Erdve: The Pursuit Of Heaviness
Forming in Lithuania in 2016, ERDVE’s mission is to create uniquely heavy music with an intense focus on atmosphere and experimentation. For many, our first glimpse of this came with their 2018 debut full-length Vaitojimas – a crushingly heavy record that mixed elements of hardcore, sludge, black metal and more. This is something the band have largely continued with for their latest album Savigaila. If anything, this one’s a little more sonically ambitious than its predecessor, with more dynamics and moments of melody. It’s still just as heavy though, with a thematic focus revealed in the album’s title, which translates to ‘self-pity.’
“[The theme] comes from a feeling of being unable to comprehend or conceptualise, for example, the meaning of our own mortality, or justify how we interact with our surroundings,” explains the band’s guitarist/vocalist Vaidotas Darulis. “I kind of find myself and know many people who are completely succumbed to the rabbit hole of self-pity… So basically it’s about seeking distractions from that, and I mean all kinds of distractions – most likely engaging in addictive activities, like escapism, and kind of living your life as a spectator. I’m not talking about it as a bad thing, I’m talking about it as something that you should consider about yourself. We all do stuff and ignore things in our lives that maybe we should consider and reflect upon.”
It’s definitely a shift from the subject matter of Vaitojimas. That record was far more outward looking, reflecting on dark societal issues like alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide. For Darulis, the shift feels like quite a natural one. “I think I just became a bit more happy in life in general,” he muses. “I started exploring myself more than the outside. It’s actually something that we’re all talking about in the band very often, so it’s not only my personal take on all that kind of stuff. Also, you read more things, you see more things, so I’d say this new album is a more experienced take, a more experienced perspective, more mature maybe. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
One thing that is clear from talking to Darulis is that he and ERDVE definitely don’t limit themselves when it comes to finding inspiration for their music. Over the course of our half-hour conversation, he points to MASSIVE ATTACK, AMENRA, old school drum ‘n’ bass, nu-metal, and even Hans Zimmer‘s soundtrack to Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk as having varying degrees of influence on the band’s sound. “Listening to so many genres of music, I couldn’t even consider myself liking any particular genre in general,” he explains. “I’ll like a couple of bands from each genre, and from those couple of bands I’ll only like six out of ten things that they do.”
Darulis’ influences aren’t limited to music alone either. He becomes particularly animated when describing a famous interview with the influential poet Charles Bukowski. “He was asked by an interviewer ‘how should poetry be written?’ And he was like ‘every sentence has to have its own juice, it must not be boring, it must not be boring to write, not boring to read… Every line has to have its own juice.’ So I was talking with other bandmates and said that every song has to have its own juice – not the whole album, but every song. I kind of always have this in mind, every song must be different, and it is.”
The effect of these diverse and distinct influences is an album that feels heavy in more ways than one. While ERDVE comfortably tick your traditionally heavy boxes with crushing riffs, pummelling drums and Darulis’ own abrasive vocals, Savigaila also carries a serious emotional weight. For Darulis, that was very much intentional: “You know that feeling when you watch a movie and there’s like a really sad and depressing scene, and you end up thinking about it for the next couple of hours, or the next two days. Or like reading a book where it’s not pure emotion like ‘I feel sad’ but you feel like ‘oh shit that was so heavy’ – you know it’s heartbreaking. So [our music] is not about making people feel sad, you just kind of feel when there’s a certain emotional weight attached to a certain piece of art.”
Few songs highlight this better than the album’s devastating second track, entitled Smala. It’s a song that sees Darulis pour his all into his vocal performance in particular, with the results sounding utterly tortured. He tells us the inspiration for it came from learning about children who are abandoned at birth when he and the band played a charity gig at a church in their home country. “Right from the moment when you are born, you are already unwanted. I don’t know what that person thinks, depending on the situation that person is in – that thought struck me very hard… So I kind of decided to make the song as emotional as possible. I don’t know if it’s cathartic but it’s really intentional, but also just being honest.”
It’s clear then that ERDVE are treating their craft and the subject matter with the respect it deserves, and as a result Savigaila makes for a resoundingly successful sophomore effort. Darulis isn’t about to rest on his laurels either. In response to our rather typical ‘what’s next for ERDVE?’ question, he mentions new music, potential tours, and a desire to push themselves in making videos in particular, concluding: “Basically, we’ll try to be as creative as possible and not only in music – but mostly in music!”
Savigaila is out now via Season of Mist.
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