To Love And Beloved

“It was a weird process for us,” admits Ben Coyte, who only joined the band last year, “because a lot of it was put together in the studio. We were there for a long time but we didn’t know what it was going to come out like until it was done.”

Despite being the newest member, Coyte grew up in the same local scene, released their first EP on his label and played in side projects with various members, most recently Kevin Cameron’s project, In Trenches.

“He sort of came back from a tour and made a joke about if I wanted to play bass. He was 100 per cent joking, and then the next day I was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? I kind of do.’ So I was literally working right up until the point where we went on tour, and I got on a plane to Europe, and straight on stage in Spain at Resurrection Fest in front of about 10,000 people.”

“At that point it was always going to be a really, really part-time thing, just two or three tours a year just to hang out again,” Cameron says of the Prom Queen reformation. “There was a bunch of leftover riffs from the last album that we did want to do something with, but it never eventuated. So I guess it wasn’t until Jona was out of the band that the sort of serious talks about writing and knuckling down really started.

“For a while, the writing process wasn’t really working to be honest. It really came down to the last month before the recording where we were locked in the studio and were recording every day that it really came together. Once we worked out that headspace, knowing where we wanted to go with those songs, where we sat in this style of music, everything started getting pretty fluid. There was a couple of things that were literally second-to-last day of recording, where I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve had this idea in my head for a couple of years, we’ll use this.’”

As with their 2006 album, Music For The Recently Deceased, the band recorded Beloved with legendary Swedish metal producer Fredrick Nordstrom. Again, the quality of the finished product is undeniable.

“The weirdest thing we’ve found is that he said from the last record we did with him in 2005, he got more work out of that record than any of the ones that we went to him for, which I don’t understand at all, because I don’t personally put that album anywhere near Soilwork’s Natural Born Chaos… but he reckoned he just got bombarded for five years. He’d never recorded a breakdown before us.”