We chatted to Beyond Extinction vocalist Jasper Harmer about their newly released album ‘Where They Gather’.
This is your debut album and you’ve already released the title track, ‘Where They Gather’. You’ve been gigging quite a bit this year, have you played it live?
We’ve been playing songs from this album live for ages – we just don’t really publicise that. And when people record it, we just tend to ask it to not get shared around places. And if it doesn’t, we don’t get seen by loads of people, so it’s all right! But we’ve been playing these songs live as they’ve come out for the last year. But up to now, we’ve been playing a few of them live in sets before. We’ve actually been playing a few off the album songs that we haven’t released as singles! That’s always been interesting too to play the album tracks live, because we pick the singles thinking what will be the favourite songs. And then we play them live and realise that we made the completely wrong decision and that they’re not actually the most popular songs.
We did one the last couple of shows we did. Actually, since August, we’ve done like four or five shows. And we played one of the songs from the album called ‘Mansions Burning on Bleak Horizons’. We played that live. It turns out that that’s really good live – and we’ve not been doing that for years. We could have been doing that for like two years. We haven’t been. So, you know, it’s good to get feedback that way, I suppose.
The live shows have also been amazing. We’ve had like a really consistently good summer. It’s the first summer where we’ve had a tour poster that’s ended with most of the shows having ‘sold out’ or ‘low tickets’ on it.
Normally I see that for bands that I like and I’m like, “that’s cool”. Now I’m looking at ticket sales for shows and I’m like, “there’s got to be some catch”. Do you know what I mean? Now there’s hundreds of people coming.
We did some headliners in January and we were a little bit like, “how’s that going to go?” There wasn’t really any type of promo – we hadn’t announced the album or anything like that. We played in Southend, back home and 200 odd people show up, in Essex, in a place most people would consider like a C-list town. It’s like, oh man, like this actually, like doing it live, that’s what it’s all about. Playing the songs live has been the best part about making new music for sure.
This album has been three years in the making. It’s a pretty dark album – it’s bleak. How was it to write?
Very much the same to honest. Losing Zach in that period meant that a lot of the writing was done under a backdrop of just generally being quite unhappy.
Obviously, I can’t speak for all the guys and everyone has their own individual experiences. But as a whole, it was very difficult. One of the biggest tasks was to separate trauma from the band and the band being a tool for getting over it and being, you know, kind of a tool for good.
Once we got through that step and taught ourselves that the band was the way to, or a really good way to help ourselves and get through things, that meant that we were able to write in a more positive way. I think it took us a long time because trying to write an album that you’re proud of, that you love, when you’re experiencing a lot of bad things can be quite difficult and definitely one of times for such a magnitude of reasons.
Ultimately, it’s been a labor of love. And I think that the main thing, that the main input on the album is the time that’s spent doing it. It’s the journey that we’ve done over the last three years. That’s the main thing that makes the album feel the way it does. That feeling of dread and that awe of nastiness of evil that’s there from like three years of condensing it and perfecting it. We wanted that to happen, but it’s all about that feeling. So I think it’s come out well over a three-year period. Took fucking ages, but there we go.
We’re not on any Spotify playlists – it’s all algorithmic pickup. This time of year, Spotify does a bit of spring cleaning. So it likes to dock a load of streams off people. I will imagine it will lose a bit like everyone else will. But realistically, people have been listening to the music and enjoying it. I look at the numbers and the numbers don’t lie and that makes us happy. We trust in the data.
The album has been marketed around inviting you to a city. How did that come about?
I spent a lot of time in London and I just hate it. I really don’t like London as a city. I don’t like any big cities really. I think I view cities and other places differently because I’m only there for a short space of time. I don’t mind Manchester because I’m only in Manchester for a couple of days at most. I don’t mind going to a place in Germany because when I went, I was a teenager and I didn’t have stuff to worry about.
But London is, I suppose I associate a lot of stuff with it that is both good and bad. But the issue for me is the massive variety and range. It just feels a completely like inhuman place. Both visually in terms of how it looks and the way it is, like trains and the underground and just 10 million people, the space that shouldn’t contain anywhere near that many, the amount of poverty, the disparity between rich and poor, all this stuff. I think it’s a really good encapsulation for everything wrong with what goes on now in the world. And I think that you can really, if you look at sort of where the worst bits of humanity are heading, I think it’s not kind of out of reasonable assumption to imagine you can direct it towards one final settlement civilization just full of all the ills of the world.
I think that getting to that conclusion is years of both my own opinions about cities and also just kind of absorbing what’s around me. It’s definitely a concept album set in a place like that.
It’s set in this last city at the end of the world. That city is the kind of developed opinion of me based on years of experiencing like the biggest metropolis in this country.
The way I see it is like the art that we got, it’s great on multiple levels, not just because it looks sick and it really, like you said, it really encapsulates the feel of the album, but also Max, who did it, is a guy who’s from the same place as us.
He’s been going to our shows for ages and we’ve known him online through music for ages. He made artwork for our single called ‘Parasitic’, which I don’t even know. I think it’s still on Spotify. I don’t know if it is. But that came out four odd years ago. So he made that up probably five years ago. He doesn’t really do tonnes of stuff for other bands, to the best of my knowledge. I think from what I’ve heard, he’s picked up some, some of you that we know have like picked him up and done some work from him. He’s amazing. So having that art there that like both is really good for the purpose, but also is kind of like linked to our character of a band is like really sick as well.
Going back to the album and the writing process, your vocals do sound different to your previous singles. Did you do anything different?
I’ve had a good few years of touring with and around really good vocalists. With Beyond, we’ve done shows with the ikes of Humanity’s Last Breath, Signs of the Swarm, Osiah, God Eater, tonnes of bands that we really appreciate as musicians and have a really good vocalist.
A lot of my mates are in sick bands that I work with or for and have toured with. I was just on tour with To the Grave and Osiah. So having like Ricky and Dane both there, they’re insane, like both crazy vocalists. Every night I’m watching these guys do shit. The main thing I get from it is I’m like, they’re just going for it, they’re just trying stuff. Every night, Ricky will just do something stupid on the stage, just see how it sounds, how it looks, whatever. I have a laugh about it. I’m just like, “he’s just doing that because he can do it”. Dane was throwing random things in a set, random sounds, complete pitch, you know, changes and opposites to, you know, the tone of the song at the time. It’s really cool to watch. I’ve had that for ages, people like Dave from Signs of Swarm, and Josh, obviously, he’s features on the album. Alex, he features on the album. “You’re just kind of like, man, if they’re doing it, I’ve got to give it a go as well. I’ve got to try and do some more range in what I do.” I’m still learning, I’m sure the next release will have even more nuts shit in it. But until then, I’m really stoked on my performance now. I love that I think the best vocal performances are all in non-singles. You have to listen to the album to get the best vocal bits. I think that’s a good payoff because it means people that listen to those tracks later in the album that weren’t out of singles, ones like Mansions, ones like Throne of Atrophy and stuff, they’ll listen to that and be like, yeah, like that’s worth it because a little bit you there you just don’t get in one of the single tracks.
You’ve already mentioned the features on the album, how did they come about?
Josh has been a mate for ages. I do merch sometimes for Ingested now. He’s a bit of like a metal vocalist in the UK, big name on campus. Do you know what I mean? Being able to get him on the album in a way that we had his lyric writing, in a way that we had his own voice and stuff was really cool because it’s somebody who’s been around us for ages. He is just sick. He’s just got a very unique voice. You can tell it’s him, and it worked for the song. The song was really aggressive and kind of razor shot. I think that he added that with the tone of voice that he has.
Then Alex was the complete opposite of that. We’ve just been massive fans of his music for ages and Black Tongue and his new stuff with The Virgin’s Crown is awesome. Just through some mutual friends it ended up just getting arranged. I think Dylan from Harvin Dramate just messaged him and asked about it while we were drunk – it was pretty funny. Then he just messaged me from that and was like, “let’s do this”. Just a legend, like mad good band, mad good vocalist, someone that I listened to and I’m like, “that’s sick”. Like he represents a really certain type of vocalist that I like.
Are there any other collaborations you think about for the future?
Yes, loads. To be honest with you, it’s kind of hard because you don’t want to stuff a release full of them. I’m not a fan of bands that will have like a feature on every release, do you know what I mean? It’s storytelling and you need different voices for different pieces of storytelling. I don’t think it’s the same in this sort of genre. I think that a lot of time you need to listen to a band that needs to be able to make an entire song through just their identity and their sound and kind of release through that. A lot of bands, I think, kind of want to ride a bit of clout off people. I credit Josh as Malice vocalist as much as Ingested vocalist on this album because he is. I’m not trying to get like “oh yeah, Ingested on this stuff”. It’s more just a case of like, he’s our mate and he’s sick. I’m just glad he went on it, I’d like to get more features like that. People that I’ve toured with that we know that we’re friends with, Dave from Signs of Swallow will be sick, I’ve spoken to Lucas from Mental Cruelty before as well, he’s amazing but that’s never transpired. I’ve never got around to getting time with him because I’ve just been badly organised but we’ve got tonnes of mates that we want to get involved that are in sick bands and tonnes of mates in bands that are smaller that I love that I’ve done features for, getting them on a couple tracks would be sick. Devin back on a track would be sick again from Harbinger because he’s done one already and another one would be really cool, so in answer yeah fucking loads loads of my mates on songs!
People are like, “oh yeah, you want to be a musician.” No, I just want to hang out around people playing guitar. That’s what it is. Just an area to chill with my friends, around people playing guitar and maybe cigarettes. That’s what I’m going for. The whole musicianship bit of it is kind of secondary to that.
How do you feel about social media within the music industry and how it affects releases?
It’s hard because I don’t like social media, it involves putting a face up. I so actively do that on the internet, my Instagram profile isn’t what I actually do in my life, it’s basically just music stuff and occasionally when I go out on dates with my girlfriend, it’s not really like a massively proportionate representation of the fact that like today I spent eight hours sat at a desk doing like menial stuff. You’ve kind of gotta do it a little bit, you have to play the game a little bit now.
The main thing for me is spending a lot of time thinking about what ideas would be good and then trying to do them. I think as much as putting things in a calendar is important, thinking about what content you want is more important. I was trying to do all the social media scheduling for release and how to hype up fans, and I was like actually what people naturally get excited for just do that, so I was like let’s just do some more limited edition merch, so we just ordered some new stuff, then people can get some stuff in before the album comes out. That means that if they want to put their money down now they get rewarded for it because they get shit before it’s kind of due to be out and then the only other people to get it are in Ireland. It’s more like think about quality and individuality a little bit but I say that a lot of thought just does go into like ‘do we have enough content about this week’, ‘do we have enough stuff to fill the calendar’. Some weeks you do when you’ve done cool shows, you get good stuff and some weeks you don’t, you’ve gotta really manage it as much as you can. But, like you say, this is part of the game you’ve got to play, and you kind of got to be aware it’s just the landscape unfortunately.
Are you thinking about visuals when you’re writing new music?
I have to attach it to an image in my mind to really understand it myself, I think. So that means that by the time I’m sharing it with other people, it usually has images attached with it or at least references that people can look at. I wouldn’t say that I think in terms of like, okay, when this song comes out, we can do X, Y, Z that’s going to look cool on social media or this sort of video or anything. I don’t really trend focus like that or anything, but I definitely like to think that we when we’re doing writing and thematically thinking about stuff we think about what represents it best visually and what represents us. Our social media isn’t very personable, we’re about making stupid heavy music. We just want to come and do stupid stuff and buy a t-shirt and go home we’re not we’re not trying to be everyone’s whole life, we have to think aesthetically minded when we create stuff but I think it’s more a process that just naturally should involve creating some visual output as well when you make new music.
Could we talk about all of your influences?
As a band and as musicians we all appreciate certain bands, like Northlane for example we all like bands like that, bands that can do heavy without being just heavy, do you know what I mean? That’s really important to us and we all like very mixed genres. Jude loves bands like Depeche Mode, he loves bands like Mastodon, Faith No More. Niall, he has a much more varied genre. There’s a lot of heavy stuff in there, but I find a lot more often it’s more niche genres of music and rabbit hole stuff, which is really sick. I think he’s got quite a good identity of drumming. He doesn’t drum like loads of people in the genre do. He doesn’t do Instagram drumming. It’s not all just crazy blast kicks and pulling their face at a camera. It’s a lot of actual being a good musician and thinking about what you like out of music and just doing that for the sake of loving it. And that comes from his taste in music. Northlane is mainly about Danny, because he’s like really big on bands like that that do modern heavy sounds in a really interesting way. He’s brought a lot of that into the band. He wrote a lot of the songs, he wrote Mansions Burning on Bleak Horizons, he wrote Winter Sun, big input on things in the album to create that modern heavy sound. And for me, I like to listen to really depressing music when I write lyrics. I’m not depressing in the sense of like, oh, crying sad music, music that I associate with depressing stuff that brings me in a bad place. There’s an album called Suffer and Become by Vitriol, which I think are the best heavy albums of the last like 20 years. It’s just relentless. People use that word a lot. I use it a lot. I think our music is quite relentless sometimes, but it is properly relentless. I like listening to music that just puts me in a headspace, but any sort of music that can put me in a mentality, that’s what I listen to because then it reminds me that music has the ability to do that. It’s not about individual things like the guitar player, like the singer’s voice. It’s about creating an atmosphere that sucks you into a certain thing. And then it lets me do that.
I really like Jesse Wells. He’s like a kind of country folk musician. He’s become quite popular on social media. I’ve seen him live recently, it was really good. That was amazing, because it was just one guy and a guitar and a harmonica. It was the most captivated I’ve been in years. I’ll go to shows or I’ll tour with bands and it’s like crazy lights and huge stages and barriers and stuff. And I’m just like, brother, I just want to go outside and have a seat. Do you know what I mean? And it’s crazy that someone can just do it by themselves. So I love stuff like that. Just anything that can captivate, so in answer everyone fucking says we listen to loads of different stuff but we all listen to stuff for that reason of just being captivated by a certain feeling and that feeling for us that we create with our music is dread, we want to captivate people in dread.
Beyond Extinction’s album ‘Where They Gather’ is out now.