Letters Sent Home: Forever Honest

The cover for LETTERS SENT HOME‘s debut album, Forever Undone, is striking. “A theme of the album that is talked about a lot is religion and religious trauma,” explains vocalist Emily Paschke. “We wanted people to see that it was a topic when looking at the cover. Nature and how humans are slowly using up all the resources and there’s not going to be this beauty that we love for much longer.” She says that the cover depicts a woman walking up a flight of stairs to heaven as nature engulfs the stairs at the bottom. The only change that was made was the hair colour of the woman from blonde to brunette.

The album itself is an eclectic mix of dark pop, metalcore, electronic and other genres. Paschke explains that this is because herself and the rest of the band – made up of bassist Lara Ripke, guitarist Robin Werner, and drummer Louis Schramm – all have different tastes in music. “When listening to our first three EPs, you can tell that we always like to experiment. We never wanted to put ourselves in a box because there are so many different influences that come together and we just didn’t want to choose just one of those styles. We started writing what we thought could be cool.” But Paschke admits that they did write demos that were dropped because they were too experimental.

As well as being an album that is full of experimentation, it’s also one that is full of collaborations. LETTERS SENT HOME have collaborated with ROYALIST vocalist Ricardo Böttcher on Gaslight, which happened because “we approached them and said that we needed to have a song together and they agreed.”

HALF ME vocalist Chris Zuehlke features on Pedestal, which Paschke explains happened because “we’ve known each other for a while, but we weren’t as close. We knew we wanted a metalcore vocalist on that album, and they had released an album whilst we were writing, and so we asked him and he said yes.” DEAD LAKES vocalist Sumy Peterson features on the song Ignorance, and “he knew of us because we’re both on the same record label. He was really hyped and really loved the idea. It’s absolutely amazing what he did.”

The album itself isn’t a concept album, but the writing of the album coincided with Paschke going to therapy, so a lot of the topics that are discussed on the album were coming up in her personal life, including religious trauma and the importance of nature that is depicted in the album artwork. “I worked through it by writing,” she says earnestly. “Sometimes you have to word vomit everything out in order to make it clearer.”

The song Sadist – which was the first song the band wrote for the album – is a key example of this. “It’s about how the band feel like humans are messing everything up now. It’s been like that for a long time, but the song is about how humans think that they are invincible, but they’re not. It’s also about how I’ve come to terms how if I had children, then what their future would look like.”

Whilst LETTERS SENT HOME do not fully dive into the topic of technology and social media like a lot of other rock bands have done recently, they do discuss how people are put on a pedestal in the song Hysteria. “It’s about how as soon as they misstep just a little bit, we seem to villainize them. It’s about how toxic social media is at altering our perception of people. We’re human, we’ve got to make mistakes.”

Paschke explains that all eleven of the songs on the album were songs that the band finished, so there are no B-sides. “We knew when finishing Earthquake that it was going to be our opener and I Hope I Die First was going to be the closing song because I like emotional songs that drag you into the song. That’s the feeling we want people to be left with when they finish listening to the album.”

She elaborates by saying that the penultimate song Final Battle was always going to be the second to last song because of the title. “It’s kind of like we’re saying ‘let’s go one last time!’” She laughs. “As for the rest of the songs, we wanted the album to start with an uplifting vibe before moving into a moody and depressing vibe.”

The closing song I Hope I Die First is a song about love. “I had this line in my head ‘I hope I die first, ’cause if you did, my life would forever be cursed’ as we write the instrumentals for the song. I had to write it down because when I was in therapy, I found out that I had really bad abandonment issues that turned to me having a really toxic way to love people because I could not ever imagine living without them, which is not a healthy way to be. That isn’t a story that isn’t told that often and I learnt to deal with that. But I wanted to show that toxic side of love as well.”

It’s very brave of Paschke to be so open and honest on the band’s debut album because a debut album is one that defines the band. But as she explains, “when writing those songs, I never think about the day that I put them out. I just put everything on paper, and then when they’re released, I try to separate art from the artist,” She smiles warmly. “It’s worked so far.”

Forever Undone is out now via SharpTone Records.

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