Post-metal band SOM (members of Caspian, Junius, and Constants) will follow their recent Awake EP and Billie Eilish cover with a new album, The Shape of Everything, on January 21 via Pelagic Records (pre-order). We're premiering the Toshadeva Palan-directed video for the heavy/beautiful lead single "Animals," and here's what vocalist/guitarist Will Benoit says about it:
About halfway through the writing cycle for our new record, I woke up to an email from our guitar player Joel with an mp3 attached called “animals”. He sent it at like 3 or 4 AM, so I knew he was excited to share something that he had obviously stayed up late working on. He was living in Richmond at the time and this was during last year’s George Floyd / BLM protests, so he was front row watching monuments getting torn down and experiencing a real cultural shift. Later on he said it was both horrible and inspiring.
I was pretty blown away by the demo. From the first note of that lonely, haunting guitar intro all the way through the heightened tension of the instrumental outro — that was all in his original version, and it felt like lightning in a bottle that I had to dig in on immediately.
I remember I was running errands all morning, and in the car I was bouncing back and forth between listening to the demo and recording voice memos of all the vocal melodies on my phone. By 11 AM I had the chorus lyrics and harmonies worked out, by 2 PM I was back in the studio and had all the vocals recorded pretty close to how they are on the album. Once the rest of the band added their parts and flourishes the song really came to life. It’s dark, it’s strange, and it’s one of my favorite SOM songs we’ve finished so far.