As I Lay Dying are metalcore no more. So says frontman Tim Lambesis about the band’s next album, An Ocean Between Us, which was partially inspired by the way many artists in the genre have become lazy and formulaic.
“We spent some time listening to our last album [2005's Shadows Are Security] and, just from being on tour, we became a little bit jaded by how the genre — as a whole — has sort of copied itself over and over again,” he told MTV.com’s Metal File. “We decided we wanted to be more diverse, even down to the point where we sort of felt like we should really focus on writing songs in different categories, and then pick the best songs from those categories and use them for the record.”
The upcoming album, which was produced by Killswitch guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz (Every Time I Die, All That Remains), is scheduled to come out August 21. While writing the songs, the band experimented with everything from melodic indie metal to nail-grinding thrash, but whatever style they were exploring, As I Lay Dying did so with energy and aggression. “On the tempo side of things, we wanted the record to be pretty fast as a whole,” he said. “[But we also] wrote songs that have a more emotional depth to them — songs that aren’t just pound-your-face-in all the time.”
While it wasn’t easy for As I Lay Dying to hook up with Dutkiewicz because of tour commitments and the guitarist’s back injury, Lambesis said it was well worth the trouble. “He has great ears, and even if he ended up going with one of the original ideas we had from pre-production, it was confirming that it was his set of ears that gave it the thumbs up.”
As much as As I Lay Dying scrambled to have the songs in working shape for Dutkiewicz, the process wasn’t any less stressful once the producer arrived. “When we were recording drums, the computer crashed,” Lambesis said. “When we started guitars, we had some bad cabling, so the first few days of guitars, we had distorted lines. And then we had a bad batch of strings, where every string in the entire box was buzzing on the frets.”
And while As I Lay Dying are a Christian band, there were some decidedly “Amityville Horror” moments. “One day, I just woke up and came downstairs, and inside the vocal booth, there were just flies all over the wall — maybe 30, 45,” Lambesis said. “And there are no windows in my vocal booth, so I couldn’t figure out how they got in there.”
For the full interview with As I Lay Dying and the rest of this week’s metal news, check out this week’s Metal File.
Now check out something that buzzes almost as much at 45 flies — the video for As I Lay Dying’s “Confined”:
