Future Static: Tearing Down the Walls
The Australian metalcore scene is often regarded as a hotbed of talent; alongside the giants, there’s also a plethora of upcoming talent eager to make their mark. Enter FUTURE STATIC, who although they’ve been a band since around 2016, are just releasing their debut full-length, Liminality, to the world in November. While it’s been a long journey to get them here, when we sit down with bassist Kira Neil and vocalist Ami Cook, they’ve well and truly “lost the fear because it’s taken so long! I just want to get [the album] out there!” Ami laughs about the impending release.
The quintet formed a number of years ago as high school friends, wanting to make the kind of music they weren’t hearing enough of, though they did go through a few iterations to become who they are today. “It started as me and our original singer Bri talking about starting a band after graduating,” explains Kira. After guitarist Ryan Qualizza joined, they recruited then-drummer Shay who departed after their second EP Fatalist. Shortly after, Bri opted to move on – and Ami saw her chance. She laughs, “I said to myself, how many days do I need to wait until it’s not weird? I wanted to ask on the day!”
After shooting her shot, sending the band a message asking if they were looking, Kira reminisces they practised with her “just to see if she fit the vibe, then we decided we weren’t letting her go,” grins Kira. With a solidified lineup, the band were ready to kick things into gear – and then 2020 happened. Instead of letting it get to them though, with Australia and their home province of Victoria having some of the most stringent lockdowns, they opted to go into writing mode for what would become debut album Liminality.
For the writing process, Kira grins that “once the ball started rolling, it really didn’t stop.” Planning Waves and Venenosa to be standalone singles, they wanted to figure out where they were now that Ami was in the fold. Instead, those songs made it to the album, with Kira and drummer Jackson Trudel working from home, contributing when they could while the others flooded the group chat with demos. “It was like Christmas every day!” laughs Ami, “there was always a new demo in the chat every morning.” The lockdowns didn’t just give them time to write; they shaped Ami’s approach to her lyrics.
“It’s what I was feeling,” she begins, “not moving forwards, not moving backwards, just stuck in a limbo, in a liminal space.” A number of songs touch on not just issues that she faced during lockdown, but always with some positive spin to them; “I’ve always been a positive person, just not be in denial about how bad things can get,” Ami explains. The likes of opening track Chemical Lobotomy and single Roach Queen are shining examples of this; with the former, she tackles themes of bad habits developed during lockdown and how those brought people closer together.
“There’s a lot of bad habits that came out of lockdown, but it was a time that we realised how much you need people and how much you love people around you. It’s about connecting through those habits, which isn’t great, but it connects you to your friends. Having hope built from a bad place is an oxymoron, but that’s really what life is.” Roach Queen offers a similarly positive spin on traumatic events; reliving an old childhood memory, where the house Ami lived in was prone to roach infestations that was a traumatic part of her life.
“I didn’t even know I was writing like this,” Ami admits, “but now we have this body of work to reflect on, it really does have a lot of my personality. I like to be a realist in a positive way, and that’s what Liminality is about. Everybody goes through traumatic things but you don’t want to deny it happened or neglect those feelings.” To help bring them to life, the band enlisted Ten of Swords, a film and media collective that transformed these traumatic events and songs into almost equally terrifying, horror-indebted videos.
“Ryan and I are both film school dropouts. We have a film degree between us,” chuckles Kira, explaining that they’re both horror film buffs, as are Ten Of Swords. “We initially came to them with the Venenosa concept saying, we want to do all this gross stuff. He said it was amazing and that he could make it even more gross!” That extended to enlisting makeup artists for Ami’s transformation into the titular figure for Roach Queen, doubling down on their love of horror to make something that helped reinforce such heavy themes. Despite all the horror though, Ami maintains her positive spin on their songs and outlook for the band.
With an album that sees them embracing modern metalcore, flourishes of djent and prog as well as poppier sensibilities, they’re poised to break out of Australia’s scene like their peers before them. “Everyone’s so far behind, dude!” Kira laughs of the world only just picking up on the Australian metalcore scene, with recent stars POLARIS or MAKE THEM SUFFER. “[Australia’s] been killing it for years, and I couldn’t be prouder that we’re part of this scene. Now we’re going back out to the world to show them what we’ve got. We’re all working together now.”
Liminality is out now via Wild Thing Records.
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