INTRODUCING: Only Human
The realms of progressive metal have been flourishing in leaps and bounds with each passing year as many a budding upstart arrives looking to push the genre to even farther unpredictable reaches. Enter Danish newcomers ONLY HUMAN, having only begun their initial assembly in 2022 they quickly grabbed the attention of label heavyweight Season Of Mist before their debut release had even seen the light of day. Despite this sounding like the ideal, fairytale scenario, frontman and founding member Patrick Grønbæch Christensen has had to be patient in order to bring his plans to fruition.
“I have been wanting to do a progressive metal project for a long time and in the beginning I was only really playing guitar, I wasn’t even singing at the time,” explains frontman and founding member. I met Andreas via social media, possibly Instagram, we knew each other through mutual acquaintances and as soon as I saw his playing I knew immediately that he was the drummer I’d been looking for. Our bassist Guillaume was a friend of Andreas and they’d played in bands before. All three of us got together and we started to slowly get the ball rolling and got to work on writing some music. We got some guitarists in and that didn’t really work out for us until we got lucky and came across Martin and Jack. We found it a bit difficult to get into the groove at first as the style I wanted to go with was a challenge for the other guys but they were keen to persevere and stick at it and I was impressed just how fast everyone started to gel and pick it up. We worked a lot on more complex, syncopated rhythms which gave us a more proggy sound. We all have different influences, Guillaume has experience with electronic music and Andreas has worked on some drum and bass projects before so we worked on how we could utilise those skillsets and incorporate them to make something more interesting rather than just having a straight-up metal sound. I feel like the progressive metal fanbase appreciate bands who are willing to experiment and be ambitious.”
Their debut full length entitled Planned Obsolescence made its arrival on March 27th and will certainly catch the eye of fans of PERIPHERY and TESSERACT. This release doesn’t just focus on the music, instead, opting to also delve deep into the prominent, pressing thematics related to the world of technology. “I work in tech in my day job and I came across the term being used, particular with mobile phones,” discusses Patrick. “You’ll start getting updates and things will gradually get slower and slower to the point where they are unusable and manufacturers have become clever, limiting the ability to modify anything or even replace the battery to try and extend its life. I then started thinking about the whole idea of the way we feel like we have to constantly update elements of our lives for fear of becoming outdated or obsolete. I was getting sick of how people have a tendency to treat ourselves like objects. Funnily enough I had also developed this whole theme before AI even became a popular topic of discussion so the release feels like very convenient timing. Some of the riffs, melodies and rhythms for these songs came from ideas I had way back before the band came together so they’ve been completely rearranged and reworked from old stuff I’d recorded on my computer. I find it quite hard to define our sound as we do kind of jump all over the place but we have found a way to channel all of our ideas and make them cohesive and we are very much aligned in what we want to achieve which I think is most important. We don’t want to limit ourselves to a particular set of parameters and are always discussing our output together to make sure we’re all in agreement.”
After initial hesitance, hoping the right person would come along, Patrick opted to take on vocal duties. “I was hoping we could find our Chester Bennington but we didn’t have such luck! I was doing all the demo vocals and Andreas and Guillaume were giving me encouragement but it took me a while to train my voice. I felt like I was just screaming badly but because it was just demos I wasn’t too worried about the outcome. I started to take vocal lessons as I wanted to focus on doing it properly and developing a technique. I’m still not convinced if I’m doing it right but I feel like I’m getting there. Because I’m involved in all aspects of the songwriting I feel like I can almost hear the vocal line so I usually have a good idea of where would be suitable places for the vocals to sit. That also helps everyone else to understand the bigger picture and we can all lock in together. That cohesiveness is very important for me. I always leave the lyric writing until last as, personally, I’m not a big fan of it. I tend to just sing in gibberish to get the vocal rhythms down and then make sense of it later. I think I was still coming up with lyrics for Breach right towards the end, possibly even the last day. I spend a lot of time recording and listening back to make sure everything sounds good and makes thematic sense. I’ve got all kinds of songs which are either recorded or half finished that we felt didn’t fit what wanted to do stylistically this time. I also had an idea to do an extended outro to Automata but we were approaching deadlines so I opted against it.”
Prior to the release of the full product, ONLY HUMAN released a string of singles along the way. As we all know, internet comment sections can be quite a blunt and unforgiving place but Patrick and his bandmates haven’t been deterred by any ill-placed negativity. “There has been an interesting split in responses to the songs. We’ve received some really nice comments but others I’m sat there thinking, ‘wow, I really ruined your day, didn’t I?’ We take everything in our stride and have had a laugh about it. I’d rather people really hate it than being indifferent as at least we know where we stand. It has been nice to have that kind of validation.”
With a release party and various festival appearances including Sweden Rock Festival and Næstved Metalfest in their homeland of Denmark already locked in, the remainder of 2026 is looking very fruitful for this promising outfit.
Planned Obsolescence is out now via Season of Mist. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS129 here.
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