Forge Your Future

About

Spirit Adrift mastermind Nate Garrett moved from Arizona to Texas on March 1, 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown due to the pandemic. He’d already begun work on a follow-up to the band’s fourth album, <i>Enlightened in Eternity</i> (which came out in October 2020, but was recorded the previous year), when his label suggested a stopgap EP to tide fans over between LP. The result is <i>Forge Your Future</i>, which features soaring heavy metal anthems directly inspired by the pandemic. “I don’t know if the song ‘Forge Your Future’ is connected to the pandemic at all, but the other two song, yes—100%,” Garrett tells Apple Music. “And musically, I probably wrote the title track and ‘Wake Up’ within the first week of lockdown.” Below, he takes us through the song. <b>“Forge Your Future”</b> “A lot of metal bands write songs as narrative. It can be a realistic narrative or a completely fantastical one about dragons and magic—which is something I’ll never do. But I did find it to be a new and exciting experience to write lyrics as a story. When I went back and read it, I realized it’s a pretty heavy-handed metaphor for overcoming adversity, which a lot of our stuff is about, but I focused more on imagery—a cool story that you could picture in your mind’s eye. And inadvertently, it does apply to the times we find ourselves in.” <b>“Wake Up”</b> “For this one, I had the chorus riff first. I think most people would compare it to some ’80s Randy Rhoads-type stuff, but actually <i>Symbolic</i>-era Death was a big touchstone for that riff. I wrote the rest of the song around that chorus riff, and it’s an open-fifth string-based song, which is kinda hard to fuck up. Lyrically, I was just watching everybody buy up all the toilet paper and felt frustrated and disgusted to my very core. I just wanted to smack people in the face and scream at ’em to wake the fuck up and start acting right.” <b>“Invisible Enemy”</b> .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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