NORTHLANE have released "Crucified", the third single from "Anemoia", the Australian band's seventh album, out independently on October 30.
The song is about the way disagreement now works, which is to say it is about how disagreement now stops working. "'Crucified' is about the collapse of civil discourse — the way every disagreement now defaults to attack, every conversation becomes a battleground, every difference of opinion ends with someone playing the victim," frontman Marcus Bridge said. He was careful not to fence it off as a political song: "Not only touching on politics, it's about the regression of communication as a whole: arguments online, wars, general difference of opinion." The hook says it plainly — if you're offside, misaligned / we won't rest tonight / till you're fucking crucified. "The instinct to go for the throat rather than hear someone out has seeped into every corner of life," Bridge said.
"Anemoia" takes its name from nostalgia for a time you never lived through, and the record was built to hold both halves of that feeling: the weightlessness of a borrowed past, and the anger that arrives when the present interrupts it. The idea started with guitarist and songwriter Jon Deiley, who came out of a set by U.K. producer Evian Christ wanting to know whether trance could sit naturally next to guitars. Two years of work followed.
"These songs we've been working on for two years about — maybe a bit over two years," Bridge told Steve O'G. "Not long after we released 'Mirror's Edge' did we get stuck into working on all of this. So it's taken a lot of fine-tuning to kind of nail that while still keeping it sounding like us and not feeling like it's straying too far off the path of what we've kind of done already."
The album was executive produced by Jordan Fish, formerly of BRING ME THE HORIZON, and Bridge's account of why it worked is essentially about restraint. "It's also really exciting for us to work with someone who also understands what our sound is and how to complement that as opposed to kind of just bulldoze over it with his own kind of thing," he said. "'Cause he does have his sound, but he was also very aware of what we do and made sure to kind of just sprinkle some of his elements in there and really kind of just tighten it all up a bit." Fish spent a week in Australia, sitting in Deiley's apartment chipping away at chorus melodies. "He's just like a kid in a candy store when he's working on music."
NORTHLANE follow their largest Australian headline run to date with European dates supporting DAYSEEKER this winter.
"Anemoia" track listing:
- Pierce The Sky
- NEED2FEEL
- Crucified
- Deathwish
- Evian
- CUT_it
- S∈GA
- The Otherside
- Start Again
- Anemoia (feat. DAYSEEKER)