Infected Rain: Flourishing Out Of The Cocoon
The new year opens up to a new sound and musical opportunities for the upcoming 12 months. There’s often a buzz about all the upcoming albums and EPs that are to be released, unsure what to expect once that first track of that new album would sound like and what kind of experience the listener will have throughout the whole record. This such intrigue also applies to INFECTED RAIN and their album, Ecdysis. Throughout the uncertain times making recording in a studio more difficult than usual, the work on the album was meticulously planned by expanding on their cocoon narrative, as vocalist Lena Scissorhands describes to Distorted Sound.
“The recording itself was slightly different than everything else we’ve done before because of COVID-19,” Lena starts off with when describing the production of the record. “Although not as drastic as people think because I’ve lived in the United States for the past six years, so we kind of got used to working remotely with the band so far. So we just had to adjust certain things and learn certain new things to make it easier or better quality. We didn’t have a release date for the longest time. In fact, the idea was for the album to come out in 2021. Initially, sometime in the middle of the year, that was the plan. But obviously, all plans were cancelled, everything was suspended. It’s a stressful thing, but also, we took our sweet ass time to record it and compose it. So that was nice.”
Starting in 2008, the band gained traction from their festival performances as well as their four previous albums, with their first released back in 2011. Their album before, Endorphin, was released back in 2019, and as Lena explains, some ideas from that record were later included for Ecdysis. “I remember Vidick, our guitarist, telling me ‘hey, this song is so complex that I think that it will be great to include’,” Lena continues about the songs Postmortem Pt 1 and Postmortem Pt 2, the first and last tracks on the album. “We dropped it from Endorphin because we signed with the label and we wanted to give a proper full-length album. If we didn’t that didn’t do that, then that would be a shorter first part of the album and shorter second part of the album. So I had written a lot of things for that album that we didn’t end up using. So when he brought up this song for the newer album, I was like, ‘actually, I do have a bigger poem that I wrote long ago’, thinking that I would apply it either partially or somehow to the previous albums so it worked out perfectly. I did change it a little bit. I add and and switch certain things around, and that’s how Part One and Part Two was born.”
“I don’t want to assume anything. I only hope for the best so I only hope that live music is gonna go back to normal and yeah, if it’s necessary to apply some rules to it just for it to happen,” she moves on to say when the discussion turned to the future of live music. “You know how many bands broke up during COVID? How many bands were very close to breaking up during COVID? We had to survive somehow. And I consider INFECTED RAIN to be one of the luckiest bands on the planet because it didn’t happen to us and it didn’t happen to us because of our diehard absolutely amazing fans. Because if it wasn’t for them, who knows what would have happened, you know? They were there for us to support, to encourage, to be present. That gives you purpose in life. It gives you that hope that this is possible to do even though we have to change our ways, but it’s possible. So I know it’s very difficult to follow rules. You think ‘Oh, I’m a sheep now and I follow somebody else’s rules’. But at the same time, why don’t we come to the happy medium where there are some rules that absolutely make sense and we just follow them so we can have a life?”
“Imagine countries that have zero support, zero help from the local computing community or the government itself,” Lena continues on to say. “I come from the country where INFECTED RAIN was born, Moldova. We had zero support and in normal times, nobody gave a shit about artists there. No matter what type. You are an alternative artist, even worse. It’s a small country. Everybody’s doing everything possible to survive and have a life, so of course, nobody is going to think about artists. But there are other countries on the other hand that actually have the opportunity to support a little bit too. They at least give you some type of help that will ease your job.”
Despite the uncertainty with live music, Lena is hopeful that live shows will continue, including INFECTED RAIN’s European tour, starting February 16th in Munich. “The tour that is announced is a tour with a French band called DAGOBA,” Lena explains before the interview ends. “Hopefully nothing stands in our way and shows are gonna actually happen. It’s a pretty big tour. We really missed our European fans. We toured Europe for years because we couldn’t go further. So little by little we started going from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, Northern Europe and all over so we definitely missed our fans there. Other than that we are planning another US tour. All the festivals, hopefully another European tour in the end. I don’t know, we are still working on it. Things do not depend fully on us or our booking agents.”
Ecdysis is out now via Napalm Records.
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