VOLA: Baring Teeth and Sombre Hearts
VOLA have fast become a staple for any progressive fans in the last ten years. Their enigmatic writing style to their unconventional approach to sound and space always surprises and delights. We caught up with guitarist and vocalist Asger Mygind about their new release Friend Of A Phantom and the process that built this latest creative output.
One thing that’s no surprise to hear is that Friend Of A Phantom was a creature created entirely as its own thing. “Yeah, I think we pretty much started from scratch, actually,” Asger explains when asked about any bleed through from previous albums. “We began writing in, I guess, spring 2022 but it was a bit of a difficult process, I would say, because we were still touring with Witness at that time. I think it can be easier to write if you end one process of touring with an album and then just start writing so you can focus 100% on that. This time we had to write while still touring and it made the songwriting a bit more fragmented. But I think all the ideas we worked on were new ideas that weren’t from the Witness cycle. I do feel like the whole vibe is almost a little bit more like a lament on this one.”
VOLA have a strange way of having a huge scope of sounds and ideas, but always managing to be distinctly, recognizably themselves before you’ve even clocked a vocal. What’s striking from Friend Of A Phantom is just how solemn it is comparative to the previous release. It’s something fans perhaps weren’t expecting, but as ever, VOLA have followed what’s naturally occurred to them as artists. “I think it’s a pretty sad album. I don’t know why it became that way to me,” Asger pensively remarks. “It reminds me a bit more about of Applause Of A Distant Crowd, which had these very low-key songs, with lots of melancholy. I guess maybe it was a bit of a reaction to Witness, which was very energetic, and that might have like pushed us in a direction where we wanted some of the materials to be a bit more mellow. But on the other hand, there’s also some stuff that’s, I would say, more aggressive than what we what we’ve done before. The album has more like screaming vocals in Cannibal, for example, and I do some more harsh vocals than I’m used to. So overall, the spectrum is just wider, I would say, than on Witness.”
The songs of Friend Of A Phantom feel like a set of cautionary tales, each expelling a hard emotional output, with no song resembling another. Self-contained efforts, there’s care and attention for whatever grows in a VOLA song, but not so much about what that might be conventionally. “I think we all care a lot about, like, the flow of the songs. If a song only has three parts it’s fine if it works. I found that a song doesn’t have to contain a specific thing for us to be happy. We [really couldn’t] careless about, like, who contributed what in the song. Yeah, it’s not a process for the ego.”
As each album offering from VOLA has a cohesion without ever being a repeat of previous work, we had to ask about what general processes the band has leaned towards to consistently hone their craft. “So it sort of feels like a domino effect, but the chorus eventually appears because of what comes before it,” Asger summarises. “It’s never really planned out, but we definitely go for the feeling of elevation when the chorus hits. We want that feeling of just being catapulted into the air, it just can’t sound big enough. I guess that’s in our DNA that we try to do that; we just hope that it will unfold naturally. They are the same with the lyrics, like there’s always some kind of sentence appearing when we write. I never know what the songs are going to be about, but some words appear in my consciousness and I just go with that. I guess I have a lot to say in terms of the emotional outcome in the lyrics, but the other guys trust me with that I want still at this point, so it’s, I feel very fortunate.”
From the ferocity of Cannibal and Bleed Out, the gentle lament of I Don’t Know How We Got Here, to the bittersweet optimism of We Will Not Disband, VOLA have poured out another earnest collection of bold and authentic tunes. Friend Of A Phantom a testament to the craftmanship of the collective, and it’s a delight to see how they follow their passion and intuition into consistently different territory.
Friend Of A Phantom is out now via Mascot Records.
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