INTRODUCING: Deadlands
DEADLANDS never intended to have an EP focused on the seven deadly sins. “It was very sporadic,” vocalist Kasey Karlsen admits. “Originally, the EP was going to be poker-themed, but then we realised that we’d never played poker in our entire lives, so writing an entire EP about it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Instead, I think I was playing video games with my boyfriend, and I had a lightbulb moment of ‘why don’t we do the seven deadly sins?’. I asked [DEADLANDS guitarist and producer] CJ [Arey], who thought it was a great idea, and we decided to stick with it.”
Karlsen initially got into heavy music through her dad, who would play CDs for her in the car when she accompanied him on his work trips, as well as playing the video game Guitar Hero with her brother. However, she admits that there was a period of time where she hated everything heavy and metal, and would only listen to mainstream music. That was until she got back into video games, and the Call of Duty series – as well as her brother learning guitar – sent her down a rabbit hole of music, and listening to AVENGED SEVENFOLD sealed the deal.
She attracted an online following in 2022 with her covers that she’d post on social media, and as the numbers grew, she teamed with her long-time friend Arey to write music that would become the foundation of DEADLANDS. After the success of their 2022 EP, Sentence of Myself, and playing at festivals such as Aftershock, the duo’s popularity has slowly been growing.
Although their poker-themed song House of Cards was already out when they decided on the change in theme for their EP, they realised that it still fit the narrative, the colour-theming and “overall vibe” of wrath, so they “just went with it”. When it came to writing the EP, they were a little sporadic at first when the duo were trying to figure out what they wanted the different sins to be, but things came into perspective when Karlsen explains that the song Villain was created in collaboration with their producer, when Arey and the producer “called me and asked me to come up with a word for the song they were about to write. I gave them the word ‘Villain’, and they came back with a really cool melody and the whole structural part of the song. As I was listening to the chorus, I though that this could definitely be tried. When it came to the other sins, I feel like they were more so we had to have them in mind, but it was more the vibe of what the song was giving if we’d worked on the instrumental first.”
The writing for the EP was very experimental, especially as this is their first release signed to a major record label, so they had some people who they wanted to duo to work with. However, DEADLANDS also had a list of people they wanted to work with, but thankfully they found that “working with different producers that had a different vibe for each song worked, because all the songs sound different from one another, and I think that’s a testament to how experimental it was.”
The band are extremely hardworking, and this is apparent in the recording process for the EP. There are two songs that stand out for Karlsen that encapsulate both the band’s work ethic and their determination.
“The easiest song on the EP to record was Villain, as we didn’t have time to dwell on it,” she explains. “The melody and instrumental was written the night before I’d left for tour with NITA STRAUSS, and I think I wrote the lyrics in two hours, and we tracked it in just under two hours. But the most difficult song to track was probably Limbo because it is so different to any other song that we had, and I was not used to singing in a very pretty voice, and it’s really high for me. Getting to those high notes, especially after the fact that we had recorded another song right beforehand, was a little tricky, but we made it work and I could not be more happy with it now.”
The cover for the EP – titled Seven – shows tarot cards surrounding a box with the number seven in a heart. “It came about because I love witchy and occult vibes,” Karlsen explains. “We wanted the EP to be very introspective and wanted people to look inward if they related to the songs and ask themselves if they can work on bettering themselves. Tarot cards hold your fortune, and these songs are meant to touch upon your weaknesses and the ugly parts of yourself, so you can reflect on them. We try to use the cards to tell your fortune to better yourself. We also did it because we wanted to align with the fact that we aren’t a religious band, but love the vibes and the darkness, because I think that the seven deadly sins is such a religious topic, but when you mix it in with the witchy stuff, it differentiates us. I also love the Seven box on the cover, which was our play on Pandora’s Box.”
This differentiation is incredibly important because DEADLANDS are a band who are just trying to find themselves. “The most authentic thing you can do to stand out is to just be yourself. The more we start to embrace ourselves, the more unique we will become.”
SEVEN is out now via Spinefarm Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS125 here:
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