Photo: Talia Ferguson
Perth five-piece rockers Ashes of Autumn have released their first single of 2022 and it continues to send the band soring to new heights. ‘The Time’ is another punchy upbeat number with killer riffs and catchy chorus, showing the infectious nature this band bring to the scene.
Lead vocalist Melanie Flynn told The Rockpit, “I wrote the first incarnation of ‘The Time’ a couple of years ago on my acoustic. The story around the lyrics was based on my interactions and relationships with people and their very strong views of particular heavy subject matters, and how their constant, never ending conversation around these topics was basically doing my head in. Don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a political song. It was an observation of the mental unravelling of people that I knew personally, who had become obsessed, utterly obsessed, with certain topics. So much so, that it was taking over their lives, destroying their relationships and themselves. It’s written from my point of view, like I’m having an open dialogue. The opening line “I don’t wanna see, the things you say are real” is so poignant.”
Flynn continued, “I took the idea to the band and something about this song tweaked Mats ear. He sent me an idea that he had been working on and basically, the riff you hear Mat playing is an idea he had for another song, but it worked with ‘The Time’. So now, instead of being an acoustic track, ‘The Time’ was definitely on the way to becoming an Ashes song. We worked a new chorus in, built it up instrumentally, Jez threw down some cool harmonies, and now it’s a banging track. Out of the tracks we recorded, this was the quickest for me vocally. I like to use a lot of melody and variance and when I get into tracking, I like to do whole takes as much as possible to catch the emotion. Tracking section by section becomes a little impersonal and almost doesn’t feel natural. The vocals just flowed naturally so Troy pressed record and just let me sing.”
Photo: Talia Ferguson
Guitarist Mat Kenworthy added, “’The Time’ was the last of a batch of four songs we recorded at Hammerspace studios. It probably has the one part of a song we spent the longest working on which ironically, was a little pause before the first chorus. We switched up the order of the instruments we tracked, and by the time we got to tracking my guitar parts, we noticed that the already recorded takes missed this little pause. After a few hours, a lot of back and forth and some magic from engineer, Troy Nababan, we managed to work in the pause. This is the joy of recording music – you dissect and painfully work out touches here and there that the listener is probably never going to notice.”
Ashes of Autumn are chomping at the bit to get back out to play some live shows so keep an eye out on their social media pages for regular updates. Ashes of Autumn are Melanie Flynn (vocals), Mat Kenworthy (guitar), Bryn Haythornthwaite (guitar), Jeremy Thomson (bass), Chris Webber (drums).
