New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Demons, the Virginia Beach-based heavy music project started by longtime Mae guitarist Zach Gehring, is premiering a new song for the track "Always Your Own" on BrooklynVegan. The song appears on the band's upcoming debut full-length,
Embrace Wolf, which will be released on December 1 via Spartan Records.
Pre-order the album here: https://spr.tn/embracewolf. All pre-orders include an instant download of the song "Always Your Own."
Gehring tells BrooklynVegan, "I came up with the initial idea for the song in Austin (while on tour with Mae). We were playing the Mohawk and it was storming really bad so the show was delayed. I had all this nervous energy waiting to see if we were going to be able to play or not, and I started going between these two chords and it kind of caught my mood at the time - anxious, frustrated, uncertain. Once I brought it to Demons it developed really quick. I love how short it is, we love playing the song live because of that break down, and it was the first song that was written for the new record. Lyrically the song is about cowardice; self-critical black holes, self-imposed limitations, and the rationalizations of those limitations that can disguise the root of the problem."_
Demons will be playing a hometown Halloween show on October 28 at Toast. More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/826145124232919.
Track Listing:
1. (telebrothy)
2. Always Your Own
3. wish
4. Nobody Loves You The Way You Are
5. Dig
6. Decibel Farmer
7. 17:9
8. Arranged Marriage
9. Assured Retribution
About Demons:
"The primary motive for how we write, for how we perform, is to evoke or exaggerate some sort of collision." This is Demons. Forces of equal magnitude uniting, reacting, and detonating. Some Newton's-Third-Law type shit. In the band's brief tenure, this is what we've come to expect. Pounding drums, erratic riffs, fervent lyrics, and structure descending into abstraction. The sum of these parts is difficult to classify with any direct comparison. Shellac? Queens of the Stone Age?
David Bazan? Melvins? While sonic or attitudinal traces may exist, Demons remains derivative of nothing.
Following the release of the band's seminal EP, Great Dismal, Demons returns with their debut full-length,
Embrace Wolf — nine blistering songs exploring a spectrum of anxiety, aberrations, and awe with deliberate recklessness. "Musically, we just wanted to be our own form of unbridled," says vocalist/guitarist Zach Gehring (also of Virginia-based Mae acclaim), up until this point, we've kept to this sonic austerity pretty straight forward, energetic, and almost off the rails."
Produced entirely by the band,
Embrace Wolf was tracked episodically in several locations, including a field-recorded drum session in a railroad tunnel. The record also features the addition of guitar player/accompanying vocalist Chris Mathews to the existing lineup of Gehring, Jonathan Anderson (bass), and Drew Orton (drums) which allowed the process to become fully collaborative. "[This time around] we've started behaving more like a band (i.e. a creative group), and we wanted to explore this dynamic more," says Gehring. "We knew we all wanted to be loud, and we wanted our instruments to work together by filling in gaps with a high degree of awareness of one another."
Lyrically,
Embrace Wolf centers thematically on prepositions of guilt, disguises, impatience, and exhaustion. "My writing is still self absorbed, a lot of first person focus because it's still all I really know how to write about. We all have our blind spots, and I only feel comfortable calling out my own," says Gehring. As the tracklist progresses through
Embrace Wolf, Gehring broods over growing resentment, facaded truth, suppression, misrepresentation, fragile relationships, and honesty versus the truth. While not always an easy listen, the cathartic self-analysis present in both the record's lyrical content and vocal delivery feels earnest and absolute.
We are all haunted by something, be it tangible, imaginary, wild, or within, and we are faced with only two choices — exorcism or embracement. Sometimes one is essential in enabling the other. While this process remains ultimately unique to our own ailments, both solace and commiseration can often be found simply by pressing play. Come
Embrace Wolf with Demons, this December on Spartan Records.
