The Acacia Strain: Stepping Into The Light
Let’s take a second to go back a little over 20 years and reminisce. Britney and Justin donned their iconic coordinating denim outfits on the red carpet; Friends dominated TV screens across the globe for the millionth year in a row; and social outcasts everywhere found yet another reason to stay indoors with the release of the Xbox. But in Chicopee, Massachusetts, a rumbling was beginning in the basement of a suburban home. High school band Septic Orgasm was looking to bring their sound to a whole new level of technicality. This band would soon become The Acacia Strain and, fronted by Vincent Bennett, they would quickly become a force to reckon with in the quickly growing metalcore and deathcore scenes. With the release of new albums Step Into The Light and Failure Will Follow falling on the same day, the band are continuing to innovate and surprise their audience with their seemingly unconventional approach to releasing records.
“We can never do a normal record release ever again. I think ‘cause we kind of shadow dropped It Comes In Waves and we released Slow Decay in the way that we did to kind of just drag it out as long as possible, we wanted to do the kind of the opposite for this,” says vocalist Vincent Bennett.
The band have chosen to go from one extreme to the other between releases. 2020’s Slow Decay was a release that took over six months with a series of seven-inch records, titled D, E, C, A, and Y, being released to the public to form a majority of the album before the final product was put on shelves. “Instead of ‘here’s a bunch of different seven inches over a period of six months,’ it’s like ‘here’s two records at once.’ One of the records we’re not even teasing any songs for, so you can either like it or not. It’s up to the listener to decide whether or not they want to buy the record before hearing anything from it, which is understandable, but everybody nowadays has some sort of streaming, and they can listen to it beforehand. We really just wanted to pull a 180 on everybody and do the exact opposite.”
“The choice to write two records at the same time was like a nightmare, especially since we went into the studio with no ideas. We weren’t pressed for time, but we had a certain amount of time that we needed to be done recording by, and it was like, ‘oh, here we go’. We added more stress to it than needs be but at the same time it was neat. Once we had a bunch of riffs down, we could pick and choose riffs that would work for other songs. The records share riffs and lyrics here and there, so it was a fun process deciding what’s good for this record and what’s good for this record.”
So, the records share riffs, yet sound completely different? It’s not exactly a fresh concept but The Acacia Strain has managed to make it seem just that. Between the two albums the links are almost invisible unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, but the drastic changes in genre and tempo between them makes the dual release seem less of an overload of the senses and more like an exploration into the genres that inspire the band.
“The real idea behind it was to take something, say a riff, and put it on this record, but kind of change the tone, the mood and everything about it so it’s almost unrecognisable in a completely different riff. It’s more like a ‘it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it’ type of deal, with both records where one riff can be really aggressive on this side and the same riff can be emotional and evoke some feelings of sadness and you don’t even realise sometimes that it’s the same exact riff.”
While the double release points toward the positive end of the spectrum for fans, The Acacia Strain began their experience producing said records on the polar opposite end. “It’s crazy ‘cause we had a lot of sessions where we just hung out together and tried to write and nothing came of it because we weren’t in the right mindset. So, when it finally came to record, we were really stressed because we were like ‘wow, we’re in the studio right now’ and we’ve never done that before,” says Bennett.
The pressured nature of the releases clearly didn’t go unnoticed by the band, instead creating the motivational surroundings they needed to create two entirely different records. “We were all really feeding off of one another and I don’t know if it was that atmosphere of just being together all in the same place with the same frame of mind, but it all came together for the most part in the studio. We had riffs here and there that we had prepared beforehand, but we did most of the creative process just in the studio with each other and with no real preparation.”
The studio time and writing as a band is just a portion of the recording process; the lyrics that bind the songs together are a whole other entity and can make or break an impressive instrumental. “I don’t like to make the lyrics too personal. So, I take stuff that I’m going through in my life and kind of like put a twist on it where it’s like some sort of non-reality where it’s either science fiction or horror or fantasy.” Bennett reveals. “I’m having a stressful time because I bought a new house. It’s really stressful, but you can’t write a song about that. That’s not anything anybody wants to listen to unless you’re like Bob Dylan or whatever. But I took that experience and just morphed it into something more.”
Though a brutal extreme metal song about moving house would be an interesting listen to say the least, Bennett instead chooses to take a more metaphoric route toward his lyricism. “There’s not necessarily a song that’s really about any of the trivial hardships that anybody goes through in their lives, but it’s all about taking that experience and kind of like ‘what can I do to help me through this?’ It’s more about the experience of what was going on through your head at the time to help you escape from the stresses of everyday life.”
That is exactly what music should be. Many listen to music of all shapes and forms to escape the clutches of mundanity and release themselves of their trivial stresses of ‘normal’ life, so why would you want to listen to something that echoes exactly what you are looking to avoid? The Acacia Strain instead use these stresses as building blocks to create the ferocious and harsh sound that many of us have come to love over their 20-year tenure as a band. They are normal people just like the rest of us, after all.
