Code Orange: down.they.go

“In about ninth grade I said to our guitarist Reba: you know, when we get out of high school – you’re joining this band, you can’t go to college.” It only really takes one sentence from CODE ORANGE drummer/vocalist Jami Morgan to accurately portray who the band really are at heart: five twenty somethings not just living, but inventing their dreams.

The band’s dark, eerie aesthetic often radiates a closed off, erratic attitude – in fairness it’s this characterisation that has helped separate the band from the norm. But beneath the low lit pictures, harsh screams, and guttural chaos – Jami is a music lover first and foremost, almost everything comes in second place and below to his passion for heavy music.

As tempting as it is to fixate on the bands future – CODE ORANGE have a past that is equally impossible to overlook. Namely, their exceptional breakout album Forever [2017], which sliced its way to the forefront of the alternative conversation to give us a brand of hardcore we had quite literally never encountered. The world may have been standing still momentarily for us, but for Morgan and co, it was merely another step in their evolution – he eloquently describes the Pittsburgh brutes journey thus far as a metaphorical house construction.

“I Am King [2014] built the house, Forever furnished it, and now it’s REALLY finished,” he claims. What’s interesting is that he refers to his own band’s evolution with a sense of upmost importance, but also stresses that not every band has to constantly be in search of the next step. “You know what, it’s not necessary for bands to evolve all the time. Some bands are fucking awesome at what they do, and they keep making great records, and it’s a really important part of the culture.”

He has a point, in a world where bands are constantly looking to move on to their next boundary, how could genre foundations ever be laid? If METALLICA were to become an all encompassing assortment of metal, then thankfully SLAYER stuck around to become thrash figureheads.

It’s not this simple when it comes to CODE ORANGE though, they were a five piece that weren’t getting what they were looking for from heavy music – how do they combat this? They become what they wanted to hear themselves. “What I saw [for the band] as a whole was: okay, how do we take heavy music and not get rid of the parts that are fun and great about it? Because a lot of times when heavy bands become more artistic they lose those parts. That was honestly the hardest part of making Underneath – coming up with new, entertaining ways to write things like mosh parts and riffs, it’s a small sandbox to play in.”

Looking back, it’s the band’s ability to become such a transformative machine of heavy music that made so many latch on to them. Metal, doom, hardcore, metalcore, even hazes of hip-hop: CODE ORANGE are a wrecking ball of music conventions. Their unique, Frankenstein approach to songwriting has given them their platform, but by the same token: been the very thing to put stumbling blocks in their way too.

“There’s no built in audience for what we’re doing,” says Jami. “There’s no band like TRIVIUM, SLIPKNOT, or whoever, that’s gonna pass their audience straight down to us – they’re going to pass some of it, but we’ll have to go around and collect little parts of everyone’s audience, that’s really the only way I can see us making a big audience for ourselves because we’re just too different, and antagonistic. But we have a community, it’s the five of us, and we believe in what each other is doing, and I’m really grateful for that. We can point to each other and say: do you believe in this? And if they believe in it, so do you.”

When it comes to the writing process for the bands new masterpiece Underneath, CODE ORANGE had targets resting directly upon their foreheads, and they were almost put there by themselves. They obsess over pushing limits into uncomfortable areas, which when you take in the records mammoth, hardcore virtuoso performance, makes sense. It’s an album which in all likelihood, similar to its predecessor will be looked back at for generations to come: a tectonic shift in what heavy music can be.

With all the hype, anticipation, and proven track record behind the band, it’s surprising then that when Jami truly opens up about the finer details behind Underneath – it’s still a potential financial make or break for the five piece, despite their past successes. “There is truly a sense of like: okay, if everyone doesn’t like this one, could we afford to keep doing this? No, we probably couldn’t. But does that influence the art? No. If it did, would the first three tracks on Underneath sound like this? No [laughs], they’d sound like something we could fucking sell.”

CODE ORANGE insist on being true to themselves. There’s a chance you’d be aware of them for their individualistic, sometimes morbid identity before you come across their music. When discussing the power of the bands bravado, Jami throws out a simple “We get made fun of and we’re fine with it” jab, but it’s not until he continues to dive deeper that you begin to realise: the front line of CODE ORANGE is simply a representation of the bands lives, the darkness is not just an image, it’s the band themselves.

“We put effort into all those things [building an identity] and making them work, and be as apparent as we possibly can, which I think a lot of bands are scared of now because they don’t wanna get made fun of. Bands 15 years ago weren’t scared about putting pictures to their music and making it all fit together, nowadays some bands just wanna be like: ‘oh, I’m this meme of a person haha’… it’s just super pathetic to me. Our art is reflective of us as artists, I think we’re very good hearted people that care about others, so I wouldn’t say it represents that part of us [laughs] but it represents what we want to see in art, and what we like, wanna hear, and consume.”

As the embers on a new cycle in the CODE ORANGE lifespan rise, it’s important to know that there’s not a shred of doubt in Jami‘s voice when he’s talking about where he sees the band fitting in heavy music – they know their time is now. “We’ve definitely felt for a couple of records now that we can do this,” he firmly states. “We can do this as good as anyone, so why not try? You’ve seen that this has made us controversial much more than anything that involves our music. We put our aspirations and our belief out there, sometimes that rubs people up the wrong way, and I understand that. But our morality has never changed, we’re still the same people: we believe in ourselves, we’re not scared to say it, we never will be scared to say it.”

Unabashed, dark, brilliant. Underneath tries to sum up the entire CODE ORANGE mantra in 55 minutes, but even as genius as the record is – there’s still masses left untouched. The Pennsylvanians may once again have reinvented the wheel for heavy music, but it’s only a matter of time you sense until they do it again. If you’re not interested in joining them in the trenches, they won’t be sticking around trying to convince you otherwise, CODE ORANGE have gone from a movement in hardcore to a full scale musical shift: down.we.go.

Underneath is out now via Roadrunner Records.

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