Dreamwell released one of last year's best screamo/post-hardcore albums with Modern Grotesque, and members have been doing other projects lately too. Aki McCullough dropped an album with Vivid Illusion last fall, contributed to screamo collective Felony For Existing, and appears on the upcoming Thotcrime album, and she's also one half of the funeral doom duo Necroplanet (alongside Mike Snow of Apricitas, Seas of Winter, and The Love Team), whose new album Negative Space comes out this Friday (8/19). Here's what the duo said about the band's formation and this new album:
Mike Snow on band formation/writing:
Necroplanet started off as my variation on the classic guitarist experiment "what if I turned all my pedals on at once," and after some tweaking I ended up with a really gnarly tone I liked but that was very limiting in what I could do with it. Since anything other than huge chords ended in a wall of static and noise I decided to write something low, slow, heavy and miserable. I ended up writing and recording all of my parts over maybe a week or two, and then sat on them for a while until I could decide what to do with them. I had originally contacted Aki to just do vocals, but she ended up adding some really phenomenal and ethereal leads that made all the songs much more dynamic and interesting since most of them were based around some very repetitive and slow riffing. In a time when everyone I know feels miserable and hopeless, I really wanted to capture that mood and feeling and between the two of us, I think we were able to.
Aki McCullough on lyrics/concept:
Negative Space is a concept album about isolation and collapse. It tells the story of an alien being who exists as the only sentient life form on their planet. They do not fully understand the concept of other beings existing, but feel an immense longing and emptiness. In an effort to find an answer to this feeling, they travel to another planet, where they find the ruins of a destroyed civilization. Despite its lifelessness, the ruins give an aura that life, connection, love, and joy once existed on the planet, causing their pain and longing to grow stronger. In a desperate attempt to survive, they eat an unknown plant amongst the ruins, causing them to experience visions and leave their body. They become the soul and essence of the dead planet on which they reside, but in a time in which it is teeming with life, love, and connection. In a quest for wealth, distrust, and the overcoming of death and pain, the beings of the planet begin to pollute and destroy it. The narrator experiences themself as the planet become sick and dying, full of cancerous growth, fever, and watching as the life of the planet extinguishes itself, unable to do anything to stop the inevitable.