Upon A Burning Body: Let Your Individuality Shine
Cast your minds back to 2016, UPON A BURNING BODY had just released their fourth album Straight From The Barrio, an album which was received with much trepidation and deemed a misstep by the Texan outfit. Rather than dwell on this too much they knuckled down, determined to get back on track and released arguably their most impressive material to date with Southern Hostility. Despite this successful comeback of sorts guitarist and founding member Ruben Alvarez wasn’t prepared to just rest on this accomplishment.
“I love Southern Hostility but I feel like you can hear the influences we haven taken all right through our careers and since we were kids. We love PANTERA and old school metal and that shows in that album. I don’t think we let our own individual identity shine through as well as we could have.”
Shortly after its release the music industry ground to a halt, borders were closed and the opportunity for touring was taken off the table. This gave UPON A BURNING BODY the opportunity to focus their efforts on constructing their next full length release, what we now know to be titled Fury. “We were looking for a title and trying to figure out a way to sum up the album and one of the definitions of fury really resonated with us about being passionate and that’s one thing I think our band has always brought to the table, whether it is the music or performing live it felt like the perfect fit. I feel like Fury is like a perfect balance and almost like a hybrid version of ourselves, bringing in the older deathcore vibes and the heaviness we had in our sound from the beginning,” discusses Ruben.
“Danny [Leal, vocals] does a lot of lows on this album too which he strayed away from in previous albums as he kind of got in his own head about it but we told him to just be free with it and it came out amazing. I went back and listened to everything I was listening to back in high school when we wrote our first two albums back to the bands on the Victory Records roster and bands like BLEEDING THROUGH. I couldn’t remember the last time I listened to our first two albums so I listened to them to get back into the essence of how UPON A BURNING BODY came to be and kind of revitalise that vibe and a lot of that spilled into the new album. We wanted to keep that integrity and intensity going, why we started and why people fell in love with with the band in the first place. We just wanna keep having fun and keep putting our message out there.”
Fury encompasses the signature elements which brought UPON A BURNING BODY to the level they are at today as well as bringing some additional grit and bite to proceedings. This combination has resulted in a particular potent offering. “We’re constantly writing you know and that’s all part of being an artist. Especially when you’re out on the road you have to write as much as possible in those gaps in between,” explains Ruben. “As soon as we’re done with one release we’re right onto the next one. We’ve never been the kind of band to stick to a certain sound and when I hear an album I always want to listen to it front to back and I feel like there isn’t a lot of bands that you can do that with anymore. You kind of tune out after a while or change the channel. For me it’s all about keep the listeners engaged and keeping things interesting, maybe a change of tempo or something we’ve never done before? Once we got word that we were going to be going out on tour on the Chaos And Carnage run later this year we were so stoked as it is going to align perfectly with the release of Fury.”
“It’s some of the heaviest material we’ve ever written and we’re going to be a part of the heaviest tour we’ve ever been a part of. We maybe played one or two shows before everything kind of shut down. We have so much material that we’ve not even been able to play live yet. From Southern Hostility, Built From War and now Fury. Unfortunately we had to pull out of UK Tech-Fest due to everything going on with COVID and navigating that just left so much uncertainty. It’s such a big investment to undertake. We definitely want to come back and we’re trying to figure out the right time and the right bands to get back to the UK. It’s definitely been on our minds as it’s been way too long. It’s just about being patient at the moment. We’re not young anymore, we have families and have to be conscious of whether a tour is going to be a viable option for us financially. We have to wait for the right opportunities to present themselves.”
In the midst of the pandemic bassist Joe Antonellis departed the band. Fortunately Ruben‘s brother Thomas was ready to step up and get stuck right in. “Thomas pitched in for the writing on Southern Hostility and when Joe left the band it made sense for him to become a full time member. He’s a well rounded musician and can handle vocals too. He’s always been up for the challenge with anything we’ve thrown at him and the biggest thing about being in a band is being honest with each other and with us being brothers we know the right way of getting each other motivated and being able to push each other. There is a lot of trust there and that strong bond is exactly what we need.”
Fury is out now via Seek & Strike.
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