As Everything Unfolds: As Above, So Below
For a genre as rooted in escapism and experimentalism, individualism and innovation, heavy metal can often be a cautious community of gatekeeping. Scene stalwarts can be stubborn, and change can be seen as if it’s the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve once found themselves faced with. With the likes of ARCHITECTS, BRING ME THE HORIZON and ENTER SHIKARI finding their footing in the future of metal, twisting and turning their takes into experimental, avant-garde, and dare we say it, poppy dimensions; it’s not surprising that others are following in their footsteps. HALF-LIVES and DREAM STATE were in the driving seat, but here to lead the charge on the second wave are British hopefuls AS EVERYTHING UNFOLDS, who are finally arriving with their debut Within Each Lies The Other.
Whilst the post-hardcore that painted the walls of 2018’s Closure EP, arguably the moment they flowed past their peers in the overfilled, overflowing coffee pot of post-hardcore, remains integral to their sound, they’ve since created a cocktail that owes itself as much to the epic orchestral brushes of symphonic metal as it does to the sensational synth-pop breeze that’s been ruling the roost in the mainstream pond. For many bands in the metal world, this would be a murder most foul, and a risk many wouldn’t deem worth taking. For AS EVERYTHING UNFOLDS, they couldn’t care less about tradition.
“I don’t think any of us actually listen to metal anymore, like I’ll delve into the occasional band in our circles, like our peers, just cause they’re good and it’s about supporting your friends, but our music tastes have changed dramatically over the last few years, from straight-up metal to pop music,” says vocalist Charlie Rolfe emphatically. “We’re analysing pop songs and listening to things and looking into the psychology behind music, which I think is a natural progression, and as musicians you evolve and change.”
You can feel the pitter-patter of pop-sensitive structures slipping through the cracks in their breakdowns and blast beats, exploding in festival-ready hooks that hit home with harmonies and melodies you couldn’t always manage. Whether it’s the atmospheric air that permeates the pummelling post-hardcore of I’m Not The Only One, or the explosive nu-metal electro-pop that brings On The Inside to life, there’s a sense of shifting allegiances throughout Within Each Lies The Other. As far as Charlie is concerned, AS EVERYTHING UNFOLDS aren’t afraid to follow in the footsteps of their idols in order to evolve, no matter the cost.
“I think BRING ME THE HORIZON are a perfect example of that, they’ve grown and changed as they’ve got older, no matter what. They’re 100% our biggest influence, in terms of their creativity, the way they do things, and their psychology behind their writing, and their marketing, it’s spot on, I love it all,” enthuses Charlie, aware of the costs such creativity can bring in a scene as stuck in their ways as the one they’re currently in. “You can’t really win either way; if you stay the same, people will slag you off, and if you change, people will slag you off so you might as well do what you feel is right.”
That process of learning is something we as humans do day-to-day, yet we often take it for granted. When writing and recording Within Each Lies The Other, they found themselves flat on their backs on metaphorical sofas, seeking solace in the catharsis their time in the studio offered, treating them far more as therapy sessions than anything else, learning more about themselves than they ever have. “It’s written like a therapy album, like it’s acknowledging the problems. There’s song’s like Wallow, where it’s a pure shouting into your pillow kind of thing, and then you’ve got songs like Grayscale which is looking at that balance, like seeing life in grayscale rather than in black and white, and that idea of not seeing the right and wrong, but seeing the inbetween, so it’s definitely an album that describes the different journeys of how I’ve felt over the last few years.”
It’s this duality of understanding that AS EVERYTHING UNFOLDS delves into throughout Within Each Lies The Other. Whilst there was much inspiration influencing the lyrical labyrinths Charlie and co have spent their time navigating, it was ultimately a philosophical and psychological deep-dive into some age-old mantras that makes the album such an adventure in self-discovery, as Charlie explains. “There’s the saying ‘as above, so below’ which is like you can’t have that which is above without that which is below, but that’s quite a wide thing, so I wanted to see how I could take that and make it more specific to the person. So for me, it’s like within each lies the other, so within each of us there’s always another version of us which you’re either not very proud of, or you don’t like to acknowledge. It’s the idea that you have to experience the bad things in order to get the good things out of life and out of yourself, so it’s that idea of without going through some kind of hardship, you can’t experience that positive side of yourself, or a self that analyses situations in a new way.”
There’s a sense of defiance that pulses through the veins that power AS EVERYTHING UNFOLDS. You can hear it in their words, and you can hear it across Within Each Lies The Other. There’s this whole new understanding of music, and of the role in which they’re now playing. They know they’re outsiders infiltrating an inner circle, and they really couldn’t care less in the most empowering of ways,
“We like to stir the pot. We like to put a bit of the heavy in, then a bit of a ballad, and a bit of the synthy stuff. We just write music that we enjoy writing, and I think a lot more people need to do that rather than stick to a formula of what they think they should do, because if everybody just wrote music they liked, I think we’d have better music.”
Within Each Lies The Other is out now via Long Branch Records.
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