Many of us who spent the weekend sinking our teeth into the debut release from R U N have emerged the other side either gasping for air from the blistering instrumentality, lost in a sombre silence from the lyrical content or some other physical, tactile, real-world response; or all of the above.
The point being one doesn’t simple encounter a body of work quite like For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet without it punching a hole right through you.
The collaboration between Australian heavy music luminaries Lochlan Watt and Mike Deslandes damn near shook the Earth with its announcement and seemed to only become more intriguing with each single.
To help gain further purchase on the extended play, R U N gave Blunt Magazine a peek behind the curtain of their creative process, revealing six releases that left their fingerprints on the drop.
Killswitch Engage – Alive Or Just Breathing
This is the one that started it all for me and a lot of others when it comes to metalcore. Killswitch Engage was not a band I had in mind as a direct reference point when we were creating R U N, but it filtered down somehow even though there were a dozen other directly referenced bands. Mike is a musical weirdo who has usually existed on the fringes, but he sent me some riffs for an early version of Within which I gently suggested sounded “a little bit too my first Killswitch riff”, and he then said he’d never listened to Killswitch Engage before in his life. The stuff he came back with was turbocharged by comparison, but the feel is still there. The melodic vocal in ‘Find Peace’ is very intentionally Killswitch however. Even in terms of lyrical content both Alive Or Just Breathing and For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet are on a similar page in that it’s all mostly philosophical lyrics about life, death and the search for meaning.
Misery Signals – Of Malice and The Magnum Heart
Truly one of my all time favorites. This album is still insanely impressive by today’s standards and captures an era. Misery Signals deserve to be much bigger I think, and seem to be a “band’s band”, in that everyone in the know is totally obsessed, without them having ever really scaled huge commercial heights. Part of the mission statement of R U N was to try and embody the technicality and vibe of Misery Signals, but utilize them in a perhaps more catchy and accessible way, as many bands before us have also done. This project has a lot of influences, but Misery Signals is the reference that seems to come up from listeners almost as much as the next band on the list, and Of Malice and The Magnum Heart is the one of the best.
Deafheaven – New Bermuda
I know Sunbather is the big one, but New Bermuda is the Deafheaven record I hold the closest. I really enjoyed how cold they went with this as a follow up to a much lighter breakout. The release also coincided with some challenging personal events in my life, and it will always hold the most significance of their catalogue. Overall however, Deafheaven is a huge influence on R U N’s sound, aesthetic, everything. They’re also one of the few spots in the initial Venn diagram where Mike and I are both genuine fans. I worship how bold this band is, I admire how they landed in the right place at the right time. We wanted to take their approach and try and splice it down even further into another style.
Rosetta – A Determinism of Morality
This is just a list of my all time favorite bands now. R U N is just a love letter to all my favorite bands. Rosetta is one of them and I think their third album A Determinism of Morality is my personal favorite. This band inspired the DIY spirit within me, so much so that in 2008 I sent them a message on MySpace about touring Australia and later that year they became the first band I ever booked a full tour for. I’ve spent a lot of time with them as close friends, and as a fan – their music is soaked into my soul. I even stole a line of their lyrics for Within as a direct nod to this. I believe their music to have healing qualities for those ready to receive, and I wanted to harness a bit of that for my own output. There’s not much more to say. I love post-metal, Rosetta are one of the best bands at it, and they’ve had a significant impact on my life.
Fit For An Autopsy – Absolute Hope, Absolute Hell
I think Will Putney makes some of the best sounding and hardest hitting metal records in the world. That’s why we got him to mix For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet, which was strangely enough Mike’s suggestion, but one I was obviously super keen on. Fit For An Autopsy is Will’s band. He also produces Thy Art Is Murder’s records. While singing for Thy Art Is Murder in 2016 I got to know Fit For An Autopsy, who were touring off the back of this record, which became an all-time favorite of mine, and a structural reference point at several spots along the way of writing my own record. Will produced the latest Psycroptic album too, and after having also sung for that band in 2017, it was very important for me to feel the satisfaction of having a record of my own that can hold its own next to my fill-in gigs. I don’t think we’re a deathcore band at all but death metal has still been a significant influence on my life and style and also lifestyle, and Fit For An Autopsy feels like the most appropriate choice to represent that here.
Parkway Drive – Reverence
Parkway Drive might have also needed Killswitch Engage to get their start, but that’s kind of irrelevant at this point. It may seem kind of ridiculous to say it like this, but we looked to the insane level of which Parkway was operating and thought “why can’t we be like that? What’s stopping us from writing massive songs that belong in stadiums with full pyro?” The goalposts have obviously shifted for everyone now, but the inspiration of Parkway Drive gave us the confidence to say things like “fuck it, European festivals”, and go all-in on the fireworks factor during our songwriting sessions. I think all their albums are basically great, but I’m throwing down Reverence because though it has come from metalcore, it is, like R U N, not exactly metalcore anymore. R U N does not exist to worship an exact style, or to dwell on the past. We strive to write songs from the future.
R U N’s debut EP For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet is available everywhere now.
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