Rising Newcastle-via-Athens quintet October Ends have announced their new studio album “Phases”. The album arrives on October 28th, 2022, via UNFD.
These multi-voiced genre-smashers have been somewhat of a well-kept scene secret. Though it dropped amidst the throes of the 2020 pandemic, the band’s self-recorded, self-released debut album “Zodiac” has racked up more than 10 million streams to date, with no touring or promotional push behind it. But now, through their global partnership with UNFD, October Ends are primed and ready to step out of the shadows and introduce themselves to the world on a larger scale!
The new album “Phases” is a significantly large evolution in the band’s sound, and all new material was an experimental combination with blending subjects, styles, instrumentation, and production magic than ever before. Feeling an intense freedom while writing pushed the band to indulge in a much wider array of influences in relationships, addiction, and even pop culture. For October Ends, “Phases” is a much truer expression of themselves.
Today, October Ends have shared the video for “Of Stars” (watch it below). “When we started writing for our new album, one thing we had in mind was that we wanted to mix up our guitar configuration and experiment with new keys and tunings”, the band explains about their approach. “In particular, we decided to introduce seven string guitars on the album, which is something we’d never done before. This allowed us to tune lower than we have in the past and allowed us to explore new sounds and implement even heavier sounding riffs”.
October Ends continue: “‘Of Stars’ is one of the first songs we wrote for the album that uses seven string guitars. We wanted this track to have banging groovy riffs while being catchy and somewhat pop-like in the verses and chorus. This kind of balance is something that we strive to achieve when we’re songwriting because it captures what we love about music. There’s definitely flavours of modern emo in the song as that’s another influence we wanted to include”.
The band furthers: “We love to utilize the different vocal talents of the band and ‘Of Stars’ actually features three of our vocalists – Nick, George, and Michael. Doing this can be tricky because you have to keep in mind each vocalists’ strengths, range, and sweet spots when you’re writing for them, and it’s not the case that each vocalist is always writing their own parts. For example, Nick, Michael, and Alex wrote the melodies/lyrics in this song. Nick and George both sing cleans, but they each have their own style and distinct voice. We think it really gets the best out of the band when you can hook them both up in a track. And then of course, George and Michael share the screams and they do a great job”.
Ultimately, the song tackles an age-old concept: relationships! “Relationships can be an emotional rollercoaster; sometimes you think you’re in sync and then you’re not, you can love each other, you can be betrayed, and a whole load of other hardships and triumph in equal measure”, October Ends share. “There’s a bunch of phases that can manifest in a relationship, and those of us that wrote the lyrics wrote from the shared experience that we’ve felt — be it love, hate, loneliness, anger, or happiness — in an intimate relationship”.
Pre-order & pre-save “Phases” here.
Tracklist:
1. Destroy Us All
2. Call Me Before I’m Dead
3. R3KT
4. Of Stars
5. Play Time
6. Hero
7. Alive
8. One More Round
9. Lay Here
10. Down
