Black Orchid Empire release new track by track guide for ‘Semaphore’
BLACK ORCHID EMPIRE have released a new track by track guide for their upcoming new album!
Titled Semaphore, the upcoming album from the rock trio is set to be released this Friday (June 12th). For fans of BIFFY CLYRO, TOOL and DEFTONES, BLACK ORCHID EMPIRE create huge, memorable rock music that combines heavy-hitting savagery with intense melodic beauty. Ahead of the release of their new sci-fi concept album, we asked the band for an exclusive track by track breakdown of the album!
Emissaries
We were inspired to make an intro to the album that echoed some of the amazing early sci-fi movies that inspired the lyrics on the record. The voice over is read by Billy [Freedom, drums], and we all absolutely love how it came out! The little beeping sound you can hear in NASA comms is called a Quindar Beep – we emulated it with a synth. It gradually increases in tempo and serves as a great way of building excitement.
Singularity
This is one of the punchiest riffs on the record, and we felt it was the perfect way to start after the intro. The riff was originally based on an exercise Billy converted into a beat, and I wrote the guitar part around that. I love how hard it hits. Singularity was a tough track to record as it’s such a deceptively complex riff. The song is about the idea of being stranded in the grip of a black hole, and being dragged towards it. The only way to escape is a daring slingshot around the singularity, but the object’s huge mass creates a difference in relativity that costs the survivors any chance of seeing their loved ones again.
Natural Selection
This song has a big hooky pop chorus, but the verses are actually in 13/8, making it feel quite disorientating. Our goal is always to create music that feels simple but is actually very complex, and this is a good example of that. Perhaps my favourite part is the middle section – there is a ton of harmonic vocal, bass and guitar layering that myself and Dave [Ferguson, bass/vocals] loved putting together. The song is about an alien sent to ‘correct’ the course of a doomed Earth, who ends up becoming so enamoured with the good qualities of humanity that they decide to stay despite the inevitable demise – to go down with the ship. It’s a hopeful but bittersweet story.
Motorcade
This is one of my absolute favourites. It’s big, heavy, complex and yet extremely melodic and beautiful too. The drop into the riff in the middle is a real moment for all of us that had us grinning like crazy when we wrote it. Lyrically it deals with the idea of a hidden assassin undercover in a position of power.
Red Waves
Dave wrote the main riff as a rhythmic idea based on trading off beats between the vocals and other instruments. It’s a really cool pattern that we all loved straight away. My lyrics are about someone being left for dead in a confrontation, but then travelling time to face their opponent again and achieve revenge.
Heliopause
We felt the album needed a break to allow a change in tone down to the next song, and I wrote a piano piece that ended up fitting that purpose really well. It’s set to a recording of a Russian public address system warning people about a bomb test. The Heliopause is the boundary defined by the outer limits of the Sun’s solar wind – the theoretical boundary between the solar system and the rest of the universe.
Winter Keeps Us Warm
This is one of our favourite song to play live – hearing the crowd sing the big hook back to us is an incredible feeling. It also came together quicker than any song before – the entire writing process was less than six hours from start to finish. The song is about a ship stranded in space – they make the decision to send out a desperate distress signal and commit to hibernation, not knowing whether they will ever wake up.
Dust
This is such a fun riff to play. We love the bounce and power of this song, which tells the story of two slaves deliberately crashing their craft into a reactor in an attempt to spark a rebellion against their oppressors. The ending riff of this was probably Billy‘s biggest challenge during drum tracking. The placement of the kick pattern is really tricky to nail down, but the final result is unbelievable.
Faces
This song is definitely influenced by two of my favourite bands: DEFTONES and BLACK PEAKS. It’s unrelenting and full of chunky riffs. The story is about an android becoming self aware and becoming a preaching evangelist – obsessed with informing those around him that they are not the humans they think they are. Whether or not he’s right is unclear.
Death From Above
One of the heaviest songs on Semaphore, Death From Above is a huge riff that smashes you right from the start. The lyrics are based on the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan, and the idea that humans uncovered ancient technology from a lost Martian race that helped the reach the stars.
Evergreen
I wrote the opening guitar riff for this song first – it’s an incredibly challenging part to play. The song is influenced heavily by TOOL (a band we all love and respect), and is built on a constantly moving texture of different time signatures. The solo section is probably the craziest piece of music we’ve ever put together from a theory perspective. Lyrically it explores the idea that a barren planet has one slowly receding area of liveable land left which the elite keep tightly controlled, leaving the less fortunate with scraps.
Monolith
Influenced by HAL from Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is a song about a malignant artificial intelligence trying to understand the weak, imperfect humans around it. Musically it’s a big, slow, sludge-filled riff fest. We feel like it’s going to be amazing to play live.
Crash
This song serves as both an epilogue to the album itself and the narrative of the song Dust. One of the characters wakes up after the crash and finds themselves both victorious and hopelessly trapped. Musically it was an opportunity to explore different textures from the rest of the album, using some industrial, processed synth sounds influenced by bands I absolutely love like NINE INCH NAILS and MASSIVE ATTACK. We adore the way it came out – haunting, beautiful and melodic, but closing abruptly on a moment of absolute sonic destruction, bringing the record to a visceral end.
Semaphore is set for release on June 12th via Long Branch Records.
For more information on BLACK ORCHID EMPIRE like their official page on Facebook.
