Pittsburgh-based Deathcore band Signs of the Swarm recently released their fifth studio album, Amongst the Low & Empty, via Century Media Records. Having been touring intensely just before recording this new album, Signs of the Swarm were a little up in the air about what developments might be part of a new collection of songs, but working with an outside Producer for the first time, Josh Schroeder (Lorna Shore, King 810, Tallah, Varials), contributed a lot to their development process.
While trusting their songwriting to a more organic progress, they also employed a greater awareness of transitions between elements their ambitious tracks. The result is a very confident sound and a clarity in the layers of their music that reaches audiences in a very immediate way, something they are experiencing when playing these songs live.
The band is made up of Bobby Crow on drums, David Simonich on vocals, Carl Schulz on guitars, and Michael Cassese on bass, but for this album, they also collaborated with a wider array of musicians for a richer sound. That included Joshua Travis (Emmure, Glass Cloud, The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza) and Cameron Losch (Born of Osiris), but on one track, “The Witch Beckons”, they are even joined by Trivium’s Matthew K. Heafy. I spoke with Bobby Crow about the ways in which the band found themselves in new territory, the discoveries they made, and the reception these new songs are having live.
This album had a pretty fast turnaround for an album in some ways, only recorded about a year ago.
I know! It’s fast but at the same time it feels like forever ago. Time being in a band sometimes doesn’t make any sense. For any kind of art or work, if you care about it, it feels like it was last year, but last week, all at the same time.
My theory is that it’s a different kind of time that operates when you’re submerged in the studio or at home working that doesn’t line up with normal time.
Absolutely. Whether I’m in the studio or at home editing videos, I’ll say to my fiancé, “Hey, I’ll be ready soon.” Then, it’s dark outside, and six hours later. What happened?
I heard that you came straight off a tour to make this album and that, to some extent, you felt unsure where the album would go. Since then, have you played any of these songs live?
Yes, that’s some of the fun part. We’ve learned a lot from touring with other bands and watching them, and watching crowds to see what they enjoy. We had a tour with Whitechapel where we were playing two new songs. We’re playing a lot more of them now and have shows coming up. As soon as those new songs kick in, it’s a total vibe change. As soon as the new songs come up, the whole room is jumping. It’s awesome. We’ve never experienced anything like that. The first time we played them was at one of our favorite venues, in Atlanta, called The Masquerade. We got to play the big stage and immediately the whole room reacted. We knew this was different.
The song we played had only been out a few days. That’s usually how we judge songs, how people react. Streams are great, they help you get gigs and all that, but what really matters to most people is if audiences actually come to see you. That’s very special and I think that should be the judge of being a band. I’m excited to play a lot of new stuff coming up.
I think you took bigger chances with some of this new music than you have before. I think you pushed into new directions, so it’s great that the audiences reacted so immediately.
I feel like there’s something in music, whether it’s Metal, Pop, or Country, that just makes it good music. It makes you uncontrollably bob your head or move. That’s something I really want to make happen in our music. There was an old Metal DVD with a bunch of musicians where Bruce Dickinson said, “We stopped making music just for the people up front.” That’s what I want to do. I want to make music for the people in the back. We’re doing festivals this year for the first time and I hope we do that. I want to reach that person in the back who doesn’t really know about the band, but if you can get them to bob their head, and think, “That was cool!”, that is such an accomplishment. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
I feel like these songs are really intentional in each part of the composition. I know there were also some returns to the studio for you where you added elements from special collaborators, so the process didn’t stop for a while either. Which is funny because you had less time than usual.
I do a lot of the core writing, starting songs, then I take everyone’s ideas and help move things around. I’m very open to ideas and do groundwork. We start like that. But for this record, I didn’t do as much of that as usual, so a lot of this album comes from trusting people around us, like Josh Schroeder. Something he kept drilling me on was the transitions and the movements between the different parts of the songs. He wanted every change to be a statement and felt like every change was supposed to be a change.
It sounded really difficult at first, but it was as easy as taking away one note here or there. We made things more intense, and made sure that everything was there for a reason. It was a big lesson for me in writing music, looking at the little things that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. Dave also has a voice that makes anything sound like our band, which is great! [Laughs] That meant that I could branch out a little and try new stuff and I knew that he would be the glue that held it all together. But I think that’s part of the big difference compared to our older stuff, that the transitions hit harder and are sicker. We gave everything a purpose the first or second time around than going back to things over and over again.
I think I can hear what you’re talking about in the music. One thing I noticed is that I found the pauses and quieter moments interesting and not choppy. The songs didn’t feel like they jumped around, but were very fluid. There’d be a quieter guitar or a breathing moment, but not a total drop.
For a lot of that stuff, I had really basic ideas, like having a clean guitar, and Josh really sat together with me and worked on that. We’d keep building and building layers. If we did a background guitar in the middle of the song, then I’d ask, “Where can I put that in the song in a different way, so that way you’re used to hearing it?” It made the softer part feel more familiar when it comes up. That’s really special for me when I’m listening to records, hearing bits and pieces that come up again.
I was sometimes reminded of orchestral music when listening to some of these songs, because of the different elements being brought in, like motifs. Sometimes the same motifs come up in songs that are being created at the same time in the same way even if it’s not exactly planned.
Absolutely. You’re sitting around and playing the guitar and you notice that you’re enjoying a sound. You wonder how many movements that you can come up with based on that. I did concert band and drumline my whole life, and I did orchestral music. I went to college for that, but ended up dropping out to tour. I take a lot of that into how we write music.
You wouldn’t think that since we’re a Deathcore and Heavy Metal band, and we don’t really use those sounds. We’ve done a little more of that in the past, but I take a lot of that song structuring and finding where every instrument needs to be from my studies. The biggest thing that I took away from school was finding the space for each instrument. That used to be my whole life.
I think it gives the songs a real advantage, because there’s clarity in how the instruments interact, and especially in heavier music, the different layers can drown each other out very easily. Is there a concept that goes with the title, Amongst the Low and Empty? Was this about feeling exhausted in some way?
There was a line from a song on our previous record and we thought it was a really cool line. We thought it would be a cool record title, but dropped it for a while. That song, in particular, was about growing up in a broken home and being around really shitty people. That’s something that me and our vocalist have in common, a similar upbringing. You could take it two ways. It could be a triumphant thing, saying, “We grew up around shitty people, but you can make something of yourself and rise above that.”
Or it also could be that if you’re amongst the low and empty, you’re a part of these things that are dark, whether it’s people or a feeling. When we started working on the album art, it has a low and empty feeling, so things started coming together. We found ways to repeat elements in the lyrics throughout the record to pull things together. I think Dave wanted to take the idea of rising above things from the phrase, but I like to think of it as being a part of things. I think it’s cool that it’s set up that it can go either way. We are curious to see how other people feel about it. Some songs are darker, and some songs are more triumphant on the album, too. “Dreamkiller” is a bit more positive-sounding, for instance.
I know that some of the songs have a specific idea, like “Malady”, which David felt could reflect on depression.
Yes, since the word “malady” means a kind of sickness. David was talking about trying different medicines over the years and having them not work. We wanted the song to begin to feel more intense as it goes and there are a lot of noises in the chorus that are meant to suggest that your head is being pulled in different directions. If you listen with headphones, you can hear that [best].
There are high notes that sound like it’s behind you, and the low stuff feels like it’s hitting you. Then at the end of the song, it gets more distorted and then it kind of falls apart. Then it’s over. We thought that was a cool way to replicate what the song is about, depression, feeling like your head is being pulled in different ways, and then it just stops. You can take that however you want. Dave is brilliant for matching lyrics to how the song feels. It’s a cool way to end an album, too.
It feels very realistic and human, in contrast to more conceptual albums, to end that way. It consumes its own energy.
That was one of the ones we wrote towards the end, when we came back to the studio, and it felt right to be the ending.
That one felt a little experimental to me, an alien, disorienting feeling that matched the ideas. I hadn’t really heard that sort of approach in heavier music.
That’s awesome. I like trying to do weird shit. It’s hard to do it without being too weird and losing people. If we can make it wacky and fun, interesting and unsettling, that’s great. I love that song and it makes me want to start the album over again. If you hear it on vinyl, normally the last few seconds will skip on a record, to tell you to flip it over. The noise that runs at the end of the song is a kind of monotone that goes on forever. You’ll only hear that if you listen on vinyl. It dives down in pitch, and you can barely hear it, but it will basically go forever until you flip the record over. It’s a reminder to start over or it will just keep going and going.
That’s very old school. Now I must get the vinyl.
We almost made it a repeating line from a song, but that didn’t work, so it’s basically a flat-lining type of sound repeating forever. It makes you wonder, “What just happened during these 42 minutes??”
