Starset: Brand New Horizons
If you’re familiar with STARTSET, you’ll understand the unique pull of the band. The lore of the music spans throughout the records, with the science fiction storyline of the two sides of society in the near future. While there’s one side that embraces mind controlling neural lace- a high functioning VR- the other lives off grid. This was the main focus of the past record Divisions, which had its tours cut short in light of the pandemic. We caught up with lead vocalist Dustin Bates about his writing through the pandemic, the mammoth number of songs on new album Horizons and the mixture of fans the band attracts.
Its interesting that the mythos of STARSET is based around a world encompassing escapism into a synthetic reality. Given the past year, where we have lived looking at our phones and computers more than ever, and interacting less and less with the outside world, the universal sense of removal from each other is more present that we could have imagined. “Yeah, it does feel that the parallel to my music to where we’re at now is closer than ever,” Dustin agrees.
Horizons has a huge well of songs to delve into, it’s a massive record with plenty of ideas. When considering the reasons for that, Dustin’s response was pretty enlightening. “It’s a product of multiple things, COVID-19 obviously being one of them,” he explains, “I wrote a ton of songs for this, and didn’t know which ones we’d greenlight. So, this is a weird way to describe this, but your album is a sphere of vibes, so eight or nine songs might cover it. The sphere here felt bigger, we touched a lot more on different genres and ideas. So, in order to make sure that the album has flow, that it’s not all spread out weird from song to song, you need more songs to round it out. I’d never want to just put out a tonne of middle of the road stuff, not here for that, but if you need more to make what you’re looking to [accomplish], that’s what happens I guess.”
“I actually have tons more songs in the can from the process. It was a creative time, even though initially this wasn’t a good time for creation. Having just come off the Divisions cycle, I wasn’t feeling massively creative. When COVID-19 hit and then there was the whole homebody time, when everyone was making bread and doing handy things. After a little bit of that, I felt like I had to get back to writing songs and then I wrote like a zillion, I couldn’t stop.”
These big stories that STARSET write, with an overarching universe that contains all the tiny details that draws people in. Having created a musical universe for the songs to exist in, it might seem like a restriction on the listener as to what they can imprint on the music itself. That couldn’t be further from the case with Horizons. “It’s strange, it’s fun and interesting to see what people make of it,” Dustin muses. “It’s always written with a narrative in mind, so it’s good to see what other people make of that narrative. If I’m successful in writing the song, I can see that the message has been written in just the right way, and I like seeing how many takes people have on that.”
“There are emotional and personal interpretations of these songs, I’ll never tell fans what a song meant, because that takes the magic out. What does bug me is when they get the lyrics wrong,” he adds, laughing, “We released a song out, and used a scavenger hunt with code and everything for people to find it, and people started to guess the lyrics and they were all wrong. I had to log in and post them up just so people knew exactly what the lyrics were.”
With such a devoted fanbase, many who dress up for the performances, it might seem difficult to engross new followers outside of the established cult following for STARSET. “You want to please you first fans, but you also want to engage new fans,” Dustin explains, “I mean, I want to play this stuff to arenas, I want as many people to hear us as possible. But you want to do that in a way that doesn’t water down the music. I’m glad that there are fans coming in at different entry points on this record, old and new. I don’t follow the fanbases of a lot of bands, but ours I feel is exceptional, there’s so much love. It can’t be like this for most bands, and I thought we were maybe doing something wrong to have this kind of response. I didn’t know it could be like this.”
Horizons is out now via Fearless Records.
Like STARSET on Facebook.