Our new interview with UNTITLED WITH DRUMS is live: Martin Le Borgne, Lucas Delay and Rémy D. Perrin on Made Flesh, out today via Season of Mist.
The Clermont-Ferrand four-piece didn't make this one in a studio. They spent ten days converting a French salle des fêtes — a rentable village hall that doubles as a theater and a cinema — into a recording space, tracking drums and bass live the way they did on the first album, in the middle of a heat wave. "Honestly, the heat was the real challenge," Perrin laughs. "It's a situation where you don't really know what to expect going in, but that also breeds creativity," Delay adds. "Recording somewhere unusual instead of a proper studio. We basically turned a small theater into a recording studio for ten days."
The result is deliberately sharper than what came before. A new producer "helped us get to where we already wanted to be," Le Borgne says — "music that's more direct, more straight to the point... we were pushing our boundaries, playing above what we'd done before." More polished, more variety, more atmosphere, in the band's own summary: a more immersive record.
The cover — a red, flayed face carrying no logo and no album title — is Le Borgne's own work; he's a graphic designer. "I was going for something close to the écorché figure, a flayed figure," he explains. "One dominant color and not too much detail... since the record is about human beings, a face felt like the obvious choice." Leaving the name and title off was deliberate: "Wherever you're listening, you can always find the artist's name and the title. It's displayed somewhere on the screen anyway."
Elsewhere in the conversation: why "Matter", "Shame" and "Oblivious" became the singles; riding the grunge-gaze wave alongside SUPERHEAVEN and NARROW HEAD while aiming squarely at "the bands that passed the test of the new millennium" — DEFTONES, QUICKSAND, HUM, FAILURE, HELMET; the electronic drums creeping into "Parasitic" and where Perrin wants to take them; the Symbols EP that came out before Made Flesh but was recorded after it, during a long and frustrating label hunt; and why 2027 is the realistic year for bringing the album to the stage.
It ends on a plea that doubles as the band's whole ethos. "We're not a singles band," Perrin says. "We'd rather people listen to the whole album, start to finish." Le Borgne puts the rest of it plainly: "You won't hear the same album twice, I hope. We'll always try something new, always push things further, sometimes in ways people won't like, but we're always experimenting."
Made Flesh is out August 21 via Season of Mist.
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