NORTHLANE LOWER THE TONE
Australian metal success story Northlane have told us about how they’ve reached a new low on new album Alien. “One of the things that we did was completely throw the notion of ‘tuning too low’ out the window,” guitarist Josh Smith tells us about his and lead man Jon Deiley’s new approach on their first self-produced record. “Some of the songs on this album go as low as [drop] C# [then a whole octave down]. That completely turned the guitar into a different instrument for us; it became a percussive sledgehammer. Obviously this comes with its own set of challenges but by having vastly varied tunings being used across the record, it resulted in all of the songs sounding far more unique to each other than usual for us.”
This tendency to go low with thick gauge strings has led Jackson endorsee Josh to lean on the single-coil pickup of his Impulse signature humbucker that he developed with Cornish tonehounds Bare Knuckle.
“I couldn’t really get the clarity I was looking for in a humbucker,” he explains. “Tim [Mills, Bare Knuckle chief] wound me a single-coil to match up with my Impulse humbucker very early on [there will be news on a production model soon!] as I was already committed to using H/S guitars at that stage. We actually based the neck humbucker off its voicing. To be fair, I don’t use the neck pickup a whole lot, especially in newer material but it was used heavily for a lot of clean and medium gain work
especially in the Node era. I just find when I go for lower gain tones it cuts through with a lot of depth and chime that a humbucker can’t offer.” For Northlane’s sound, Alien presents a landmark for a band that transcended the metalcore tag some time ago. It’s also a deeply personal and honest album with vocalist Marcus Bridge reflecting on his troubled childhood with heroin-addicted parents. Deiley’s programming work contributed to huge genre-splicing soundscapes combined with carefully picked guitar tones.
“It gave us a lot of freedom to hand-pick the sounds we really wanted to work with,” explains Josh on the experience of selfproducing the record. “We had a huge arsenal of amplifiers [including a Diezel Herbert and Fortin Meshuggah] and shot them all out to find the sound that would make the backbone of the album. Thankfully, [engineer] Chris Blancato who oversaw our instrumental recordings was on the same page as us and saw eye to eye with his ear for the kind of gargantuan sounds we were shooting for, and we got there. It does make decisiveness a very important attribute as previously we’d have someone telling us which choice is right, and that made a few calls difficult, but the result was that we are happier with the sound of this record than any which have come before it.”
Alien is out now on UNFD. Northlane tour the UK in November. For more info go to: northlaneband.com