“We felt, and feel, a lot more confident in ourselves, and what we do, and the music we write, and how we feel about things,” says Conjurer guitarist/vocalist, Dani Nightingale. “We just wanted to put that on this record.”
The UK metal band’s third album, Unself—out October 24 via Nuclear Blast Recordings—is the four-piece’s most direct record to date, musically and lyrically. Since day one Conjurer has walked the lines of doom, sludge, and post-metal while also incorporating ethereal atmospheres and traces of black metal and hardcore, but with Unself, they feel locked in, more aware of the twists and turns each song takes.
There’s also a theme of self-actualization and identity to the record that presents itself very forthright. It’s an album for marginalized people around the globe, inspired by guitarist/vocalist Dani Nightingale’s own personal experiences. It’s a conscious effort to connect to anyone struggling with who they are.
With the record on the cusp of release, Nightingale took the time to speak to us about writing and recording the record, the collaborative nature of the material, and the personal and emotional themes of the lyrics.
When did the writing for Unself begin?
That would have been around December 2022. The main memory I have was right as the second album came out we were playing in Tasmania, and it was [Noah See] our drummer’s first official gig with us, and once he was in the band he was like, “Oh, I can ask this question now, what material have you got for the next album?” I was like, “Jesus Christ, let us put out this one first.” I had the intro to “Let Us Live” knocking about and I played him that and he was like, “Okay, cool, we should get together and start demoing.” So December 2022 was the first time that me and Noah got together and started throwing ideas around, whether that be stuff I was already sitting on or just discussing where we wanted things to go with direction and vibe.
What was the direction that you guys talked about?
Me and Brady [Deeprose, guitar/vocals] for a long time discussed that we wanted more space in the music, we wanted more breathing room; we wanted all the tactile things, as the producer of the album Joe [Clayton] says. Being able to hear the pick scraping against the strings, being able to hear the room you’re in, using different room mics and mic placements. I’ve always loved that kind of thing and that was something that I think we wanted to do for the second album, but it just didn’t end up working out that way.
In terms of musical differences and variation, when me and Noah would get together and demo ideas we really bonded over our mutual love for indie folk music. He loves Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Midlake. We both love Baroness, particularly Yellow & Green and the way that album sounded so different from their previous ones. It was just a lot more experimentation in terms of guitar tones, effects, the way a song is built, or the kind of character that a song has. We really bonded over that kind of thing, so when it came to putting the songs together there was a lot of using those references. Like, we wanted a really sparse, thin drum sound; all that kind of stuff became a whirlwind of things we wanted to try.
Another thing was that we really wanted to get a straight up folk song on the record, which ended up being the song, “A Plea.” There was just that very natural, organic sound of people playing together. I think with the last album it all sounded a bit more claustrophobic than I think we’d have liked. We’ve always kind of struggled to balance the really beautiful side of the stuff we do—the clean, crisp and clear stuff—with the super heavy stuff. We really wanted to bridge that gap on this album and I think Noah was a really big part of that.
How deliberate is the songwriting as far as including these different ideas?
I think most of, if not all of our songwriting, is all completely natural. I’ll be sat at home writing some riffs and maybe I’ll write one or two and put them down, and I won’t revisit them for like half a year, but it’s always just in my head. I imagine that it’s going [a certain] way, so I just kind of write that and then I put it to the guys. It’s very rare that I ever show the guys just a riff or a section; I usually like to get the skeleton of a song down, or the general idea before I introduce it to them. Just giving them a more fleshed out idea tends to yield better results than just, “I’ve got one riff, what should we do with it?” We’ve never been a jam band, we’ve never been a band that gets in the practice room and we have no new ideas and then we come out with a song. We’ve never been that kind of band. There’s always got to be at least fifty percent of the song mapped out before we then start throwing ideas around.
I remember being at Noah’s and he was discussing how typically a super fast hardcore song would be like two minutes and a doom song would be like ten minutes. He was like, “Who’s to say that a super fast raging song can’t be six minutes, and who’s to say that a doom song can’t be three.” We were just discussing all of those types of possibilities, and that, honestly, with no intention at all happened. I started writing the song “The Searing Glow,” and that starts off super-Converge and just balls-to-the-wall, hitting every drum every second, and that ended up being this six-minute super heavy song. And then when it came to writing the last song on the record, “This World is Not My Home,” I started writing that and that ended up only being like four minutes and it’s the slowest doomiest song on the album. We accidentally did that thing he said. It’s all natural, there’s never been a kind of, “Okay, we want a song that does this, we want a song that goes to this kind of place.” It all is completely natural. There’s no planning.
How much of Unself is a reaction to Páthos?
It is one hundred percent a reaction. When we were writing Páthos, it was in the middle of a pandemic. We were touring from when Mire was released. We didn’t stop touring until the pandemic. We just kept getting offers and we didn’t turn any down, we just wanted to be out on the road. I think we had a couple of ideas for the second album musically, but it literally took the world shutting down for us to hunker down and write the second album. The process of that was obviously very isolating. We couldn’t get in a room together to hash everything out, so everything was written on Guitar Pro, sent back and forth by emails and WhatsApp and that type of thing. It just didn’t have a very natural birthing period.
I think before we went in to record that album we got into a room together at most twice. We didn’t even play through all of the songs together. There were songs that when we recorded them we hadn’t played them together. We booked a studio, and this was when lockdowns had been lifted, and then right when we went into record another lockdown was enforced. In terms of resources, we could only use the amps that we had, the mics we had, the cabs we had. There was no experimentation, there was no time to try to flip songs around; there was none of that. It was, go in, record what you have, and that’s that. There’s no playing around with tones, no freedom, essentially. Even though obviously we got it done, by the end of the recording process for that album we were like, “We are never doing an album like that again.” It was so stressful and so rubbish, really. We had a good time doing it, but the circumstances of the situation were far from ideal and we came out of it like, “Okay, cool, we did it,” but we never wanted to do that again.
Going into this album we were not relying on Guitar Pro, we were not relying on sending the songs back and forth, we wanted to demo the songs properly so we could actually hear what they sound like, we wanted to have more time to discuss and flesh things out. We did two pre-production sessions. We were in a room together like ten times more than we were in the lead-up to recording our last album. There was a lot more playing around with songs with where they could go. Then when it came to the recording process as well, it was the same thing. We had a greater choice of amps, a greater choice of mics. We just were able to experiment a lot more and that felt so much more liberating than the process for the second album.
We saw how we did that second album and we were like, “We’re going to do the complete opposite of that,” and it worked out so much better for us, I think. Just having the comfort and the freedom to experiment, and it also helped that we weren’t recording during a pandemic.
I know you’ve barely had a chance to even reconcile Unself yet, but in that same regard, were there any ideas you had going in that you weren’t able to get to?
Honestly, no. When we went in to record, the first few days of recording I felt very anxious. I pulled Brady to the side and was like, “Do you feel weird about this at all? I’m worried I’m not enjoying it, it all feels so relaxed.” He was like, “Dan, this is because we’re comfortable now.” We’re so used to recording situations being uncomfortable or stressful in one way or another, and this time, we booked so much time for ourselves to be able to account for days of hunting for guitar tones and things like that. We did the drums in a beautiful studio in the north of England, and we had like a week there which is quite a long time for drum recording. It was all just so relaxed. He also mentioned that we’ve been doing this for ten years now. You go into your first album like, “Oh, cool, first album, here we go.” But third album in, we know what we’re doing. I’m loathe to say that we’re veterans, but we know what we’re doing. With each album you have a better idea of what it is you want to achieve and how to achieve it. Going into the studio with that relaxed, comforting feeling made me feel anxious, and then once we discussed it I realized I’m anxious because it’s going well.
But, in terms of things I wish we should have done, I honestly don’t have any. I think the only thing I’d have wished for, the thing I really hate is the restriction of vinyl in that you get 22 minutes one side and 22 minutes the other side, so if you’ve written, let’s say, fifty minutes of music and you’re not allowed to put a double LP out, it’s like, why does there have to be to be this restriction?
We recorded two tracks that aren’t on the album. They will both be released. I suppose the only thing I wish is if those two could have been on the album, but even then, I think the omission of the longer track was for the benefit of the album. Now that it’s not on there it’s much tighter, and the omission of the shorter track, I do wish that was on the album, but I also see the positives in it not being on there. Both of them will be released, so I honestly have no regrets. There’s nothing that’s like, “I wish I had done a different take of that,” or, “I wish we found a different tone for this.” I’m really, really happy with it.
You mention comfortability, how has working with each other over the past ten years led to the evolution you have had musically since the beginning?
There’s been a lot of personal changes for all of us in the band since and I think we’ve all—to used the dreaded word—matured as people, and that’s definitely had a big impact on just the way relate to one another, the way we work with one another. I think before, when we had Jan [Krause] as our drummer, Jan is an amazing person but he was just as opinionated and stubborn as me when it came to writing. He’d admit to this, there was often unhappy compromises, like, I’d want things one way and he’d want things another way, so we would try to find a way of melding the two ideas together so that neither of us was particularly happy with it. With that, it just meant that there were decisions on the last album that none of us were one hundred percent happy with because it was like, I’m not budging on this thing and Jan’s not budging on this thing, and Brady’s not budging on this thing, so it just leaves you essentially a loss.
This time it was a lot more about, “Okay, just see my idea through, just let me cook.” The perfect example of that is the intro because that was one of the last things written for the album. I remember having the idea, having it all laid out, I went to Conor’s [Marshall, bassist] house to demo it and the first minute or so of it is just three acoustic guitar chords. I’m just recording that and Conor’s like, “This can’t be the intro, right? You’re not just going to sit and strum three chords.” It was like, “Hang on, let me cook.” Eventually, once all the pieces had been put together during pre-production and everyone had recorded their parts and we sat in the control room and listened to that intro everyone was like, “Oh, I see what you were going for.”
I find that with a lot of the things I write, like I was saying earlier, if I was to just show the guys one of these riffs with no drums behind it, just me playing guitar, they’d be like, “What the fuck is that? It’s awful.” But when you put it all together it makes sense and it creates this new thing, and there was so much more of that. I don’t think we’d have got to that point if it wasn’t for giving ourselves more time than usual, being more relaxed, and being more comfortable as a unit and putting that trust in one another.
What did the addition of Noah bring to this record?
For one, he is a huge, huge music nerd. I love talking about music with him. I think Brady will admit—he’s obviously hugely into music too, but he listens to kind of catch-all music. He doesn’t often put on the more heady and thinky music, really intense and experimental. He likes to put music on to casually listen to it. Noah really gets into the intricacies, especially of recording. I can sit with him for hours talking about how small a drum kit sounds in a particular song, or what they’ve done to get this particular effect and things like that. I’ve loved talking about music with him.
Really, that whole demoing period of this whole album was a getting-to-know-you period. He’d been touring with us since end of 2021, so it was getting to know him in terms as a live musician for about a year, but when it came to recording music and writing music, it was a completely different thing. He kind of opened up a lot more about what he likes and what he wants to achieve in music and what he wants people to feel and things like that. Jan always had that but he was similar to me in that he would kind of go away and come up with his ideas and you take them or leave them. Noah is a lot more like, “Okay, let’s try this, let’s try that.” It was a lot more free-flowing. I think Noah taught me to be like that as well.
I’ve said to the guys so many times over the years, I sometimes feel like a greedy lion, like a zookeeper drops a chunk of meet into a cage and I grab that and I go into my corner like, “This is mine, no one can touch it.” I’ve often felt like that with the music I write. I think Noah being so relaxed and casual about things enabled me to loosen my grip a bit, so I find that I’m not as precious about the ideas I have. I really believe in the ideas I have and I’ll discuss that with the guys, but when it comes to new suggestions or ideas and things like that it’s not so much like, “No, you can’t change this.” There were so many things on this new album that I had an initial idea in my head for and then during the recording and writing process it was completely different, but I wasn’t mad at it. I think we’ve all just, me especially, eased up a lot more in terms of just how protective we are of our ideas.
Much has been said about the lyrical direction of Unself, how you took a more direct approach talking very specifically about things you had been through. Can you delve deeper into the themes?
To follow on from the whole idea of this album being a reaction to the last album, I felt with the last album there were some really personal and emotional songs on that album, but I started to think, “Are people going to get what it’s about?” There was some instances of people reviewing or people listening to it who took a completely different interpretation of what the songs were about. Most of the time it’s like, yeah, cool, whatever you get from music is great. But there were songs that were very specifically about certain things and that message got lost and I felt that with that album I was screaming out for help about certain things, and I don’t want to say it fell on deaf ears because I put the onus on me, but I felt like I didn’t get the point across well enough. I don’t think I really summized the ideas that well.
With this album I wanted to be more direct, I didn’t want to hide behind flowery language, as much as we love it. I didn’t want to hide behind metaphors all the time. I just wanted to be more honest, more vulnerable, more upfront about things. This is what I’m thinking; this is where we stand; this is what we’re all about. Especially with the personal discoveries that I’d experienced in the last few years, I want to scream this from the mountaintops. Whether it was my autism diagnosis or realizing that I was non-binary, as much as I don’t want the band or the music to be exclusively tied in to all that stuff, I just wanted to sing about it. Me and Brady felt so many things about whether it’s the state of our current capitalist society and the way that these oligarchs are running the show, or the way that trans hatred is such a ridiculous yet prominent thing in our current society.
We just had all these feelings and I wanted to get them out and I wanted people to know what we’re singing about. I don’t want it to be so internal. I wanted it to be more of, this is what’s going on right now, this is how we feel about things, and we know you feel that way too. We wanted to connect with people more. We wanted to reach out to people a lot more, and just let people in. The last album was very internal. It was screaming for help but pushing everything away. This album has a greater realization of self, self-actualization as well, whether it’s individually or as a collective. We felt, and feel, a lot more confident in ourselves and what we do and the music we write and how we feel about things. We just wanted to put that on this record.
Are the lyrics more for you or for the audience?
For the audience, one hundred percent. As much the lyrics may come from a personal place and may describe personal experiences, I know that I’m not the only person that has experienced those things. The songs are to act as a source of catharsis for other people that are in the same position, whether it is neurodivergent people, trans people, anybody who feels marginalized or unseen or unheard, these songs are for them. I didn’t want to scream about me all the time. I did that on the last record and afterwards I wasn’t sure I felt so good about that. I was happy that I got that stuff out, but it was ugly, horrible stuff that I was dealing with, and now that I’m in a much better place and I understand myself and the people around me a lot more, and for better or worse the world around me, I didn’t want to be so internal. I wanted to reach out to people. I wanted the songs to just connect because there are so many people in a similar position that just don’t know what the hell is going on with themselves, they don’t know who they are, they feel a complete lack of self as I have. I just want these songs and this album to tell them you’re not alone.
You mentioned the last song, “The World Is Not My Home” earlier and I know that song—as well as the intro song—was inspired by a more traditional gospel number, can you talk about how that idea took shape?
During the pandemic I was watching a lot of YouTube essays and there was a video that came up about cave diving or something, and the very beginning of the video had this version of this song called “This World Is Not My Home” by Ben Babbit and it was for a game that he was working on called Kentucky Route Zero. I’ve always loved acoustic music, folk music, Americana, that kind of thing, and I just loved the song. I looked it up and added it to my streaming and for the longest time it was just a song that brought me a lot of comfort. I know the lyrics are very religious and it’s more of a hopeful kind of [message of], “It doesn’t matter what I do in this world because it will be better in the next one, I’ll be with my savior and kin.” But for me as a neurodivergent person who has never felt at home in this world, and never felt very welcome in this world, the lyrics hit me in a very, very different way. I really got attached to that kind of warring hopefulness and despondency in the lyrics. If you read the lyrics as they are they are pretty depressing. It’s somebody saying, “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” And that really, really resonated with me.
In the meantime we were writing the album, we were recording the album, demoing it, and I would sit and play that song to myself just playing the chords. If we were on tour and I was backstage or something, I would just play it to myself because it’s nice to just have a sing and a play. Towards the end of the album process I just had the idea of interpolating this song. I was trying to write a closer for the album and realized they don’t follow the same chord progression of the traditional song, but I found that the lyrics and the phrasing all fit with it. It was just in this much more downbeat minor key version.
I always loved it when albums bookend, like Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall—a lot of Pink Floyd—and I thought, let’s have the introduction where it is this more hopeful rendition, it’s more someone quietly musing on them not feeling at home in this world, and then the feedback and the drone comes in, it’s kind of the breaking down of the self. Then the album goes into all the reasons why it’s so difficult to simply exist as a marginalized person in this world. By the end of the album you get that introductory song again, but it’s in a much more hopeless and desperate place and it focuses a lot more on the despondent aspect of it. I just found that very personal and a very poignant way to end the album, really.
What else were you listening to while writing this record?
A ton of Pink Floyd. The Wall was a really big influence on the album, and themes across the big four Pink Floyd albums play into the album directly. In terms of stuff that influenced the album, the band Great Falls, their album from a few years ago, Objects Without Pain, that was a huge, huge influence. Giles Corey and Have A Nice Life, I’ve loved them for years, both those projects were big influences on the record. Thou were a big one. Agriculture is another one. SUMAC has been an influence forever. In terms of recent stuff I’ve been listening to, I’ve had a lot of Mastodon on because of Brent’s passing, so I’ve been revisiting—I say revisiting all those albums, but I listen to them constantly anyway. I’ve been listening to them in a different way. A new one that I’ve been listening to is a band called Crippling Alcoholism, they have an album calls Camgirl. It’s kind of dancey goth rock and it’s really cool. The newest Bon Ivor album has been a big one for me. There’s a folk artist from the UK called Jim Ghedi and he released an album called Wasteland around the time we were recording. That was a big one for me because that album goes into a lot of the same territory in terms of looking at the world around you and going, “What the hell is this?”
Is there a song on Unself that sticks out to you for any reason?
I’ll give you two answers. The song “Let Us Live” is for me a really important song and I’m so glad that (one) we got to make it and (two) it came out so well. It’s the most message-driven song we’ve ever done. I remember when Joe was mixing the album, he sent me the chorus because I hadn’t heard it all put together yet. I listened to that over and over and over again. I was so happy with how it came out. It felt so euphoric to me. It was a huge, huge moment.
The other moment that sticks out to me is the last third of the song “All Apart,” which was difficult to record. We’d recorded the vocals for the first two-thirds and then it got to the section where everything drops out and it’s me screaming at the back of the room and I remember Joe speaking to me from the control room like, “So this part of the song gets really, really intense; are you okay with delving into that to bring out a particular kind of performance for this section.” I was like, “Yeah, I deal with this stuff daily, so it’s nothing new for me.” It’s a very, very sad topic and very, very sad part of the song, and very emotionally intense. He just wanted to prepare me for it, which I really appreciate. In my head it was like another day at the office, and we started recording it and it was like I was recording—I don’t want to sound up my own ass or anything—it was like I wasn’t recording the song anymore, it was like I was just screaming all of my trauma into the room. Whether a mic was recording or not didn’t matter. My voice was shot, I was so desperate in that performance.
Recording the rest of it was like reaching in and pulling out every ounce of pain and hurt that I’d felt since I was a kid, and it all just came out. That part of the song, when I listen to it I sometimes get choked up, and it’s not like, “Look at how cool this song is,” it’s more that I spent so many years of my life, like a quarter of a century, not knowing who the hell I was, or what I was, or why I was being treated the way I was being treated, why I behaved the way I did, why I thought the way I did, why I communicated the way I did, and why people just did not like it and did not accept it, and feeling very isolated and alienated. All of that just came out in that part of the song, and it’s a really, really personal moment for me. I’m super proud of it, and I’m happy that it came out the way it did, I’m happy that the guys let me go to that place, and encouraged me to sing and talk about that stuff.
Unself is out now and you can order it from Nuclear Blast Records. Follow Conjurer on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: Matthieu Gill
