IN THIS MOMENT's ninth album, "Witch", arrived on August 28 as their debut for Better Noise Music. According to co-founder and guitarist Chris Howorth, it is not the album they originally made.
Speaking to Australia's Heavy, Howorth described a record that had to be talked back from its own ambitions. "This album, it's been quite a journey, 'cause we started out wanting this to be a really experimental, odd time signatures, really heavy, very hard to listen to album," he said. The band went in with longtime producer Kane Churko and finished twelve songs on that brief.
Then they listened. "Once we got out of the studio, we were kind of listening back to everything and we realized that maybe we were trying a little too hard and pushing a little too far in certain directions." The label agreed, which is not the direction that conversation usually runs. So the band wrote three new songs and went back into several of the existing ones to rework them.
The rewrite forced a second producer into the process. Churko was unavailable by then, so the new material went to Drew Fulk. "That added a new kind of flavor to the whole mix," Howorth said. "And they kind of gave it a special energy. And I think once we combined all that stuff together, that's kind of what made the album sound the way it sounds, and have the vibe that it has."
He is candid about how hard the judgment call is to make in the room. "I don't think you know as much until you listen back. But Maria's always afraid to have too much heavy stuff at first, and that always kind of goes layered on afterwards in her world. And in my world I'm always — the heavy's always the main, what starts it. So we're always kind of pulling that up and down. But a lot of times we don't know until after the fact, and then you're just, like, 'I don't like that.' And that's tough to say to yourself sometimes."
The abandoned versions still exist. "Our producer Kane has those songs somewhere, and maybe someday we'll be able to pull 'em out and release them as B-sides, 'cause I know our fans would probably like 'em," Howorth said. "But just almost trying too hard to be weird, and you lose kind of the musicality of the whole thing. We had to find that sweet spot."
The three singles so far — "Heretic", "Sleeping With The Enemy" and "Crawl" — are all heavy, and all carry work from both producers. The next one breaks pattern: "I Want To Believe", featuring Rory Rodriguez of DAYSEEKER, is the melodic end of the record. Elsewhere, Kim Dracula guests on "Heretic" and Kat Von D appears on a cover of PINK FLOYD's "Another Brick In The Wall".
"'Witch' is my declaration of inner transformation," vocalist Maria Brink has said of the album. "It's about embracing the duality within."