After signing with Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor’s 3DOT Recordings, Obeyer give us the lowdown on how their debut album Chemical Well was intricately put together…
It’s been hardly any time at all since Lay Siege bid farewell as a band and re-introduced themselves as Obeyer, and since then they’ve already signed to 3DOT Recordings (the label co-founded by Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor).
Now, the quartet – vocalist Carl Brown, guitarist Jamie Steadman, bassist David Bartlett and drummer Lewis Niven – have unleashed their debut album Chemical Well, a record they say has actually been “a long time in the making” behind the scenes.
Here, Jamie reveals what went into it, from “kitchen sink” prog to Linkin Park-inspired bitcrushed drums…
“The majority of our material is written during jam sessions as a band, and we would have a setlist of five or six songs that we would play at practice. When we wrote a new song, the weakest would drop out of the set, and we were doing this over and over for years until one day we wrote Witness and we felt like we had finally found the blueprint for a sound we could expand on over a whole album. I think it’s the one track that has all the different elements of our sound on it and if you were to ask me to pick one track from the album to play to someone who had never heard of us, this would be it. I’m happy with the bounce of the verses, the big chorus and the cinematic clean section. It all comes together!”
“This was originally a ditty that the other three guys loved but I could just never gel with, to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to flesh out the various parts. I would basically just play placeholder riffs in most of the sections with the intention of writing actual parts at a later date. When I sat down to demo it, I could finally hear what they were hearing and finished off the parts. It’s funny because I think this is now my favourite track. I had previously had a go at trying to make my own version of the bitcrushed drums in Don’t Stay by Linkin Park in Cubase, and I used the little drum kit I made in the intro along with the midi for the tom part later on in the song.”
“We ended up tweaking and rewriting every other track on the album over and over, but this is the one song which came together quickly and was left completely as is, verbatim from demo to final recording. Carl would regularly ask me to write a song which was just chugs, chugs, chugs. So in the end, I relented. This song is me saying, ‘Look, here are your fucking chugs!’ to Carl. I used the Neural DSP: Gojira plugin for the clean section. There is a pedal in the plugin that modulates and layers what you’re playing over the top and it sounds like a synth is playing with you.”
“It’s funny how this song has ended up being the one that has gained the most traction so far because it was a candidate for culling during the writing process – we went in to the studio expecting it to be one of the weaker tracks. It used to be this oddball where I was playing these flimsy, octave chords for the main parts, it was in a different tuning, it was lacking any real intense moments and we just didn’t really know what to do with it. Carl was always convinced that the chorus was strong, so it stuck around. As we were getting nearer to our studio booking without time to write a brand new song, I sat down with it at home, put the song in drop tuning, beefed up the chords and wrote some chuggier riffs. We were happy with how it turned out but we never expected it to be one of the standouts.”
“We wanted to write a riffy, relentless, catchy track in amongst all of the dirges we usually come up with. Sam [Bloor, producer at Lower Lane Studios] elevated it during a pre-production session, particularly with the break at the start of the second chorus with the clean singing and the keys. It’s a tough nut to crack performing it live as the transitions have to be spot-on to keep the flow and groove going. It was a contender for releasing as a single but we could only put out so many…”
“This is one of the older songs on the album and it was one that I always enjoyed but the others were often pushing away from. I originally had this chord structure which I admit was not the darkest sounding thing and Dave in particular took issue with it, saying that it didn’t fit with the tone of the other songs. I conceded that he was probably right so I went away and rewrote the chord structures whilst keeping the rhythms and song structure the same and we ended up with something that we all feel is a solid, pacey track that we enjoy playing in our live set as it has lots of moments that translate well during a performance.”
“The first time we played any of our WIP tracks live, we played a version of this song. Someone recorded the performance on their phone and at the end of the song, people in the crowd made audible ‘O’ noises – think Gary Neville, Chelsea vs. Barcelona. That was an indication to us that we were heading in the right direction with our new material. The idea with this one was to have something that was a bit of a shapeshifter, rhythmically. I have always enjoyed it when bands manage to move around between time signatures without you even noticing that it’s happened so this is our attempt at doing something like that.”
“I think we have captured a good sense of motion on this track. It comes blasting straight out of the gate and it probably has a bit of a nu-metal vibe with its bounce. We worked on this one in a pre-production session where Sam suggested adding in the little drum solo and the short pre-chorus before the second chorus. It has some good moments with the atmospheric section, the drop and the outro riff and the flow of the song serves as a good contrast to the stop-start riffs of the previous song.”
“I wouldn’t consider myself as a particularly gifted guitar player and it’s never really been of interest to me to be able to play fast, technical parts, so the tremolo guitar part from this song required a bit of an upgrade to my playing to perform it at a level where I could track it. This is probably a bit of a ‘kitchen sink’ kind of song, where lots of different things happen along the journey. But I think we glued it all together well and came up with something that keeps the listener engaged. It’s probably the more interesting track on the album for people that are in to their prog and music on that end of the spectrum.”
“This song is completely different to the demo we entered the studio with. It was originally longer and had no repeating sections, but Sam raised concerns at the stuttering nature of the flow of the song. I took a day off from tracking to attend a family wedding and when I came back the next day, Carl looked up at me from the sofa and said something like, ‘Sam has fixed your song.’ He chopped out the second half and repeated some of the existing sections. It was a relief, to be honest, as I had been struggling with this one after rewriting it over and over across years. It was the one we were least confident in out of the 12 tracks we had when we entered the studio.
“What we ended up with was one of my favourite tracks on the album. It is just so bleak and it has some of my favourite of Carl’s lyrics and subjects. I don’t usually have much of a personal relationship with my own music, but I ended up imprinting some of the things I was feeling at the time on to this one. My dad unexpectedly passed away eight weeks before we entered the studio, and on top of that I was living in Airbnbs in Stoke for three weeks, often by myself, away from my young family, drinking red wine and living with my own thoughts and feelings. It was tough. On the last day of tracking we went through and added guitar feedback to all the tracks. This was the last track we did and it was the very last bit of tracking to do on the whole album. After we finished, I put everything down, went outside, looked up at the studio and just started crying. It felt like a bookend to a period of my life which had drained absolutely everything out of me and tested me. When I listen back to this track I can feel it all over again and it’s very cathartic.”
