Few bands portray those moments before, during, and after a dream morphs into a nightmare quite like Slow Crush. The Belgian band’s latest and first for new label Pure Noise – Thirst, out August 29 – is a record that taps into the parts of you that only are revealed when you’re either hauntingly alone or in a dream state. Few emotions are as terrifying as vulnerability, though Thirst is never fully a nightmare; existing in a clearly Lynchian liminal state, Slow Crush ask listeners to be one thing and only one thing: fully present.
“With everything that’s going on, we do forget sometimes to take a step back and just be in the now,” vocalist/bassist Isa Holliday says. “[Our style of music] kind of forces you to do that. Everybody has a darker side I fear, and I know for what we are doing, we do sort of present the yin and the yang, to present the light at the end of the tunnel as it were, that no matter how dark your thoughts are, there is always that silver lining just over the edge, and that may be in a dream state that we take you to.”
“What we hear a lot from people that come to see our shows,” she adds, “is that they were just able to float away and listen to the music and let the music take them to a different realm. That is so necessary to sometimes forget about all of the horrors that are going on in the world or in your own lives. Everyone has something that they’re fighting through, and music is really a universal tool to be able to let you forget for half an hour or 45 minutes or however long the album is, just to sort of put yourself in the current moment and listen to those songs and think about nothing else. So I hope that our music is able to [do that].”
All this talk of surreal imagery is meaningless is the piece of art isn’t initially arresting, and Slow Crush have carefully crafted and curated Thirst in a way where the first half introduces their heaviest and most immediate material to date. The self-described “abrasive shoegaze band” front-loads Thirst with quenching material that’s the best “gaze” this side of Deftones or The Smashing Pumpkins. They let things get a tad weirder and more wistful in the second half, to the benefit of the entire experience. That said, there are some capital “r” riffs herein that rise above the fold.
“That kind of more aggressive feel was I think what we felt was missing perhaps from our previous records, which is why we’re very happy it worked with this one.It’s just the organic evolution that Slow Crush has gone through. Each record has its own evolution, whether it be in sound and tone, as you were mentioning earlier, or just in production. We worked with a different producer with this record, Lew Johns, who also helped to elevate that and just create a massive sound, even more massive than we had originally envisioned. So that was another learning experience for us to work with somebody with so much passion and who was really involved from start to finish.”
“A lot of the times when we’re writing and when we’re practicing to get ourselves ready for recording,” she continues, “we are very sort of ingrained in how it was captured in the demo, to a point where we kind of want to recreate the demo as it was exactly. Lew was able to take us out of our shell and just expose us to what we could add maybe things that we could cut down, although I must say we have songs that had 200 plus tracks of guitar recorded on them, so I’m not sure how much he was able to cut down rather than add [laughs]. Having him really step in as a producer and open our minds to a lot more was a great experience and really added to the overall production of Thirst in comparison to our previous record.”
One aspect I’d be remiss to not mention is how Slow Crush leverage Holliday’s croon as an instrument that is part of the whole instead of the kind of thing that stands out in an awkward way (see also sometimes Deftones or Smashing P’s). That said, Holliday is as high in the mix and essential to the record’s success here as ever, and that was intentional:
“I don’t know if I’m confident enough to sing without effects. I mean, the effects are kind of an integral part of our sound as well. In general, I do have quite a soft voice. It might not sound that way when I’m talking, but my singing voice is very soft. Thank you for saying that I’m an integral part of the album or that my voice is. It’s something that we do put a lot of effort into making sure that the vocal melodies are bringing out the best parts of what the instruments are doing as well. It is something that we do intentionally consider, that the vocals are an extra instrumentation rather than just putting words together and making a completely different melody over everything.”
An aspect that stands out when talking with Holliday is the receptivity to inspiration. We gushed about music and movies, but when it comes to actually feeling moved to create, much like a dream, you just have to be open for that to occur:
“I can’t say that there was a particular visual influence. There may be many. Sometimes something as silly as like an ice cream van driving past can trigger us to write a song. I think that there are so many influences out there or just experiences that we’ve been through all the tours that have sparked some kind of motivation or idea when writing. I was brought to tears during tracking at different points because of the emotion of everything at the time. I think just the music took me there. I think it might just be like, it’s silly, some chord combinations and combinations of vocals and instruments can just hit a chord [pun unintended]. But I think that is just something typical with music, that music can really pull on your heart strings and draw tears out of your eyes, whether it’s, I don’t know, somebody hitting a high note or even a choir singing can draw emotions out of you sometimes just because of the combination of those vocals.”
Thirst is out Friday, and you can preorder it from Pure Noise Records. Follow Slow Crush on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates.
Photo Credit: Stefaan Temmerman
