Black Peaks
Young Brighton prog metallers come on like a polished Mastodon on latest album.
Black Peaks are all about making forward-thinking, modern, heavy prog that evokes plenty of emotion. Second album All That Divides keeps those fires burning…
Drawing from the same well that contains Tool and Gojira, Black Peaks’ earth-shattering brand of progressive metal deals in crushing riffs, mammoth hooks and spacious post-metal passages – they’re like a more polished Mastodon. Hailing from the sunny beaches of Brighton, the experimental fourpiece have just released All That Divides, the follow-up to 2016’s genre-bending debut Statues, a record that takes their forwardthinking heaviness into broader realms.
“When we come together and play music it’s never this conscious decision of, ‘Let’s go and write a 10 minute song’, or ‘Let’s be weird for the sake of it.’ We make music that feels right to us and good to play,” guitarist Joe Gosney tells Prog. “We’re not the type of band to be technical for the sake of it or heavy for the sake of being heavy: everything has to serve a purpose and evoke an emotion in all of us to be a Black Peaks song.”
Speaking to us from his home in Brighton following a surfing holiday in Cornwall, Gosney is still riding that chilled post-break vibe before the touring kicks into gear once again, and he’s happy to discuss all facets of music inside and outside of Black Peaks.
Growing up on a steady diet of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath, Gosney soon fell into the weirder end of the spectrum with bands like The Mars Volta and A Perfect Circle. In 2012 he started a threepiece instrumental outfit which would ultimately become Black Peaks. Following the addition of Will Gardner on vocals, the group began to write “proper songs” and toured solidly until Sony came knocking to release debut album Statues. Hundreds more shows followed, including a support slot to Deftones at Wembley Arena in 2016.
Writing 30-40 songs for All That Divides, which was eventually condensed down to nine pieces of music, Gosney admits he is his own worst critic and something of a perfectionist. And with just two weeks to record the album, Black Peaks decided to record each song in full in the order it appears on the album, fully immersing themselves into the music.
“It was a really cool experience because you got to hear the album take shape: it’s like listening to it really slowly over the course of two weeks,” says Gosney. “Having all your ideas realised in such an amazing way was a beautiful thing. It was hard work, as making an album always should be, but there was a point right at the end, where we stood in the control room and listened to desk mixes of the whole record from start to finish, and it was an insane moment to properly hear it all for the first time.”
This approach to recording makes the album less of a jigsaw and more of connected organism. Gosney is mindful of the album’s ebb and flow, almost making it one piece of music. However, each song has its own identity, from the crunching Blood Mountainstyle riffs of Can’t Sleep to the brooding darkness of Home to album standout Aether with arena-sized Gojira-esque hooks. This isn’t a straight-up metal record by any means.
“There are some long songs on there but also some dynamic shifts in the way the songs sound: it’s not your normal rock structures,” Gosney says of the album’s inherent proggy sound. “We’d never class ourselves as a prog band, but I guess we are because the music’s progressive and is in that form. Prog’s a very broad genre, there are so many different types, but people that are into progressive bands of our ilk like Tool or Mastodon will dig it.”
And like those bands, Black Peaks are eyeing up bigger things. Following a weekendwinning performance at this year’s ArcTanGent festival, the band recently completed a headline UK tour of venues that they’ll undoubtedly outgrow, given the size of these new choruses.
Black Peaks have their songwriting down to a fine art, with both albums sounding unmistakably them, and Gosney is always conscious of pulling a song into a state where it’s “listenable”. But despite the Radio 1 airplay, accessibility and mainstream appeal is not on their agenda.
“The moment we start to cater our music toward the radio we’ll lose the essence of what we’re doing,” Gosney says confidently. “You can have some sensibilities to your music without sacrificing your original inspirations and ideas for songs. You’ve got to be true to yourself.
“We’re always striving for bigger and better things. We haven’t sat back and said, ‘This is fucking great, we’re doing really well,’ we’re hypercritical of everything we’re doing to be the best version of ourselves we can be. I always watch our live stuff back to work out how we can sound better. Even though we’re not sat there saying, ‘Let’s make threeand-a-half minute pop songs,’ we definitely want to be as big as we can be without sacrificing musicality.”
And these are not three minute pop tunes, in fact just one track dips below four minutes on All That Divides, giving each musical idea the time to breathe and expand into something altogether more satisfying. Second track The Midnight Sun has a vast post- metal mid-section while Slow Seas calls to mind a more anthemic Leprous. With so much tightly packed in to the second album, what else is there left to explore? Outside of the band, Gardner is a saxophone player, and while Gosney isn’t closed off to the idea of incorporating some jazz into album number three, he has some other ideas.
“I don’t think any of us have an answer about how we want things to sound, but after the next two years of touring this album, we’ll be different musicians and different people because you experience new things, you grow, your styles refine and mature.
“I’d love to get some slide guitar on parts, maybe some more keys and bring that into the live aspect. We’re a constantly evolving beast and if it calls for it we’ll never shut it down because it’s different.”
Whatever it is, it’ll be undeniably
Black Peaks.
“THERE ARE SOME LONG SONGS ON THERE BUT ALSO SOME DYNAMIC SHIFTS IN THE WAY THE SONGS SOUND: IT’S NOT YOUR NORMAL ROCK STRUCTURES.”