World Maker, the new record from Belgian post-metal trio Psychonaut, opens with an electric piano over a softly pulsing drum as steady as a heartbeat. This might have been a very deliberate choice given that becoming a first-time father profoundly shaped how Psychonaut guitarist/vocalist Stefan De Graef approached the record.
“The whole idea for the album started when we found out my wife was pregnant,” De Graef tells New Noise. “I just wanted to write an album for my son, and also to write about how I was feeling (as a new father).”
The songs on World Maker comprise a series of life lessons for De Graef’s son (who was born last January), and is an altogether more wide-ranging and varied record, especially compared to the band’s previous album, 2022’s Violate Consensus Reality. “That was such an angry album, it was our Covid album,” De Graef says. “This album is so much more personal, a lot more positive. Lyrically, it’s (me) singing to (my son), so yeah obviously I’m going to be happy and excited.”
While the music on World Maker has also evolved along with the lyrical themes, the positive vibes don’t mean that there’s no heaviness or ferocity. “I just didn’t feel as angry as I felt on the last one,” De Graef explains, “but that doesn’t mean the album’s not heavy, it definitely goes hard on many tracks.”
After all, becoming a new father is anything but all positive vibes – it’s also a harrowing experience, there’s a lot of fear and worry that come along with bringing a fragile new life into a chaotic world. “If someone ever hurt my son I would just go savage on them,” as De Graef puts it.
But ultimately, he says, “I just really wanted to write an awesome progressive rock album” when composing World Maker. “I wanted a good degree of variation and surprise all throughout the album, so it’s very light, it’s very psychedelic, it’s progressive, a lot of different rhythms, a lot of crazy riffs.”
De Graef particularly wanted the album to have a really long intro that pulls the listener in gradually, and thus the opening track, which is also the titular track of World Maker, clearly marks this out as an altogether more patient and heady record than Psychonaut’s previous full-lengths. “World Maker” is pure psychedelia, never boiling over into anything approaching the metal part of post-metal while De Graef sings exclusively in his decidedly David Gilmour-esque baritone throughout the song.
That just makes follow-up “Endless Currents” all the heavier when it launches with a ripper of a finger-tapped riff, as if Russian Circles have just barged in on a Pink Floyd jam session. It’s not until more than halfway through “Endless Currents” that De Graef finally unleashes the first proper metal scream – and again it is made all the more ferocious because of the clean baritone he has sung in up until that point. The effect is mesmerizing, and it’s just one of many such gripping moments on the record.
Just like the soft pulse that opens World Maker, the Pink Floyd influence would seem to be entirely deliberate. That’s certainly fitting enough, given that the record is written to De Graef’s son who is actually named David in honor of David Gilmour. “I really wanted a lot of psychedelic sounds in there, I wanted soundscapes, so I guess the biggest influence for this album is Pink Floyd,” De Graef says. “Their influence has always been there, but the Amenra, Mastodon, and Tool inspirations were a bit more present on the previous albums.”
It may be more positive and psychedelic than Psychonaut’s previous two records, but World Maker is just as weighty and deep a work as anything the band has done. It just happens to be a real trip, too. De Graef may be speaking to his son through the album, but he’s also speaking to the very nature of life and the cosmos. “Spiritually and philosophically I believe that we generate the universe,” he explains. “We get information, we process it, and it displays reality in the same way that a computer screen translates code. So in that sense everyone, every life, every human being, every animal, is a world maker.”
World Maker is out now from Pelagic Records, and you can order it here. Follow Psychonaut on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: Christophe Bryce
