Sleep Waker: Soul Of An Insomniac Machine
Grand Rapids five-piece SLEEP WAKER aren’t your typical metalcore band. Sure, at first they seem like a familiar prospect: passionate young lads, screaming over chunky breakdowns and stomping guitar riffs. Bands like them turn up every single week in the music world. But there’s more to these boys than mere pit thuggery. Their second album might be the smartest ‘core of the year.
In its brisk, thirty-two-minute run time, Alias walks a fine line between aggression and melody, while also dealing with big ideas. The lyrics question reality and our perception of it, they ask what it means to be human and how our identities are formed. There’s a lot of nods to science-fiction too, with the blurred lines between natural and synthetic life bubbling away in the background. Like FEAR FACTORY before them, SLEEP WAKER aren’t always optimistic when looking at the future, but they’ve done it with more subtlety. This isn’t a gigantic Hunter-Killer robot bulldozing a field of human skulls, it’s more insidious than that.
If drummer Frankie Mish is afraid of tomorrow though, he doesn’t look it. When he joins us, he’s relaxed and never stops smiling. He talks enthusiastically about his favourite sci-fi movies and seems very excited to have a great album lined up and ready to send into the world. SLEEP WAKER are on the verge of a new chapter and despite the pandemic, the recording process has been a very positive time. In fact, the lockdown has given them more space to be creative, compared to their first album.
“There was more collaboration and time for everyone to be involved. We didn’t have jobs getting in the way, didn’t have family get togethers or tours or other band things like practices, so we were able to have everyone recording and throwing in ideas. We had people spending the night and we were recording later, we could devote more time. It was kind of nice to have the space to evaluate every session and figure out what we were doing.”
The chance to stretch their limits and take their time has yielded great results. Alias might be comparatively short, but it’s huge. It’s a notable step up from their debut and the common theme of personal identity running through it gives it a singular narrative focus that their contemporaries often lack. So, would he describe it as a concept album?
“I would say yes, a loose concept but it would definitely be based around what it means to be human, what it means to be alive. It’s us exploring those concepts and trying to find our own meaning within them. It’s an album we sat and thought about for a long time and I hope that comes across in the lyrics.”
The science-fiction influence is impossible to ignore as well. The album art features a humanoid figure with plugs in the back of its head, there are bizarre little effects dotted throughout and there’s a distinctly dystopian, otherworldly vibe to it. And it all started when they were finishing up the first song:
“We were working on the lyrics to Skin first, we had tracked that one instrumentally and we thought let’s finalise this first and have it be a jumping off point for the rest of the album. We had a bunch of ideas then I sat down and watched Blade Runner 2049 and I was thinking ‘this is what I wanted from that,’ from that song.”
Frankie also namechecks Ghost In The Shell, Isaac Asimov and Mark Z Danielewski’s dense experimental novel House Of Leaves as influences on him. The sci-fi of Alias isn’t chisel-jawed heroes shooting lasers at alien spaceships, it’s an anxious and troubled individual who just found out their memories may be fake and that reality is an artificial construct. But it’s also not so overt as to detract from the more grounded aspects. It’s entirely possible to enjoy without worrying if you might have synthetic veins:
“We didn’t want to write an album that people come out of thinking ‘yeah, that was about Star Wars and Blade Runner,’ we wanted it to be more of a fun little Easter egg, that you can dig deeper into. But you don’t have to be a fan of these things to enjoy it.”
When talk turns to the actual future, rather than a dystopian theoretical one, Frankie is obviously excited about playing live. They have a few hometown shows planned to celebrate the album release and he’s keen to start touring again. Getting across to the UK to play Download Festival is a dream and on the strength of Alias, it can’t be long until we see these boys play at Donington.
And he’s already thinking of album three. This is no clearer than when we discuss Distance, the emotive closing song. It grapples with the theme of grief and how the passing of a loved one leaves an indelible mark on a person. It’s remarkably well done and he’s rightly very proud of it:
“It captured most of the sounds on the album and the evolution of the band. It showed off the non-aggressive side of the album, moving away from the straight up heavy, hardcore all the time record. It’s almost like an ellipsis, it doesn’t quite end, it fades out. We’re not done exploring this, not finished with these themes and this sound and we wanted this to be a promise of more to come.”
Alias is out now via UNFD.
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