Following their Awake EP released this past spring and their recent cover of Billie Eilish’s “Everything I Wanted,” doom-pop progenitors Som (comprised of current and former members of Constants, Junius and Caspian) have unveiled plans for a new full-length album and released its first single, “Animals.”
Vocalist and guitarist Will Benoit explains of the song, a shimmering example of Som’s patented sound:
“About halfway through the writing cycle for our new record, I woke up to an email from our guitar player Joel with an mp3 attached called ‘Animals.’ He sent it at like 3:00 or 4:00 am, so I knew he was excited to share something that he had obviously stayed up late working on. He was living in Richmond at the time, and this was during last year’s George Floyd protests, so he was front row watching monuments getting torn down and experiencing a real cultural shift. Later on, he said it was both horrible and inspiring.
“I was pretty blown away by the demo. From the first note of that lonely, haunting guitar intro all the way through the heightened tension of the instrumental outro — that was all in his original version, and it felt like lightning in a bottle that I had to dig in on immediately. I remember I was running errands all morning, and in the car, I was bouncing back and forth between listening to the demo and recording voice memos of all the vocal melodies on my phone. By 11:00am I had the chorus lyrics and harmonies worked out and by 2:00pm I was back in the studio and had all the vocals recorded pretty close to how they are on the album.”
Give “Animals” a spin below. The Shape Of Everything arrives on January 21 via Pelagic; pre-order here.