Sleep waker dont look at the moon11/28/2023 Mish: This whole band is pretty much based on our experiences with insomnia, sleep paralysis… Don’t Look A t T he Moon was a whole story about sleep paralysis and trauma, and we didn’t necessarily draw all of that from personal experience – but anything that didn’t come from us was still based on the experiences from others. The inspiration for ‘Distance’ obviously came from a very natural place, and I think that’s because I find it so much easier to write about things I’ve experienced or felt that I am, in some way, personally in touch with. ![]() How do you find that channelling your emotional weight into music helps you reckon with it?Ĭourtright: It’s very much a form of catharsis. That obviously comes down to how this band serves as an outlet for your personal afflictions – ‘ Distance ’ for example, being about Hunter losing his grandfather to dementia. But as soon as we had that call, I was like, “Yeah, I want to push for UNFD.” One thing that makes Alias such a powerful record is how authentically you approach some real heavy, sobering themes. I have nothing wrong with record labels or how they operate, but I didn’t know if that was the right path for us. ![]() We got off the call and I was like, “Honestly, they’re the only label I want to work with now.” When we were talking as a band, originally, I was like, “I don’t know about labels.” I mean, I was totally open to it, absolutely. And it had been a bit of a chore, y’know? But this was like… We got into the call and we just immediately clicked. Mish: I’d been in calls with a bunch of different labels, just talking and figuring stuff out, seeing what we could do with them – all that stuff. So many of the bands that we all love are on there, and a lot of hard work was put into it, so it feels really good. Let’s actually dig right in and make something personal – something more than just riffs and angry noises.” Congratulations on joining the UNFD family! What ’ s that been like for you guys?Ĭourtright: It’s been awesome. Mish: Yeah, we’re starting to take ourselves more seriously as artists, rather than just band kids that were like, “Dude, heavy riffs are fun!” This is more like, “Okay yeah, riffs are fun, but let’s make something super creative with them. And we’re just beginning to flesh out what it is. What you hear in this record is the beginning of what the new Sleep Waker is going to be, I would say. It’s colder now.”Ĭourtright: We’re still 100 percent Sleep Waker, but is a new platform that we’re going to build from. One of the tracks in this is called ‘Cold Moon’ and it’s kind of like, “Alright, Don’t Look At The Moon was a thing, but we’re moving past that – this is the new stuff. As we were writing, we were like, “Let’s do a few callbacks to old Sleep Waker stuff, but take it in a new direction. Mish: We wanted to just restart, I think. ![]() How did you want this record to really take Sleep Waker to the next level? Twining their ruminations of as much with themes of grief, dysphoria, angst and trauma, Alias essentially boils down to 30 minutes of unrestrained catharsis, spun through a web of tearing riffs, scorching yells and wall-rattling drum fills.īLUNT caught up with Courtright and Mish to explore the way Alias marks a striking leap into new territory for Sleep Walker, why UNFD was the label for it, how they use their art to reckon with their trauma, and how they manage to stay awake onstage. They both suffer from insomnia and sleep paralysis, and bonded over such in the band’s infancy. ![]() The album – and really, the band itself – is rooted in the deeply turbulent relationships that songwriters Hunter Courtright (vocals) and Frankie Mish (drums) have with sleep. A press release says that Alias “asks listeners to examine who we are, how we quantify our reality, and what it means to be alive” – but those kinds of copy are always at least a little exaggerated (take it from us, they’re how we make a living), so when we first hit play, we didn’t expect to be so viciously slapped in the face with an existential crisis. We can see why UNFD have jumped on their hype train by that virtue alone.īut scratching away the album’s sonically adventurous veneer, we unearth a striking palate of thematic intensity. The five-piece have found away to make silvery, glitch-inflected metalcore sound more natural than most DIY punk bands recording on stolen tape recorders. At face value, Alias – the bold and blistering second album by the Michigan-native moshlords in Sleep Waker – is a truly riveting affair it’s polarising in the best ways, fusing a distinctly raw, visceral and incandescent surge of authentic human emotion with spot-shined production and soundscapes meticulously crafted for maximum impact.
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