Things feel a little different this time around for new Metal Blade signees WAKE. The Calgary-based act’s label debut, and sixth full-length overall, Thought Form Descent, out July 22, is a masterclass in everything all at once. Thought Form Descent feels like a band firing on all cylinders, one who is aware of exactly what they want to be and how their past can and should inform that. It’s also a gleefully psychedelic experience, where grind, death, black, post, prog, jazz, and shoegaze all come together to create the most incredible extreme metal record of 2022.
“Without us (pushing the envelope) every time, we never would’ve been able to have something like that work, says bassist Ryan Kennedy. “(Our social media) handle is @wakegrind, but that’s because when we started playing in 2012, we were definitely playing grind. That’s what we were doing, but after a while, we all just realized that we don’t spend all day listening to Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and no one in the band really does or ever did, and finally it was OK to say, ‘Well, not only can we do that when we’re listening to music, we can let the music we want to listen to come through in what we make.’”
“And that I think that was about 2017,” he continues, “when that really started to be like, wait a minute… We don’t have to just keep making sure that every record is, like, this certain type of thing that fits the handle on the Bandcamp. We can just start doing whatever we want. And I think really the truth of it is that we got lucky (with Devouring Ruin), and it worked. And then we found a format where it was like, OK, well now that we know that we can get away with it, let’s just keep going and never stop. So that’s pretty much what happened with us. I think that was, that was pretty much the path from going to our social media handle @wakegrind to Wake the band.”
It’s much more than leaving a constricting handle behind. Though Form Descent is about a band truly letting go of notions of the past and venturing deep down into the cavern of possibilities. To be fair, though, there are clearly more beautiful bay windows in Grotto WAKE than typical (they must be excellent speleologists in Calgary because their cave could not be more majestic and brilliant. That balance of weight and wonder was key for Kennedy and company:
“At the heart of everything we’ve done since I came back to the band, about five or six years ago, is that we don’t want to be motivated by one thing, but we do want to have goals. It’s kind of like, we don’t want to say this next thing will be X, but we do want to say this next thing will be Y. That was a bit of a struggling point for us going into this new one because it was clear that everybody wanted to have more parts like Devouring Ruin that were nicer and melodic and reflective of different sort of movements. But we also were completely unwilling to think that this is the record that we’re going to make a hit single off. None of us wanted to do that at all.”
Here’s where the “Eureka!” moment kicks in for Kennedy:
And I what I think the truth is that we kind of got lucky because of our drummer (Josh Buekert). Our drummer is the type of musician who can play blast beats for five straight minutes. But he’s also a really, really good musician on his own. I think he’s like the middle linchpin sitting among all of us that just enables us to keep playing really, really heavy, fast, like things that are unpalatable to a commercial ear but to still have a lot of really good rhythmic, creative elements that do represent a more welcome, open type of music. I mean, we all contribute, but I think Josh is really the biggest part of that because a lot of the times when you see a fast drummer play extreme music, they’re just attempting to go as fast as they can in the 16th notes. Josh is so good at introducing all these cool rhythmic elements at a high speed because he played jazz for so long.”
“And I think that really helps us come back and go for it,” he continues. “All my accents from my lines come from Josh’s ghost notes and his alternate notes. He’s just so good at coming up with that. We just feed off of each other. So I think that’s a big part of how we are lucky enough, not to just kind of either sound like an extreme death metal band or sound like Turnstile. That’s kind of, that’s where we managed to find a way to get in between because we’re lucky to have Josh thinking like that and me thinking like that. So that’s a pretty long answer to a simple question, but I think if you want to talk about our mindset, that’s probably where it starts is like, we’re able to find places where we’re not just playing extreme blast beats, and we’re not writing hooks. We’ve got some stuff going on in the middle that’s a little different than either of those.”
Kennedy started as the band’s drummer and came back to WAKE as their bassist, so what has it been like being on both sides of the rhythm section?
“I started playing guitar in 1994, so I’ve basically been playing every instrument I’ve ever been able to get my hands on since I was seven. In this case, it’s way better because when I played drums in this band, I was kind of the type of drummer who’s like, ‘I want to play really fast.’ And I did have, like, some ideas that were cool, but I’m not as good of a drummer as Josh, but I am pretty good at playing every other instrument. So it kind of was, like, not necessarily a growth point from a quality of musician thing, but it was a growth point of the dynamic of the group. I feel like there’s never been a state of this band that had every member contributing on every cylinder the way that it is now. It’s always been, like, lulls and ups and downs for everybody, and in this time, in this case, I mean, we’ve finished three records in three-and-a-half years. And every time, I would say it’s been a steady flow of contribution from every member. I think we wrote everything so fast because we’ve felt lucky that we are able to, or, like, we got to get all the stuff in a bottle before somebody has a heart attack or something. Make sure we don’t miss any of this stuff because we’re lucky enough to be able to put it together.”
I don’t want to gloss over this concept of ghost notes and how being both parts of the rhythm section clearly has colored Kennedy’s relationship to the band and dynamics. Where a lot of extreme metal bands focus on guitars and vocals, WAKE feels like the drums and bass are central—but not commanding—sort of like Kennedy and Bueckert are the cake, and the guitars and vocals are the icing. One is dense and (sorry!) moist, while the other is sweet and heavy. It all comes together to create this delightful cake, but can you serve cake at the bottom of a cave? Who cares! Let’s allow Kennedy to elaborate more on his impression of the band’s key relationships:
“We have a really specific goal of not losing the relationship between the rhythm section and everybody else. I feel like when we started writing Devouring Ruin, that was something that everybody really got excited about, instead of having the rhythm section just be the drums and then everything else just be riffs. It was kind of like, well, we are changing the way we’re looking at our group in the context that like a string quartet where every instrument will have a role, because it has to have a role. And I think when we started writing these songs, instead of someone just bringing a riff and being like, ‘Play this, and we’ll play this and play this.’
“Someone would play something, and then everybody would look at each other because everybody has to do something, right? So I think that concept of, like, not keeping all four instrumental layers as layers—no one can play something different from each other all the time. We were trying to make sure that there’s, like, a relationship that feels like every instrument is playing something specific to its case.”
Watch the video for “Swallow the Light” here:
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Photo courtesy of Metal Blade Records
