Alternative psych-rock band, Meltt have had a hell of a year already and are just gearing up to end it with a bang. Following the release of their EP, Another Quiet Sunday back in March, the band began building anticipation once more with a string of singles, all leading up to the release of their new full-length album, Eternal Embers just last week. The sprawling fourteen-track album not only showcases Meltt’s full dynamic range, but it also finds the band tackling some powerful and personal subject matter, from social media anxiety and technology addiction, loss of a parent from ALS, tripping in a desert and facing your fears. The wide-ranging album found the band pushing themselves sonically and emotionally more than ever before for a hard-hitting, well worth waiting for release.
With Eternal Embers out now and tour dates kicking off this weekend, we caught up with Meltt to discuss the creation of the album, what they hope fans take away from it, and their upcoming shows. Read more now below.
Prelude Press: You’ve already had an exciting year with the release of plenty of new music, including your EP, Another Quiet Sunday. What has been the highlight of 2023 so far?
James Porter [guitar, keys, vocals]: Lots of personal highlights but as a band our spring tour in March was great! Super cool to be connecting with fans across the US and returning to places and seeing more people than the last time we played. It’s still wild to us to have fans throughout North America and the world. Learning all the new songs off the record for live has been a more recent highlight as well!
You also just released your new album, Eternal Embers last week! What are you most excited for fans to hear on the album?
I’m super pumped for fans to hear us stretching out over the album – we really pushed ourselves into new sonic territory and now that we’ve had some time away from the record I think we all feel really proud with what we’ve made. Hope they like what we’ve cooked up! There’s one song in particular called “When the Smoke Abates” that I think is one of the best things we’ve done. Lyrically I love it and musically it really came together playing it as a band – we left in a bunch of the stuff we recorded live off the floor during the demoing phase in that one which we don’t normally do and it feels super organic and natural to me as a result.
It being your first full-length release since 2019, was there anything that you wanted to accomplish with Eternal Embers that you haven’t had the chance to do with any EPs yet?
We all listen to albums primarily over playlists or singles so for us Eternal Embers is really the true way the music is meant to be heard – I think going on the full journey of the album adds a lot to the whole experience. With this record we set pretty minimal guidelines of what we wanted it to sound like or how to make it but a few ideas were floating around of making a “brighter, more colorful” record with more variety and that would be fun to play live. Super excited to see how the new tunes work live now.
You spent some time in a remote cabin for the creation of Another Quiet Sunday and Eternal Embers. How do you feel the isolation and disconnecting for a bit impacted or is reflected in the album?
At the time it was done out of COVID time necessity but being in such isolation all together was a beautiful way to work. Just being away from the daily distractions of life was huge for us in productivity – we probably did more in a month there than we got done in year of lockdowns and distancing. So much of what we did there was hearing the songs a few times then jamming them out live in the room, coming up with new parts and new arrangements right then without overthinking them. It felt so easy and natural compared to a layer by layer approach we have taken in the past. So much of the album has themes of connecting to nature as a way to heal or restore oneself and I think the basis for a lot of that came from that shared experience there and a deeper level of bonding amongst the band that happened whilst we were there.
Eternal Embers is an incredibly introspective release, touching on themes of growth, death and rebirth. Was this a conscious effort or something that sort of just happened organically during the writing process?
It definitely wasn’t consciously laid out at first. After our time at the cabin we all took some songs home with us and worked on the lyrics. It was only really on coming back together and sharing the lyrics for everything that we realized just how cohesive the themes we had been writing about were with one another. I think all of us in the band are in different parts of our life in regards to growth, decay and rebirth as it pertains to all sorts of things and just by the act of four of us writing about those topics at the same time the album contains all of those themes from different perspectives. When the songs are sequenced in the right way you start to see multiple cycles of growth decay and rebirth all throughout the album. I think if we planned that out from the beginning it would have been a mess and too calculated but I’m super happy it came together naturally the way it did in the end.
Was there anything that collectively you knew you wanted to touch on with this album?
We had areas that we were all interested in at the time but that was largely sonically and not really lyrically at all. We had all gotten into messing with VSTs and plugins and eventually analog synths in the time following the release of Swim Slowly and we wanted to bring our excitement for those things into the record for sure. It wasn’t really pre planned though just natural!
What would you like for listeners to take away from the album?
I’d like the album to be a catharsis for the listener that hopefully leaves them in a positive hopeful and open place at the end of listening. I love music that ultimately uplifts the listener so hopefully our listeners can have that experience.
You recently released “The Absent Sea” from the album – can you tell us a little bit about the track? What inspired it?
Musically that one started as a frankensteining of one of Chris’ demos for the first part of the song and one of mine for the second part of the song. From there we all layered instruments to make this murky deep psych vibe we all associated with this desert landscape or wide open ocean. Ian brought in the bulk of the lyrical direction for this one and I know in there were themes of the end of life on earth when the sun explodes – for me the B section always feels like this big expansion as if the sun is exploding and consuming and sending ripples throughout the universe.
With Eternal Embers out now, do you have any other big plans for the rest of 2023? Any upcoming shows or tour dates?
We’ll be going on a North American tour this fall which I’ll include the link to! Super pumped to play Eternal Embers in full at our Vancouver release show and to play in Mexico City for the first time! www.meltt.ca/tour
Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! Is there anything you’d like to add?
Thanks for the interview this was fun to reflect on the album a bit!
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