BENT KNEE REVEAL “EDGY” NEW ALBUM
Boston six-piece change focus on fifth CD.
Bent Knee’s You Know What They Mean arrives on October 11 via InsideOut, marking a complete change of approach and a resulting new edginess, says sound designer Vince Welch.
“This was the first album that we wrote in the studio, starting every song from scratch together,” he tells Prog. “Since [2014’s] Shiny Eyed Babies, we’ve been using a demo based approach. Writing together from scratch wound up being quite a bit different from the kinds of ideas people would come up with on their own. It’s the simplest record we’ve ever made musically, but also possibly the strangest.”
He describes the results as “angrier” and “more aggressive” than previous outings, reflecting, “Heavy material is basically the easiest thing for all six of us to agree upon. Naturally, when you have a heavy, riff-based instrumental bed, you’re going to be much more inclined towards angry, aggressive lyrics.”
Bent Knee’s main intention was to take a leap in a new direction. “We had tried to do that with [2017’s] Land Animal, with some degree of success,” Welch says, “but we were limited by the fact that we were using nearly the exact same writing process that we had used for [2016’s] Say So. Having something that felt really fresh and different was a high priority with this one.”
The music was also affected by drummer Gavin WallaceAilsworth breaking his leg on tour, which meant the band had to work without acoustic percussion. “We wound up adding a little more of a drum synth-pop kind of element,” Welch notes. “As the album progressed, we realised that we were leaning towards very simple song forms. So we started thinking about making an album made up of simple songs that are stitched together in a way to make the whole seem stranger and more complex than its constituent parts.”
The biggest lesson Bent Knee learned was “the key to evolving your music is to evolve the process you use to make that music,” he says. “Finding something new is difficult, because you have to take a big risk. You don’t know if what you’re doing will work – you’re always risking failure, so I’d say that’s definitely a challenge, constantly pushing yourself into new situations and finding a way to make them work.” MK
“Having something that felt really fresh and different was a high priority.”