFoS allocates the proper space for thoughtful wanderings, fury, scorn and even a little hope.
Brazilian correspondent Bruno Moraes spoke with the band, who shared some insights about the steps leading to this new project, as well as its political and psychological themes. They also told the story of how Stack Overflow stems from a near-death experience of A Forest of Stars as a band.
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During the interview, done via video-conference with founding members Curse (vocals) and The Gentleman (keyboards and percussion), both went into details of the near eight-year space away from the studio, and how the album ultimately came to be. It is a fitting story for a band that kick-started their career with an EP called The Corpse of Rebirth.
“There was never any intention to take so long between the albums. After the 2018 album’s cycle was over, we got down to writing again,” explains The Gentleman. “And we actually wrote a colossal amount of stuff. We demoed it all, fit it all together… We were trying to do something ridiculously ambitious. A concept album thing, that was really, really hard and ridiculous.”
By their account, when the meetings with the record label to discuss the album’s budget began, doubt started to creep in: “And then suddenly the band was like: ‘I’m not really sure about this!,’ and some of the elements of the album didn’t feel like they were working,” he continues, explaining the band felt they “should take another look at it, and not just power straight ahead as we tended to do.”
That’s when songs started being scrapped away, while others were dissected to search their entrails for signs of what wasn’t working. “And, before we knew it, the whole thing started to unravel,” The Gentleman summarizes.
In addition to an already complicated scenario, by then COVID-19 had developed into a worldwide pandemic, and the tensions that had been building up inside the group turned even more unsustainable. As The Gentleman explains: “We were all isolated, and in our own headspaces, as well as in our literal spaces. For a while, it kinda looked like we were going to split up and all that kind of stuff! And we started then just using the album as a way to just argue with each other. And it was just getting quite nasty and horrible, and definitely compounded by the isolation!”
Time passed. When the virus started to be contained and it was possible to meet in open, ventilated spaces, A Forest of Stars decided to gather in what could possibly be their last meeting.
If you’re reading this text, you already know the course of events took a different turn.
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“The most crucial thing we all agreed on was that the only way to move forward as a band was to completely ditch everything that we’d done and start completely from scratch again. And find a different way of working together,” says The Gentleman.
This conclusion came to the band after one evening spent in a public garden. But the road to the new album would take more than a year to be crossed, during which AFoS tried an assortment of different methods to learn how to work together and create cohesive projects again. The Gentleman recounts that, suddenly, “It sort of all clicked. And when it clicked, it just flew by, and that was it. Before we knew it, we had recorded an album.”
The keyboard and percussion player, who also took the mantle of main producer of the album, reflects further, saying this eight-year process wasn’t just the discarding of a project, but something much more potent:
“What we went through was effectively a complete rebirth of the band, an absolutely necessary one! It was painful and horrible, and it was nasty… But, if we hadn’t forced ourselves to do it, it wouldn’t have naturally happened. And I flipping hated it! But now, I’m absolutely so glad. And it’s really because the band is the seven of us being very close friends. It works in sort of a strata, a framework. At the top, we are but a group of friends who are very close. And then, below that, we always look after each other, both our physical and mental health. We make sure that always comes first, before anything. And then, below that, anything else to do with the band, writing, recording and stuff. With this rebirth, we really kind of chiselled that in as commandments.”
The sparks from “chiselling in stone” these commandments of the band seem to have started a creative blaze of gigantic proportions, according to The Gentleman.
“The fire that it lit under us, once we got a hold of that and understood what it was and what we could do with it, [in terms of] writing and stuff… Technically, it was eight years, but the actual time of us writing the current album, the Stack Overflow version, was quite really short for us, because once we lit the fire it went ‘whoosh! ‘ And I’m really glad that people say that translates when you hear the music. That you feel the passion and the energy.”
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Indeed, Stack Overflow sounds like something that took eight years to be released. Along the six tracks, A Forest of Stars build layers of sound which never seem out of place or accidental, movements seamlessly flowing into each other with extreme naturality. One moment you’re listening to a highly cataclysmic doom metal session, then it melts into classic prog. Then, heavy metal riffs rise to the center of the composition, alongside Katheryne’s violin and flute lines adding a lot of feeling and gravitas. Same Katheryne, out of the blue, adds beautiful melodic vocals, contrasting with Curse’s growling and theatrically recited verses. And, against all odds, every flavour of this concoction is perfectly balanced.
It is a rare kind of work of art. A record at once meticulous and spontaneous, at the same time, sublime and brutal.
It is also AFoS’s most openly political album, thanks to the sarcastic, absurdist, and symbolic lyrics exclusively written by Curse and revised by the other members. Armed with apocalyptic descriptions and images which flutter between the macabre and repulsive with a vast emotional vocabulary, the album paints an extremely consistent fresco of contemporary despair. The horror of finding oneself in a global society collapsing in slow-motion, but constantly building speed.
Even then, according to Curse, it is not properly a concept album. Although it has, in his words, “a huge thread running through it.”
“I cannot answer without being honest, so: my mental health has been shambolical enough throughout my life,” the vocalist confides. “In 2020, I had a full breakdown. And most of what we have on this album was written at that time, so I have no recollection of writing [most of it] whatsoever.”
One seldom lands such a cohesive artistic result being exclusively in dire situations such as these. Curse explains that, over time, in episodes in which his emotional well-being improved, he went back to the material, adding or chopping bits off when needed. “Generally, it’s all stream-of-consciousness. I try and keep it, warts and all, as much as possible. Because it is how I tend to write.”
In this case, the stream of consciousness was being fed a disturbing real-world scenario. The number of COVID cases and deaths was piling up daily, the band couldn’t meet in real life and it was passing through the aforementioned personal and artistic crises. Meanwhile, political projects centered on intolerance were becoming more upfront and gaining traction. The lyrics that, years later, would be reworked for Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface started to reflect this whole scenario, which was also new for A Forest of Stars.
“Despite us having a Victorian persona over the years, apart from very rare occasions, there’s not been anything written, lyrically [with this in mind]. Apart from, perhaps, the A Shadowplay for Yesterdays record, which has more of a tie-in,” Curse reflects when asked about the current album’s more contemporary afflictions. “But, even then, it’s a thinly veiled way for me to write about mental health. It’s a lot more than that, don’t get me wrong. But that’s the lynchpin.”
Curse adds that the new album is a sort of commentary on “how abjectly fucking disgusting the world is”: “I know we shied away from anything political in the past. But it’s almost impossible to avoid saying something, because it’s the world that we live in. We seem to be going further and further downhill at a speed that we have no chance of tampering. As people, if we are gonna carry on this spinning rock of whatever the hell, we really need to start actually being reasonable to each other. I don’t see any excuse for anyone to hurt anyone else based on who they are, who they love or what they choose to do, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. And stop bloody murdering everyone, you know? This record, lyrically, I guess is more a stab at the people who make that acceptable in the world.”
The opening track of Stack Overflow stabs pretty deep, its targets beyond doubt. Titled “Ascension of the Clowns,” its sung parts (aside bass lines equally macabre and circus-evoking) describe doomsday scenarios in which said clowns conduct a spectacle of death, the hearts of the desperate masses “twitching out to the binary.” When asked about the true identity of the clowns, both Curse and The Gentleman agree they’re the reactionary political forces of our world. In particular, tech giants who have allowed the spread of various forms of intolerance and hatred, while also destroying millions of lives in order to profit from the platformization of the world:
“Yeah! In a nutshell, it’s all of those!” says Curse, with a laugh. “But I decided to call them clowns because they are sinister. And they wear a noose around their necks everyday and they stand there and tell us what to do, and how to think… and program our reality. And they’re such a shambolic… I mean, you look at these people and wonder how they could ever gain so much traction anyway.”
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The Gentleman adds his own take, stating: “It’s the arrogance that really does it for me. And also, the bar for success is ‘how much money you’ve made,’ effectively breaking the backs of others or breaking the system.” Indeed, so-called “disruptive ideas” commonly degrade the working conditions of people in a given sector of the economy. One has to look no further than music streaming platforms and their devastating effects on artists and smaller record labels. “Then you have tech-bros who go: ‘I’m brilliant, so, therefore, I’m going to apply my amazingness to multiple different things, and I’ll be equally brilliant at them all,’ and they’re absolutely not! Not least of which, a lot of them are desperately bad at socially communicating and emotional intelligence, self-awareness… But they’re considered successful because they make a lot of money destroying it all,” he adds.
Curse then comes back to his reasoning, stressing that, as much as we need to take seriously the risks posed by these figures upon society, it is important to never forget to laugh at their faces: “They need to be laughed at. They need to be shown: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, how many yachts you’ve got or how important you think you are! You’re still the scum of the earth. It’s a stiff middle finger and a shake of the head. We have so much potential to do not necessarily good, but just to do right. And we fail to do either, I think. As a species, we seem to be so obsessed with breaking our own backs rather than helping anybody else.”
And that’s why he likes the image of terrifying clowns making a bloody mess out of this world: “I have a bit of a vision of tanks painted-up like the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo, driving into town and blasting everybody else off the face of the map while squirting it all with a squirty flower, that kind of thing.”
“Ascension of the Clowns” is a nine-minute track constantly punctuated by tension in which a lot happens. The social chaos described by the lyrics by way of satire, allegory, and end-of-times images appears in some furious sections, woven together by more contained instrumental passages where melancholy becomes the dominant emotion. It is also the shortest song of the album.
This text won’t go about it track by track, but the conversation with A Forest of Stars touched on more aspects of the “huge threads” Curse referred to when talking about how Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface feels like a concept album. Also, the band brought forth more production stories which deserve telling.
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The warning message about “sinister clowns” is not the only one A Forest of Stars brings to the new album: each track’s lyrics work collectively to create a landscape filled with alerts to humankind as a whole. For example, in various points along the record, the band confronts us with the existential idea that we are not we. The singer and lyricist explains that this idea comes from reflections about the rejection of ego, and the possibility that our minds are part of a widespread, all-encompassing conscious process. It is also a reminder of how confusing and tough-to-swallow a pill sentience can be, no matter the amount of sugar life also coats it with, from time to time. Here, the consequences of such a confusion to human relations is also dealt with.
The careful allocation of the words discussing such topics is another remarkable aspect of Stack Overflow. In contrast to previous AFoS records, in particular its immediate predecessor, here Curse’s verses are way more contained. While he was singing and growling a colossal word count in Grave Mounts and Grave Mistakes, here the spaces centered on the instrumentals and those focused on words have clearer borders, the movements elevating each other.
Questioned about this choice, Curse and The Gentleman explain that, regularly, the writing and arrangement processes occur separate to the writing of Curse’s lyrics. “Sometimes I’ll be intentionally listening to demos and I’ll be trying to come up with some lyrics that can fit in with the general flow. Most times, it’s just stuff that’s been written blind and it just gets into place as we go!”
The singer also states that the band managed to birth a way of creating together in this manner which has reliably worked for them. Especially among both interviewees. Doubtlessly a perk of nurturing this creative partnership for the best of two decades.
“But we just really kind of…,” adds The Gentleman, “I think 95% of the words we just knew ‘This is the place for vocals, this isn’t the place for vocals.’ Even though we haven’t even started thinking of where to put vocals until we had really written all the music. We just knew.” Song after song, the spaces had already been carved out.
This coordinated way of composing the group of Brits adopt here — which he describes as “serendipitous” — might have less to do with coincidence than with a consistent adherence to the artistic project on their part. The album was crafted from the start following a different approach than that of their previous albums.
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Curse answered first the question about the different direction of this album compared to Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes. “There was a conscious decision this time around to give everyone space to breathe on the album, so that every instrument gets its place,” recalls the serious man of sparse but sincere smiles. “And one part of that is just to not have bloody words over everything. They need to have a place and not just be on top of and on the way of everything else.”
“That was exactly the idea we were going for, to make everything more impactful,” The Gentleman adds, confiding that the group had already discussed the idea of having more breathing room in previous albums. But he shares that they “never really achieved it.”
“But in this one we really went for it,” he says. “If we want the words to have more meaning, more power, then we use it sparsely. So that, every time it comes in it’s like: ‘BAM! Here we go.’ Full intent, there’s nothing else getting in the way of what the words are saying.”
The Gentleman never turned his camera on during the interview, so it wasn’t possible to see the smile with which he made a quip: “Whereas, before, we used to densely layer everything up and Curse just boasted on top, effectively (laughs)”
Indeed, a smaller density of words doesn’t mean compromising the many layers of meaning the album contains. On the contrary, Stack Overflow successfully balances a myriad of themes which go way beyond discussing crescent ties of reactionary ideology and tech platforms. Beginning with its title, a creative commentary on the challenges of keeping one’s mental health stable in a burning world.
“‘Stack overflow,’ you may well already know, this is a programming term,” Curse elaborates: “You try to put too much [data] into a confined space of memory, and there isn’t enough room for all that stuff to fit in. So it runs out and then there’s a critical error.”
But the memory overload the album makes reference to doesn’t occur in inanimate computers: “So, talking about the world we’re facing at the moment, the genocide and all of that… The general mistreatment of anybody perceived to be lower than those who think of themselves as being higher up because they have lots of bits of plastic in their wallet! So, the ‘Corpse Pile Interface’ is, you know… The bodies are piled so high that we can’t naturally or reasonably, without blowing a fuse or having a stack overflow, process the weight-state — if you want another computer term — that they’ve got us all in”
He then concludes with another cultural reference, giving Scooby-Doo a pretty British companion: “And I suppose over a while, it’s like Mr. Creosote from Monty Python[’s The Meaning of Life]. The guy who has eaten so much that he can’t have an after-dinner mint. If he has one more, he’s going to explode.” The singer then moves on to a more hopeful sentence:
“We need to do other stuff, apart from consuming media and being shaped by it. And we need to laugh.”
Maybe the only laughs possible in Stack Overflow come with a sardonic grin. But it is something. For instance, there’s a moment in “Root Circle Usurpers” in which the narrator recalls talking to the trees, which later were felled so that they could wipe themselves. The band tries adding a pinch of decadent humour when exploring this contrast – between a spiritualized experience of nature and the banality our globalized society treats the very same nature with, as mere ‘natural resources.’ Through the album, the band sheds light to the absurdity of a young and presumptuous primate species that loses respect not only for its equals, but also the planet as a whole.
A humongous irony resides in the fact that this lack of respect for planet Earth puts humankind in danger of total annihilation, along with many other lifeforms. In a cathartic moment during “Street Level Vertigo,” they mock this situation: “Even our fossil records are shit!”
“I think we should live with the land, not own it,” Curse states. The constant anguish of seeing humanity threatened by this complex equation of sociological and ecological factors haunts Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface as a whole. It is in the title: the pile of bodies grows, and one day we’re all going to be added to it. Also, as exemplified by the previously discussed bit of “Root Circle Usurpers,” these images of the end of the world come hand in hand with references to an assortment of bodily fluids.
Here, mass graves and the ultimate extinction of humankind coexist with cosmic urinals and rhymes about excrement and “shitefests.” Which is particularly ironic to the author of this text, since in Portuguese, both the word ‘eschatology’ (as in the differing conceptions of the end of times, as understood by distinct cosmovisions) and ‘scatology’ (as in the dejects produced by our metabolism) are spelled and pronounced as only one word: when a Portuguese-speaking person says ‘escatologia,’ they might be referring to either the end of our world or the end of… our meals! Even if the Greek words for such disparate concepts are not the same.
When asked about the meaning of having these two symbolic universes in conversation throughout the record, Curse recalls the fact that this kind of caustic humour has always been a part of AFoS. Also, most of the time it is posed as the answer to another relevant sociological matter.
“There’s a… shall we say, a somewhat healthy mistrust of organized religion, from over here. Those things [religion and scatology] can be so close to one another, whilst being so far apart, potentially. But in the wrong hands, you know… You’ve got a shitshow!” the lyricist ponders. Responsible for an album filled to the brim with riddles and wordplay, Curse adds:
“But I’m still reeling from you telling me that eschatology and scatology are the same word in Portuguese. It’s kind of a core part of the mindset when we’re kicking against religion. But we also respect religion in its way, when it’s performed by those that believe in what they’re doing, and do it for the right reasons. And don’t harm anybody else, or force it on anybody else. We’re all older people now too, so we got the benefit of hindsight. But that doesn’t stop the world from using religion as a weapon.”
Curse’s penchant for deploying wordplay comes from a long British tradition, one he inherited directly from his familial roots. He explains: “I think it comes from my grandmother, and then my mom. My granny used to speak in riddles. She’d write us notes in riddles. And it just sort of… I don’t think I was taught it. It’s just a natural thing, I like to tie things up in knots.”
This oblique style of writing has another side effect on Curse. A deeper one, beyond serving the album’s dark comedy: “I also think that it makes for a better set of lyrics, if you can give somebody something that isn’t immediately obvious. They can take it away, and they can make their own interpretation, which is something that I care tremendously for! There are a lot of music where the lyrics are so important that it’s its own story for each individual person who listens to it. And it can be a different story every time, maybe. If you listen to it numerous times.”
One beautiful passage following this writing style and philosophy comes in the aforementioned bit where the narrator recalls talking to the trees who later had their spiritual significance reduced to toilet paper. They say they and the trees “stumbled back through knots in time, barking at nothing much.” Later in the album, a scree is home to trees not yet felled, who are “rooting for the victor, at strain of death.”
The Gentleman recalls the fact that the English language has a lot of ambiguity, in the form of homophones and polysemic words – as in many languages, the example in Portuguese standing as a witness. The tradition of using this for artistic or comedic dates to many centuries ago. “You can literally have something that has the complete opposite meaning of what you’re saying,” says the keyboardist, adding that “All of us in the band love stupid wordplay, basically! (laughs) And Curse is the master of it!”
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One instance of wordplay in Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is a reference to the progressive rock giants Genesis in their first streak of albums of the 1970s: “Who on Earth gives a firth of a fifth of a fuck?” It is interesting to note that Genesis’s song “Firth of Fifth” is also an instance of British wordplay, with the firth of Forth River.
That decade doesn’t appear only in Curse’s words (mixed with curse words) in the album. Some of the textures utilized, be it on the keyboards, guitars or bass guitar, have a distinctive marker of that era’s sound, even in the context of quite contemporary compositions. And the technology employed isn’t exactly vintage either.
“It’s all software-based, all the synths and stuff,” recalls The Gentleman. “I do have a real piano, a pianoforte (an earlier kind of piano, that was further developed to create the grand piano. Mozart used one through his life to compose and play his sonatas). Which is an absolutely beloved thing of mine, which I’ve had for a very long time. I think it’s approaching a hundred years old now, that piano. It’s crazy, it still can be tuned, which is insane, because it’s really pushing by this point.”
This same pianoforte has been a part of A Forest of Stars’s history since The Corpse of Rebirth. “But most of the sounds [on this album] are… The thing is, now software recreation of this stuff is so much more powerful,” he continues. “But it’s about the way you produce it. The examples we gave to Rob Hobson, who did the mixing here and in most of our albums, were of ‘70s albums. Because we wanted a modern feel, but we also wanted to recapture that ‘70s feel, which is why, for the majority of it, I used instruments from that era. Like you said, the Fender Rhodes, the Clavinet, stuff like that. Which helps with playing live, because I don’t wanna be like Rick Wakeman, having to carry around eight keyboards! (laughs)”
In this album, more than at any point in the band’s history, the textures built by the violin follow a sublime – sometimes apotheotic – direction. The decision of giving more breathing space and meaning to each instrument allows incredible moments of drums, bass, guitars and the aforementioned keyboards and pianoforte to grace the listener. But, the violins and flutes sometimes create lines akin to chamber music, while other times being folksy, as if painted in clay and natural pigments in pagan circles. In many moments, they create psychedelic atmospheres. This variety of complex moods reinforces Katheryne’s reign as queen of AFoS’s troupe of Victorian ghosts.
The album’s meticulous musical production spawned great fruit, indeed.
The main voice in said production of Stack Overflow (co-produced by Kettleburner and Wight-Barrow), The Gentleman adds also that it was the band’s idea for him to take the lead in this project, which he considered graceful of them. “It’s basically like being a project manager, who just can manage the whole thing and understand where all the parts are, and organize all the people. And making sure that they are comfortable. Because we can get the best takes out of them by setting things up so that they can be really relaxed and happy. But, before you start it’s like a ‘What is it gonna sound like at the end?’ kind of thing. And then making sure that everything lines up, so it funnels down that path. But doing it in a way that isn’t awful. There’s no need to be authoritarian about it.”
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The last track, “Not Drinking Water,” is where the consistency in this direction, of merging sounds and ideas from both the present and the long history of prog and metal, peaks in refinement. It is also the album’s higher emotional point. “Not Drinking Water” is sort of an epilogue to the concept album that wasn’t there. For starters, it is the only song dedicated to someone specific: “For Benjamin James Hanson, 1978-2001.” Also, its lyrics abandon the symbolic language and poetic parables about an ill society, adopting a more direct approach.
Which is appropriate for the story behind the song.
Content warning: The following passage deals with severe mental illness and suicide. If you’re going through a crisis, please seek help from mental health professionals and support networks. To skip the sensitive part of the text, skip the next passage (including the video) and resume reading after the next still photo.
“This chap was a friend of both of ours,” says Curse.
“In fact, we met kinda through him, didn’t we?”
“We did, actually. Properly, we met through him,” the singer responds to The Gentleman’s input. “He took his own life by drowning, back in 2001. And he did it in a local reservoir. So, he was missing for several weeks, it’s a very grim thing.”
Curse and The Gentleman share that they always wanted to pay tribute to this friend, arriving at the conclusion that, in a certain way, the group’s whole career is like such a tribute. Curse explains that “he’s always been close to our hearts. And it seemed that the time was right too. The words got written and they seemed to fit with the music we had.”
The Gentleman continues: “It’s a very emotional song for us, especially for Curse and I. When he first sent me those lyrics, I was just blown away by them. He was like ‘What do you think?.’ And when I realized what it was, I was like ‘Man, that’s amazing!.’ That was perfect.”
In the first five tracks of the album, A Forest of Stars performs an alchemical process of turning the chaos of our current reality into a potent metal, the colour of the night. A metal that’s solid and hard in its metaphors, and malleable in its satire. In the last track, they cast a hammer from the very same metal, crushing our heads with the reflection: ‘How long further are we going to feed a system which breaks people in such a way?’
Curse draws attention to one last detail: “It’s important to say, as well… Once all the words are out of the way, the song launches off into a massive cosmic jam. And that feels like the perfect way to end the album, and it also feels like the band’s really paying tribute to a wonderful person.”
To which the Gentleman adds: “And I was trying to push for this, definitely early on, the idea that it should fade out. We don’t like doing fade-outs in songs, but this felt right! Because then it means that it goes on for forever, effectively. The only limitation is the medium in which it is recorded. We just had to fade out completely at some point for the record format.”
Three days after this interview, on May 31st, the band held their first Stack Overflow performance, at Fortress Festival. In a vulnerable moment, Curse shares that, during the rehearsals, when the jam part arrives: “I keep saying ‘Let him go,’ because it’s time to let him go.”
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By working with contrasts in a masterful way, Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is a work of art full of ambition, which deals with mental health and contemporary issues with rawness and poetics. It fluctuates between styles, building a sound of its own. It poses a hopeful rage as an answer to its descriptions of a desperate world. And it does this with a dark metal, potent and well-played, mixing irreverence and artistic ambition, as the great names of progressive music have always done.
All this memory overload of factors makes Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface probably one of the boldest metal albums of 2026.
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Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is available now via Prophecy Productions.
SANCTUARY – THE YEAR THE SUN DIED When Sanctuary returned in 2014 with The Year The Sun Died, the result was far more than a […]
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