In This Moment

SHAKING UP THEIR SIGNATURE GOTH-METAL GRANDEUR WITH SOME BOLD CREATIVE RISKS, IN THIS MOMENT HAVE REINVENTED THEMSELVES AS A NEW FORCE OF FURY WITH ALBUM #7.

Celebrating their 15th year of delightfully demented, horror-influenced metal mania, 2020 pretty much belongs to LA quintet In This Moment. Even the current global crisis feels suited to their bold and polarising aesthetic: the universal economy and major mainstream society being progressively buried alive at the hands of a viral infection caused by a bat? When you think about it, that’s prettyf***ingmetal.

Anyway, the band are currently riding high on the release of their equally intense and intriguing seventh album, Mother – a career-defining onslaught of harrowing hollers and spine-rattling shred. For founding members Maria Brink (vocals/ piano) and Chris Howorth (lead guitar), it’s an especially gratifying release – as Howorth tells us (over the phone, because y’know, social distancing, etcetera), its writing process saw them break free from the shackles of expectation that 2012’s

Blood burdened them with; it saw them rethink and rejuvenate their creative affluence, and open themselves up to more collaboration.

The end result is an album well deserving of its critical acclaim, with some of the most explosive and ebullient material In This Moment have ever written.

How does it feel to be unleashing this beast into the wild?

I mean, it always feels awesome to finally get your record out. But this time, y’know, in the current world climate, it’s a little bit weird because we’re supposed to be on tour, pushing it as it comes out and all of that stuff – but now it’s just coming out into this… Uncertainty.

But there is kind of an upside to it in the fact that maybe because people are just sitting around at home, they will be open to having something like this to listen to – something new to check out, y’know? So it could work both ways! It’s just weird not being on tour and promoting it in the traditional sense.

It kind of forces people to really dive into the album and digest it as a body of work, which is pretty cool.

Hopefully people do that! We don’t think about it as individual songs when we do the album – when we present it, we’re presenting it in an order that we’ve thought about and went back and forth over, and the songs all tie together in a very certain way. It’s nice to think that some people might listen to it like that now that they have nothing better to do [ laughs]..

So heading into another monumental chapter for In This Moment, how did you want this album to sort of take the band to the next level, or build upon what you’d established over the first six records?

The next level has always been what we’re

always trying to go for, y’know? And we’ve definitely been climbing the ladder with every album over our career arc, heading in an upward momentum – and we want to keep that going, but we’re also looking for our place now. Like, where are we going to sit, in the grand scheme of things?

We want to be an arena band – we’ve always felt like our show could be in arenas – but we’re also happy to bring this really cool show to theatres and stuff too. We’re just kind of feeling it out right now. But it feels really cool to just be building with each consecutive album, y’know? Mother is kind of an extension of Ritual. We’re always just trying to write better songs and just do something better than the last thing we did.

In addition to a stack of brand new bangers on this record, you’ve got these three covers scattered throughout the pack – a Steve Miller Band song, a Queen song and a Mazzy Star song. What made you want to throw your own little spin on those classics?

Maria’s been notoriously brave with her cover picks. We did “In The Air Tonight” on our last album, and we all loved that song, but there was hesitation from me and Kevin [Churko], our producer – y’know, we were both like, “Are we sure we want to try to do these types of songs?” They’re already so epic that you can’t really make them better – you just have to kind of go with the angle of making it your own as much as you can.

But with “We Will Rock You”, I was telling Maria, “No, there’s no way we can do that song right now, it’s just too well-known.” At the time we were talking about doing it, that Queen movie [ Bohemian Rhapsody] was blowing up, and I just thought, “There’s no way we can do this song. Even if we do it our own way, it’s too risky. Why bother with it?” And she said, “What if I got Lzzy [Hale] and Taylor [Momsen] to do it and all three of us sang a verse? That would be so cool!” And I was like, “…Damn, that would be so cool. But how the heck are you gonna get those guys to do it?” And y’know, she just went and worked her magic with them, and they agreed to do it. It just kind of came together.

Some of the the fretwork on this record is absolutely mind-blowing. Was this a particularly gratifying album for you to make as a guitarist?

Honestly, with the band in general, Blood was the last record where we were thinking a lot about the guitar work. After that record, we kind of stepped away from the need to have big riffs and shredding throughout the album – it was more like, “What can we do to make the songs stand out?” Less worrying about the solos or fretwork.

But I think we’ve kind of evolved to where now, with Mother, we wanted to kind of try and go back to more of a quote-unquote “real band” type of sound; we have a lot of synth and a lot of samples and stuff that we play with when we play live, and that’s a big part of our sound, but sometimes we feel chained to that, so we wanted to try and give Mother a little more of an organic feel.

Yeah, it definitely felt more satisfying to record, from a guitar playing standpoint, than our last couple of albums. And I think Randy [Weitzel], our other guitarist, he stepped up to the plate on several things, and we were able to work really closely together on some of the solos. I think it came out sounding really cool.

What’s the creative dynamic like between yourself and Randy in the writing process?

Well, it’s been a weird situation for In This Moment – before our Blood album, we had a full band of vehicle members that all had a say in what we were doing. And then a bunch of them quit and it was just down to Maria and I. We went into the studio with Kevin Churko and literally did the whole Blood album with just the three of us. And that ended up being our most successful album – it shifted our career to a new phase.

So on the subsequent albums, we didn’t want to bring some new guys into the band and start writing with them as equals – we just weren’t thinking like that, because all of a sudden we had success. We were like, “We’ve gotta keep the Blood formula going!” But now we’re on our third album since then, and Randy has been in the band for seven years now, so we definitely wanted to get him more involved.

Randy and I have a really, really easy dynamic – he’s a super talented guitarist, and when we do our live stuff, we’re always working out really cool parts that we can play together.

“WHEN WE PRESENT AN ALBUM, WE’RE PRESENTING IT IN AN ORDER THAT WE’VE THOUGHT ABOUT AND WENT BACK AND FORTH OVER, AND THE SONGS ALL TIE TOGETHER IN A VERY CERTAIN WAY.”