In February 2011 we decided to go to Above All Studios in Margate and demo six songs we had been working on for quite some time with Jamie Frye. We recorded ‘Give Up’ with Jamie and we felt comfortable in the studio, so it seemed logical to work with him again. Having six songs written was a big deal for us, we’ve never been a band that’s struggled writing songs, it’s more of a case of struggling to get together to write songs. We all lead very different lives miles apart from each other, so finding time to get in a room and play music can be hard for us. We had been writing since summer 2010 but we never managed to get anything together which we were happy with. Nevertheless we got the six songs recorded with Jamie, and we were surprised with how well they came out considering some of them had never even been played in a rehearsal room before. We headed in a new direction with these songs, much heavier than before (but not just mindless heaviness), much more thought out than before and also in bunch of different tunings. Once the songs were recorded we left them for a while. We had them to listen to and knew we could come back to them at any point and be happy with them. I think that was part of the problem, considering we’d vented the recording process and got the songs out of our head, we could listen to them…and we were happy. That’s a pretty selfish thing to think, but it’s also the honest truth, we enjoy the music we write, sharing it is obviously the best part but for some reason we weren’t in a mad rush to share.

With a (for our level) decent budget we wanted to put all we have into this record - after all the music is what’s going to stick around for hopefully years to come, and it’s what (some) people judge you on so why not put all we have in to it? We’ve never been a band to try and record ourselves or try and do it on the cheap, that just doesn’t cut it for us. We looked at a lot of studios and after a lot of asking around and researching we finally decided on The Ranch Production House in Southampton. Connor had worked with both Neil and Geoff beforehand and could vouch that they were good dudes so that was a big plus for us.

We got together at the end of August/start of September for two last practices before recording, one where we changed a load of bits of songs from the original demos, most notably Marionette which was a middle of the road instrumental song before, but we managed to turn it into a proper song whilst retaining a lot of it’s original elements. The other rehearsal was two nights before recording. Leaving things to the last minute doesn’t always turn out badly as we went in with literally nothing and came out with Love Is A Vampire, perhaps our most complex and diverse song yet. Funnily enough the same thing happened for ‘Give Up’, we only had one set weekend where we could practice and one set weekend when we could record due to time constraints. We booked in to record and the weekend before recording we wrote ‘Green Eyes’ one day and ‘Dreamland Welcomes You’ the next, with our then new (and outrageously hungover) drummer Connor and no bassist. Epigraph was written in the studio on the day of recording. Last minute just works out some times, perhaps we just work better under pressure.

So Connor, Bobby and I piled into my insanely equipment packed car and headed for Southampton where we would stay for a week. The Ranch is based on a farm and we slept in a converted stable. Adrian and Theo joined two days later. We got on really well with our producer Neil, he is relaxed (but hard working), well in to his equipment and knows exactly what he’s doing, so we were able to experiment with drum/guitar/bass sounds and not feel pressured into just saying “yeah that’ll do”(Equipment trivia: Neil let us use one of his latest purchases on the album - the same snare that Dave Grohl used on Nirvana’s Nevermind). Our days were spent recording and our evenings were spent driving round and hanging out with friends or in restaurants. We’d never been in the studio that long before, so by the end of the seven days we were feeling a bit worse for wear but extremely happy with what we’d achieved. We’d done the eight tracks.

Getting Alan Douches to master the record is just one of those things I never thought would happen to our band. Initially I jokingly said to someone in the band “yeah we should get this guy to master our record” and linked them to an album credit list of Alan’s, which is a real who’s who of harcore and metal. For starters he mastered Background Music and Ill Blood, two pioneering hardcore records, less we forget pretty much the entire Converge back catalogue and numerous other classics that we as a band love, Witness, Deja Entendu, Hot Damn!, the list goes on. I looked into pricing and realised we probably could afford to make it work, so I booked us in and set a deadline for the album to finished by. We had to go back for mixing and to record some vocals as Theo’s throat didn’t hold out during the week we recorded. The mixing process took a long time as I am admittedly extremely awkward to work with and kept finding tiny tiny imperfections throughout the record. All of these were our own fault, and Neil was beyond patient when fixing our errors, to the point that I would say he actually has the patience of a saint. The night before the files were due to be uploaded for mastering, I emailed Neil and asked if he had sorted the last couple of corrections and he emailed straight back under the impression he had two more days to work on the album. Under the pressure of sorting the mixes and with a few crossed wires Neil and I had different deadline days. With the deadline just hours away, Neil got up at 3am, drove to the studio and mixed til 8am, where he then proceed to upload the files via Dropbox, I streamed them on my phone as I got to University at 8.30am (technology ey…) and approved them to be uploaded for mastering. Neil then hit the upload button and probably collapsed on the floor due to exhaustion. We owe you one Neil, you literally saved the day. 
We are beyond stoked with how the record has come out, we never would have imagined in our wildest dreams that we’d have had our stupid band’s record mastered by the very engineer that mastered the albums that influenced us to start this band in the first place way back in an awful rehearsal studios in Croydon in 2006.

Far too often a band’s publicity revolves around this running theme of how hard it is to be in a band, how the band have had literal fist fights with each other, nearly died touring, nearly died writing the new CD, how being in a band has literally torn their lives apart and they’ve contemplated suicide or some other made up nonsense, but in the end they pull through for the fans… spread across two pages with a huge exaggerated caption in some vastly overrated magazine. The point is that a lot of press relies on fake drama to make bands seem more interesting and deep than they are. This whole facade sucks, no one is forcing anyone to be in a band, we do this band because we enjoy doing it and unlike a lot of bands out there we are actually friends. This album didn’t nearly kill us, there were no literal fist fights, we didn’t nearly break up and there were no near deaths, however we did put a hell of a lot of effort in to it, so we hope you enjoy listening to this record as much as we have enjoyed making it. 
Thanks for reading, now go start your own band. 

Anthony Sykes, February 2012.