What happens when the band that famously shouted, “Hail Science!” to the world moves from the cerebral to the psychological, from the intellect to the heartfelt? Well, if you’re Colorado-based act Allegaeon, you emerge with your most passionate, powerful release yet.
Damnum, out February 25 via Metal Blade Records, feels like the band have stripped away the emphasis on what they think matters to what they feel works—both in how the record sounds and the darker subject matter. Damnum is the most expansive release yet, with the darkest metal Allegaeon have put to record contrasting with a greater emphasis on melody and tempo changes. In short, it’s a masterpiece, but not the one you’d expect from the band.
It’s also just a record that feels like an invitation to listen to some dudes cry into the wilderness about how shitty the world is, and it’s awesome and cathartic.
Vocalist Riley McShane is appreciative and adds:
“I appreciate that a lot. It means a lot that that’s what you are taking from it, because that’s definitely what was intended. Lyrically, as you mentioned, Allegaeon has always been very cerebral, all ‘hail science.’ We’re like the science band, even songs like ‘1.618,’ that have funny videos attached to them, the lyrical content is still all about the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio, right? And so, with this record, I just wasn’t there. I wasn’t in a place where I felt like I could slam my head against the door, trying to think of scientific concepts to write about. And not for lack of interest, but just because it didn’t feel right. Music, to me, and writing especially, has always been very emotionally intuitive.”
“Not only was the music a lot bigger-feeling and more grandiose,” he continues, “and just had more darkness and emotion attached to it, but I was also in that head space and I feel that, obviously with the pandemic changing everything and kind of putting everybody’s lives into these weird tailspins, we were all in a place where it just felt kind of tone deaf to be like, ‘Hey, let’s write a science album, guys.’ Not only that, but it just felt a little disingenuous for us to just square peg round hole the science thing for the sake of brand consistency, when what we were all feeling was something that I think is much more relatable and profound.”
What they were feeling was the weight of loss—the album title is a Latin legal term that means “detriment either to character or property whether involving legal wrong or not; harm or loss.” (Hey Mom, I’m using my law degree here!) Damnum is a record not weighed down by all the harm and loss that the past few years have put on the members of the band, but enhanced by a group not using scientific evidence, math equations, or cellular biology as a metaphor for life; it’s an honest portrayal of life’s toll.
Ironically though, it’s also a bit of a science record, delving into sociology, psychology, and neurology. The emphasis on the human rather than the concept was reinforced by the way each of the humans in Allegaeon had a hand in the album’s creation:
“This was also the first album that we all had a hand in the music. In the past it was just (guitarists) Greg (Burgess) and Michael (Stancel) doing all the songs. So, there’d be five Greg songs, five Michael songs, and then everybody would kind of add their parts individually. We would all write our own sections, but as far as the foundation of the music and the structure of songs went, we would just take what Greg and Michael had come up with individually and apply our writing to those parts. But this was the first album that we all put our heads together and went part by part, through each song, and contributed creatively.”
So, was it difficult to have so many voices in the writing room?
“It was a challenge for sure,” McShane answers, “to put all those creative heads together. It was something that I don’t think anyone was used to, even me, having the background with all these different bands (Continuum and Sons Of Aurelius). This is one of the first albums that I’ve done, especially in this capacity, where it was truly collaborative from start to finish for writing and for production, just everything all along the way. I think that we came through it with a better understanding of each other, not only as artists and creators, but as people and what we each value out of the creative process and what we want to accomplish with the music that we write and how we write it.”
It took 15 years, but finally Allegaeon have become a legion (ba dum tis!). All of that collaborative effort and focus on what they wanted to say without the veils of science metaphors has resulted in not only the best album of their career but a clear early standout for metal album of 2022.
On the powerful ballad ‘Called Home”:
“Cool, this is going to be hard to talk about. So, during the course of the pandemic, both Greg and I lost really important people in our lives to suicide. In dealing with that grief and that anger, all the things that come with losing someone in that way, we chose together to write ‘Called Home.’ The name comes from the suicide note of Greg’s person that he lost. So, if you inspect lyrics from that perspective, you can see that it’s a song all about grief and anger and loss and sadness. And we wanted to express that in the music. We didn’t want to put that kind of subject matter on the backdrop of death metal, right?”
He continues:
“And so that was hands down the most emotive song that I think we’ve ever written as a band. I think that Greg and I, for sure, both spent a lot of time in tears in the studio when we were recording it, finally putting that experience into a catharsis. It felt like we were writing a letter to the lost for months and then finally sent it off when we were recording. And so, yeah, that song definitely has those ballad vibes, but I think that it just comes from that place of it being such an emotional mission that we had kind of set ourselves to with that track particularly. So, again, I’m just glad that that human element, it’s like you said, the song begs you to feel something.
Watch the video for “Into Embers” here:
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Photo courtesy of Allegaeon and Caleb Dane Young
