Hail The Sun: A Higher Level Of Frequency

California’s HAIL THE SUN have earned their fair share of praise and admiration over the years with their never-ending wealth of inventiveness ensuring they are one of the most consistent bands around. As expected, the collective spearheaded by visionary Donovan Melero have zero intention of resting on their accrued accomplishments as their sixth full-length album draws ever closer. 

“You can expect an onslaught of familiar yet evolved musicianship and lyrically driven, melodic song writing,” says Donovan. “One of the biggest differences this time around was that we worked with a co-writer, with a friend of ours, Joe Occhiuti from ICE NINE KILLS, who we thought would be really fun to write with. We are always learning and growing so we always try to bring that new information or knowledge and bring it into our songwriting. I really leaned in on my vocal performances and finesse and it’s something I’ve been working on for a few years now. I wanted to explore avenues to making myself a better singer and to portray emotion and character in my voice as best as I can.”

The release Donovan is alluding to is Divine Inner Tension, the new and exciting chapter for HAIL THE SUN which possesses a remarkably optimistic outlook. Something which has rarely been present in their catalogue thus far. “This album is the first album that we’ve written which doesn’t come from a place of just despair or darkness,” admits Donovan. “Of course, in a way that has inspired great art in the past, including from myself but on this one I went through a transformation during the pandemic where I really started to try operate on a higher level of frequency and bring my life into orbit by believing in manifestation and bringing non-tangible things into tangible aspects of my life.”

“The album theme, in general, is about that how we are our own gods and are our own creators and when we can recognise that we’re pretty much an unstoppable force. It all comes from within and everything that has happened to me up until this point has served me well but I realised that I’ve been swimming upstream a lot in my life. We may not know why things are happening at certain times but if we accept that they are happening to lead us to where we need to be there is nothing that can’t be achieved. The whole divine aspect comes from within and it comes from the tension that we experience trying to get to that point of aligning with our source energy and only leaning into those vibrations and frequencies that make us feel good and bring us what we want in life.”

As is evident by Donovan‘s eloquently delivered insights, he and his fellow bandmates are looking to leave any lingering negative energy behind them and focus on becoming the best versions of themselves. They look to continue to reap the benefits of their fearless innovation and robust companionship. “We take a different approach to every song, we all bring different ideas to the table, even if it’s just a rhythm, we start putting the pieces together, embellishing and finessing it as we go along to give it its own identity. It’s great working collaboratively as someone can maybe hear something that the other people may not hear and that’s why we work so well together. Our songwriting ability just keeps growing. This all leads back to the manifestation thing and how we’ve been able to do this for so long. The world works in mysterious ways, we somehow all crossed paths and have been able to keep this going for twelve plus years. It’s all meant to be. We’ve gone from playing to just bartenders to playing to hardly anybody to now where we’ve created this machine that has come from nothing and it’s amazing.”

In recent times Donovan has stepped out from behind the drum kit, the place where he has predominantly plied his trade for over a decade, to unleash his vocals front and centre. A decision which he has really taken in his stride. “I love being up front, it’s a lot of fun. It creates a different shift in dynamics during the performance. I used to drum the whole set and that was one of the things which really set HAIL THE SUN apart from everyone else so I like to pop back there for old times sake. Allen Casillas, our touring drummer and essentially fifth member has now become a central piece of this outfit and he gets us really well. There’s no better person I could think of to play these parts.” 

Speaking of central pieces, Donovan also has another ace up his sleeve. Someone who has been an indispensable asset to the band. “Adam, my brother has done our artwork from the very beginning and he is synonymous with the visual aspect of our band. We trust his vision and sometimes we have had artwork completely change following a conversation where he’ll get re-inspired and start from scratch but we trust him implicitly and he allows us to critique along the way.”

Music is ingrained into the very fibres of Donovan‘s anatomy. When he is not writing/performing with HAIL THE SUN, he is pouring his seemingly endless creativity into a string of other projects such as SIANVAR, NOVA CHARISMA and CHELSEA PARK AFTER DARK to name but a few. “It’s something that I just can’t not do and I think it all stems from when I first got sober. I felt like I had all this pent up energy that I used to funnel into drugs and doing shit that was bad for me. All this time I had displaced had nowhere to go anymore but I’ve always been passionate about music since when my parents got me a drum kit when I was five. I used that motivation to shift into doing things that were healthy and good for me. I see it as a massive umbrella and community that I just want to keep cultivating and that goes for Kill Iconic too, whether it’s the magazine, record label, clothing line and I feel like that’s what my purpose is here on earth while I’m living this human experience.”

Divine Inner Tension is out now via Rude Records/Equal Vision Records.

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