SPACELORD drops their new album "False Dawn" on November 5, and you can catch a few of the tracks right now on Bandcamp. This duo from New York will blow your mind with their unique blend of desert rock and heavy psych. A lot of time and effort went into these songs, and the result is an album full of heavy riffs and mellow melodies. Listen to the pre-release tracks from Spacelord's "False Dawn" on Bandcamp:
Spacelord is a band that takes the best of my favorite bands and rolls them into one killer album. One track has me thinking, "Yea this would have been a killer Zeppelin tune" and then the next has me wishing Soundgarden had never broken up. Don't get me wrong -- I'm definitely NOT saying that there is anything derivative here. Spacelord's songs are inspired by the same music that all of us love, and the result is original and amazing. Some of the songs are heavier, some are slower, and all of them are killer stoner tunes. There have been a lot of great releases these past few months, and Spacelord's "False Dawn" is definitely among the best of them!
The full album release is on November 5 and is available for pre-order now at https://spacelordband.bandcamp.com/album/false-dawn
From the band:
False Dawn draws together the band's many influences, from 70s acid rock like Zeppelin and Sabbath to the dark, heavy sound of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. "Some of the music was written in the days and weeks that followed the death of my brother, while some others were concepts I had wanted to explore for a long while," said guitarist Rich Root. "We're taking the personal impressions of all of our influences and amalgamating them into something that makes us feel like the music we love makes us feel."
I asked the band to tell me about the cover art (which I find to be amazing!) and here's what they told me:
We kicked around a bunch of art direction ideas, but we didn't have a clear vision, we were just looking for something that might inspire us. There were several artists we considered working with, and we found some amazing museum photography of ancient artifacts that might have worked. In the meantime, I was messing around with this program called Artbreeder. Artbreeder uses something called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to "learn" what different types of images should look like, and which ones look best. Users then collaborate with the program by setting the parameters or mixing different images or types of images together. It has an album art setting, which is what gave me the idea to go in this direction. There were some promising images from our early experiments (I've attached an example here),
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| Early version of the album cover by Artbreeder |
but the problem is, Artbreeder knows albums have word-like shapes on the covers. But it doesn't know what words actually are, so when it generates album art it creates these weird cryptoglyphs in place of the band name and album title. We'd have to either incorporate them into our concept or just put our text over them. In the end we weren't happy with what we got out of the program. Then I started playing with Artbreeder's landscape setting. By going through several iterations, it started to learn what kind of fantastical, surreal visions I liked best. When we got this one, it was instantly clear we had a winner. So this album cover is actually a crop of a wider landscape. There's also an alternate version of it that could serve as the back cover if we're ever able to do a vinyl run of False Dawn.
Spacelord is from New York with members
- Vocals, guitar: Ed Grabianowski
- Guitars, bass, drum conjuring: Rich Root
Follow SPACELORD on Bandcamp at https://spacelordband.bandcamp.com
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