GRAYSCALE SEASON Announce New Album The Weight of Things We Cannot Touch, Release Video For New Single 'Strung Up'
Stream 'Strung Up' here: https://nfan.link/strung-up.
Pre-order The Weight of Things We Cannot Touch here: https://nfan.link/grayscaleseason
The Weight of Things We Cannot Touch was produced by George Lever (Loathe, Sleep Token), who worked with the band remotely while they recorded everything themselves, a first for them. The album was mixed by Buster Odeholm (Humanity's Last Breath, Bring Me The Horizon) and mastered by Seth Munson (Teddy Swims), with additional top line production and piano by Aurora Karme Nord.
New single & album opener 'Strung Up' illustrates the feeling of being in the wrong room with the wrong people. It is about how far the need to belong will take you, and the codependency underneath it. The clean vocals originally sat on an acoustic guitar, and swapping that out for strings and samples is what made them sound dark. Underneath there is piano, there are pads, and there are samples pushed through guitar cabinets and filters. Not one acoustic guitar survived onto the finished track.
On the single, vocalist and bassist Adam Dahlman comments: "I tried to design the clean vocals to bloom. The first verse is head voice and I try to pronounce and enunciate differently than I normally would, to turn into more of a chest voice for the second verse. And that harmony on the second verse is killer. Eddie's 'more' is so fucking good."
Guitarist Richard Sörensen adds: "The end breakdown where the ambience drops with the guitar, creating this weird beautiful/ugly feeling."
The band knew 'Strung Up' was the opener almost immediately and then spent over a year and five or six complete revisions finishing it. The last six months went on the stomping guitars alone. The solution was to keep them.
Grayscale Season have never sounded much like their hometown. Formed in Gothenburg in 2012 and independent throughout, the four-piece pair crushing low-tuned riffs with a fragile falsetto, because that is what it sounds like when someone performs strength while falling apart underneath it. They have toured the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and played Helltown Festival in 2024. Press comparisons have run to Loathe, Deftones, Humanity's Last Breath and The Acacia Strain. The Weight of Things We Cannot Touch is their most direct record and their least resolved.
The album takes its name from a Japanese word. Yarusenai describes the sadness or anger you feel when you know exactly what is wrong and have no way at all to fix it, and Grayscale Season have built an entire record out of that condition. Across eleven tracks the narrator sees precisely what is wrong with him and stays in the wrong room anyway, conforms anyway, says the thing too late anyway. The album keeps looking for somewhere outside itself to put the grief, first in contempt for other people and then in the ground. Neither works. Only the closing track names something reachable, and what it grieves is not the loss of that thing but the years spent looking past it.
On the sound of the record, vocalist Eddie Lejhagen comments: "I don't think we really had a specific reference for how the album would sound. Melancholy is probably what I wanted the album to have a lot of, and I think we managed to pull that off. As for the screamed vocals, Deafheaven is probably a major inspiration - the desperation in it, but melancholic at the same time."
Tracklisting:
02. soulmogged
03. Yarusenai (Ghost)
04. Infinite cc
05. Exit
06. Second Breath
07. mov
08. Square Terror
09. Heart&Ache
10. HER
11. I Know What You Are
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