At Soundscape Magazine, we’re big fans of This Burning Age, who are currently in the process of releasing a four-part EP project. Interested to learn more, we caught up with vocalist Friday for a track-by-track insight on the first two EPs of the series – Supplication and Devotion. See below to learn a little more about the songs and stories behind them.
EP01: Supplication
Disappeared
Disappeared is about the struggle to love and keep on living in a broken world. It was influenced by Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”. Essentially saying that we need to fight, rail, kick and scream in the face of the darkness around us, to announce that we’re not going to go quietly…” Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Your Will Is My Kill
Your Will Is My Kill talks about sado-masochistic and destructive love from the point of view of a disturbed dominant male character. The implication being that he’s wrestling against personal demons and holding the other character against their will.
Want
Want focuses on unrequited love and unhealthy obsession – they have lost themselves so completely to another person that they’re aware that their own life is suffering and breaking down as a result.
EP02: Devotion
There Is No Hope Except For That Which You Give Me
This track is a meditation on hope and redemption out of despair and disconnection. A late night journey through the city was the first inspiration for the song and I use symbolism associated with that in the verses. The titular phrase is deliberately repetitious – the rhythm of it, the more sinuous first half coupled with the choppy, harshly accented delivery of the second, an unstoppable affirmation with every repeated phrase layered with additional vocal takes, each building upon the last, to create something like a chant or incantation. In my head I was referencing those circular prayer forms found in Vedic tradition, Buddhist Mantras or even Catholicism.
Hollow
Second (and lead) track Hollow touches on ideas of love and the human condition from the point of view of someone who’s jaded, world weary, dislocated and desensitised yet, at the same time, their sense of disconnection and emptiness has brought about a personal epiphany.
Nothing
The final track Nothing talks about destructive love where each person is both the source of the others greatest joy and their greatest pain. The lines in the verses were written as non-rhyming couplets – I liked the idea that something you think is good, something you think you need is also the very thing that will fuck you up and bring you to your knees.
