Gaerea: Crossing Black Metal’s Bridges

Releasing a record at the start of a global pandemic is like gambling away your house keys on a hand you’ve not even seen. But as GAEREA proved with 2020’s Limbo, a life in lockdown doesn’t stop an album from exploding into eardrums. With countless tours cancelled, they found themselves up against a brick wall – could they smash through it?

“We were reliving this nightmare; that fury, that frustration of working so fucking hard for something that you can’t fucking show the world in it’s pure form, like performing these songs, it consumed us,” says GAEREA’s anonymous leader, who found a fuse to be lit in the fury being stuck at home. Ultimately, that frustration gave birth to Mirage, their all-conquering third album.

“I guess that fury and that frustration led into us picking up the instruments, picking up the pen and writing what the mind was giving us; we took the time to just reflect, shut down and get these internal sources out of my brain and just write about it,” they explain, having tied together the thousands of threads that make up Mirage in just three weeks. But with Limbo levelling up their profile globally, did black metal’s masked disciples feel the pressure? “No – we don’t feel pressure by trying to top what we’ve done in the past. For us, it’s not only about the music, it’s about growing.”

Without a little pressure though, you won’t turn carbon atoms into diamonds. And Mirage’s black metal masterclass only evolves the genre it’s inspired by because of how highly GAEREA regard Limbo. “I wouldn’t say Mirage is better than Limbo; one of the songs of my life is on Limbo, I don’t think I will ever write a song like Mare, and I don’t think it’s about topping that, it’s about continuing the path, taking that growth that you had for the last two years and asking ‘who are you now?’”

We’ve all done some deep soul-searching over the last two years. An entire planet reassessed their purposes in life. So as they look out across the precipice of Mirage, one question remains: who are GAEREA in 2022? “I think we’re way more comfortable in this world that we have created for us now than when we were in Limbo, like we were still discovering some things about our psyche in this band, and I think now, we’ve created an album where I can see a painting or a movie in my head for all the songs, I think we’ve finally mastered a way of telling these stories.”

Mirage is a cinematic experience unfolding through your ears. From opener Memoir’s haunting post-metal isolation to closer Laude’s blastbeat bruising, GAEREA have truly learnt how to weave a narrative, both musically and lyrically. Having realised that their masks, their symbols, and their live shows were unique to them, allowing them to “feel it in our own way, we have found our own bridge to cross”, they soon discovered the key to their storytelling: minimalism.

“It’s about being minimalistic, not showing a lot of things just because you could; it’s about showing the right ones and telling the right story and playing the right notes” GAEREA ponders, often deep in thought. “Take the song Mirage, it’s very minimalistic. After all of that chaos of 6000 guitars doing absolute apocalypse, just letting it all go as a sea wave and just having this guitar playing two or three notes, I think it’s exactly what we needed. We don’t need to be the most explosive, fast, blasting band in the world. That’s not our thing, it never was.”

In finding minimalism, they found themselves, and in turn, the next chapter of their story. With Limbo, they felt “stuck inside this concept for the first time” whilst Mirage feels like “a rebirth in the third person.” Revisiting the Vortex Society concept, they’ve etched out on Unsettling Whispers and Limbo, Mirage was the easiest to explore. “It’s getting way easier now – it’s like having this 2D image, what you see is what you get and you can write about it once. But once it’s 3D, you can look at it in different perspectives, you can light it in different ways, you can find shadows, you can be closer. It’s the same world, we’re just placing ourselves in different perspectives.”

Based on GAEREA’s observations of the world around them, Mirage’s eight tracks tell the stories of eight characters. Sure, it’s nothing new for them – but in a way, it is. “For the first time, we’re telling the stories of real people; we’re watching other people, and people that we know but just don’t fucking understand how they function and how they cope.”

“We know some things about these people, but we’re not able to interfere. It’s a very unsettling feeling sometimes, just observing and letting their world turn to ash to survive or just commit suicide, or just getting themselves burnt to ashes like in Arson.”

Mirage is an album made for finding yourself within its characters. They might be inspired by the everyday lives of real people, with specific stories to tell, but they’re ours to engage with. But if you’re searching for a place to begin, GAEREA offer a clue: look at the artwork. Against a black background, the GAEREA mask stands out in solid gold, tearing at its seams. So what does that mean? “This album struggles a lot with high and low, perception versus reality; what we perceive as gold might just be rotten on its core, so it’s an invitation for something that I want people to not have a perception about it, I don’t want them to think this is just another GAEREA record.”

“It’s about perceiving something, judging something, and never actually getting to the reality. It’s about the creation process, about having a very specific thing, a piece of art, or music, or a movie and claiming it’s the thing of your life. That’s completely based on your experience, based on what you felt with it, it’s based on helping you cross a bridge in your life.”

Whilst these songs are yours to interpret, there is an element of sadness that fills the void for GAEREA. Once these stories are out in the world, there’s a gap between the listener and creator that they feel deafens the process. “Even if you know exactly everything about a song or an artist writes all his thoughts about the art, it’s sad because I don’t think that you will ever be close enough to what the artist actually felt while creating this masterpiece for you.

“There’s always this glass wall where you can’t see everything or feel everything to its fullest and that’s sad for me, that’s confusing and frustrating. People tell us how they feel about songs, how they’ve helped through moments and the songs are not about that, but who am I to just tell people to not feel the songs the way they are – the moment you release something, it’s not yours anymore. It’s like giving birth to something and just letting it go for the world to witness, interpret and understand, or not.”

The concept of understanding an artist’s intention is important to GAEREA. It’s what they want Mirage to achieve more than anything. Some of us strive for understanding, GAEREA need it to live. “It’s important to have people understanding your art, and whoever says the opposite, that they don’t care about their fans, they’re fucking hypocrites. It’s not about appreciation, it’s about being understood, and we feel like some people are starting to understand exactly what we mean with these lyrics and these concepts.”

These lyrics, these concepts, and these ideas of The Vortex Society are more than just the sum of their parts, they’ve grown into a community of fans. It’s through this fanbase that GAEREA find the strength to move forward, to continue to create. “It’s very important for us to feel that we are creating this community, this society of people that care for what we do and embrace it in ways I never fucking imagined would be possible for us. It’s weird, but very pleasing to see because it’s about spreading a thought, a message, planting a seed in people’s minds; it’s not just the music, it’s about the message.

By holding a mirror up to the world, by sharing different perspectives on the way we live our lives, GAEREA hope to shape the way we think as society. They’re on a quest for positive change, and they know that starts from within yourselves and your own community.

“People come to shows and spread the music, and message us with new ideas and how they feel about the song or have a debate. I’m very happy that we can do that with people, just sharing ideas on the world and it’s exactly what the world should do way more often, we wouldn’t have so many problems socialising with each other if we would just fucking sit down and debate ideas without arguments.”

“This record and this band bring that into my life. There’s very deep holes and abyssal moments in this path that we write about, it’s not about having this community of self-help, it’s about having this community that can understand what we’re doing and dive deep into this world, letting it flourish within themselves or not.”

Mirage is out now via Season Of Mist.

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