For their second LP, Darkness, Together, Portland rockers Lee Corey Oswald took the ingredients from their first record, 2014’s Regards, and cranked the gain up to Dave Grohl levels. Recorded at Trash Treasury in Portland by Nick Vicario and mixed by Justin Francis, the record—due out Oct. 12 via A-F Records—has a healthy dose of big riffs and big drums, with a fresh coating of ’90s-era pop punk.
“This was the first time we had someone produce a record,” drummer Corey Ciresi explains. “It was nice to have someone not let me do a bunch of frivolous shit. There’s at least one guitar solo on each song, so simplifying the drums made the guitar stuff stand out. We wanted this to be a more mature, sicker record that’s heavy as fuck.”
An understandable sentiment—especially since Darkness, Together almost didn’t happen. For Ciresi and vocalists and guitarists Lee Ellis and Dan Silver, the last few years have been a harsh lesson in how dark life can get.
“Lyrically, this record is way darker than anything we’ve ever done,” Ciresi reflects. “A lot of horrible, bad-luck shit has happened to the three of us in the last few years.”
Lee Corey Oswald toured rigorously after the release of Regards, doing a full stint on the Vans Warped Tour the following summer, then booking a five-week DIY tour immediately after. It was right around this time that the band members’ personal lives began to collectively deteriorate, while their experience on the fest chain left a sour taste in their mouths.
“We absolutely hated Warped Tour,” Ciresi states. “We ended up $10,000 in debt. Basically, we were supposed to split a bus with Citizen, but we got fucked last minute. A week before Warped Tour, we realized the bus we got was a 14-passenger, not a 12-passenger, so there’s no lounge to hang out in. Citizen didn’t want that; they wanted a more comfortable bus, but we had already signed a contract to share a bus with them. It cost $850 a day, and we couldn’t get out of it, because we already signed into it. So, every penny we made went to the bus and everything else we owed. God, this is crazy to talk about.”
“We’d sit down in the lounge with our manager to open up our little safe, and, like, a moth would fly out,” Silver laughs.
“We went from the DIY scene into this weird thing where we had a manager and a booking agent—oh god, our manager had a mental breakdown a week before Warped Tour and turned his phone off. It was fucked,” Ciresi continues. “I ended up leaving halfway through, because my fiancé was leaving me. So, I went home to deal with that, and then she left me anyway.”
Ellis reflects on this period, “We got ahead of ourselves and booked a five-week DIY tour about a month after that. We got back and then had to leave again, and that’s when we lost [former bassist] Sam [Pape]. We had to have our friend learn the songs in the van. Sam was really great, so we had a hard time when he left.”
“I don’t even remember that tour, because that’s when I really lost everything,” Ciresi says. “It was three months after Warped Tour, so it was right when I was supposed to get married.”
At the end of that year, Ellis, Silver, and Ciresi found themselves back in Portland, tired, disillusioned, and unsure of where to go from there. Despite the uncertain future of Lee Corey Oswald, the trio accepted a slot opening for Anti-Flag on their Canadian tour in the spring of 2016.
“We decided if this was going to be our last tour, then fuck it, let’s go out with a bang,” Ciresi says. “They treated us super well. We weren’t even sure if we were going to record the new songs we had written. Anti-Flag was super encouraging. They said, ‘Hey, we love your new music. If you record it, we really want to put it out.’”
“Honestly,” Ciresi reflects, “at that point, people in the music industry were so weird toward us with how they handled our last record, just to hear someone say, ‘Hey, we like your songs. You should record them. We don’t care if you tour, we just like your songs,’ it was a completely different way than people had been talking to us for a while, so that’s why we’re putting out our new record on A-F.”
With the record release show in November coinciding with their 10th anniversary, Ellis looks back on the personal significance of Darkness, Together. The band were finished recording when Ellis’ older sister passed away unexpectedly, prompting him to record one final song, “Darkness, Together (11/20/85),” to close out the album.
“Writing the song was very cathartic and was my form of therapy for the situation,” he shares. “Recording it and putting it on the record felt very right and like a great ending to it. It’s also a tribute to her life and such, so I’m just glad people will be able to hear it.”
“I honestly feel reinvented and hopeful with the record finally coming out,” Ellis concludes, “like a dark cloud has passed, and we’re back to being a band again.”
Purchase Darkness, Together here
Photo by Dan Stanton
