Varials: Remember The Name
Mitchell Rogers never planned on being a vocalist. As the guitarist in VARIALS since 2013, he and his bandmates spent most of the 2010s making a name for themselves in the metalcore scene through killer full-lengths like Pain Again and In Darkness. But then, in January 2020, vocalist Travis Tabron announced his departure for reasons of mental health. Amicable or not, the split left Rogers and co. in a predicament; unable to find another suitable vocalist, an initially unserious suggestion became a serious one and Rogers stepped up to lead VARIALS to where they are today, having just released arguably their most vital effort yet in Scars For You To Remember.
“Literally for weeks and weeks every time I would drive somewhere I would just put on songs that I liked and start screaming at the top of my lungs my whole car ride,” explains Rogers on how he prepared for his new role. “I don’t really have a private space in my house so I would just go out and sit in my car in the driveway and practice. I saw a couple people walk by at like two o’clock in the morning while I was sitting out there, just like ‘what the fuck is this guy doing?’”
“At first I was questioning whether I was going to be able to handle it because I was blowing my voice out,” he continues. “My ab muscles and my stomach were hurting from all the straining and shit, and then I just dedicated myself to using everything I could online to learn how to properly do it. There’s this amazing vocal coach, David Benitez, and I learned so much from his videos and that was really what got me comfortable.”
Of course, you’d probably never guess that Scars For You To Remember was Rogers’ first full-length in the role. Front and centre of the band’s tight and punchy metallic attack, his cleans and screams mark an obvious stand out on the record, hammering home the band’s impressive balance of fury and melody. “This time everything was aimed to be much more focused,” offers Rogers. “Every song on the album was written to meet a certain goal of something that we felt we needed for the record and there were only three or four songs that got the axe when we were picking what was actually going to be on the album, and those songs only got axed because we felt that things were already achieved better in other songs.”
The band also wanted to make sure that Scars came with a proper through-line, something they’d attempted on previous records, but that Rogers feels like they didn’t quite nail until this album. “We are all huge movie and video game heads,” he smiles. “So that was definitely a purposeful thing going into it where we wanted this to feel like a cinematic experience. I was listening to a load of video game and film scores when we were first writing the album, and then I took a couple of those songs and brought them to the guys like ‘check this stuff out.’”
Among the inspirations were Metal Gear Solid (Rogers’ favourite piece of any media of all time), as well as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which Rogers often had on in the background whilst writing for Scars. “This is something that hasn’t really been spoken about a lot, but every song on the album is loosely about or related to a video game or a movie,” he elaborates. “It’s really not obvious. You could look at the songs at face value and they just seem like normal metal band lyrics, but every song, even if there’s only one quick reference in it, I could go through and point it out.”
It’s a nice touch that helps set VARIALS apart in a scene that Rogers agrees feels increasingly crowded with talent. “I gotta give a lot of credit to LORNA SHORE because I feel like they opened up a lot of people’s eyes to this genre of extreme metal still being a pretty big thing,” he suggests as our conversation turns further outwards. “There hasn’t really been any push from mainstream music media about these heavy extreme bands in a long time, and then when their To The Hellfire song blew up on TikTok it was like every single person wanted a piece of that. You had fucking Rolling Stone writing articles about it, and they’re my friends, so seeing them do something like that was so crazy to me and I genuinely feel like that was a real turning point.”
It seems the winds are in VARIALS’ favour then, as they are for many others, and you can absolutely count on Rogers and co. capitalising on that at every chance they get. “We really just want to push this band as far as it goes and see what we can do with it,” he concludes. “It’s been almost a decade of my life doing this now and I’ve loved every aspect and every second of it, but I think we’re really in the mindset now where we’ve been doing this kind of hardcore/metalcore thing and touring with these bands that are more aligned with us for years, and we just want to break out and push it as far as we can.”
Scars For You To Remember is out now via Fearless Records.
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