EXCLUSIVE: Northlane Walk Us Through Their Surprise New Album, 'Mesmer'

Following their surprise drop of a new album Mesmer (or as we called it, a bonafide masterpiece) last week, Northlane frontman Marcus Bridge and guitarist Josh Smith have stopped by theMusic.com.au to give you a track-by-track look at their new opus.

Citizen

Smith: "The first track on Mesmer is a song that was written about the First World police state and our willingness to live under the watch of those in power, for their means, while those who blow the lid on it suffer. Writing this one was quite a mission, we went through five completely different sets of lyrics and the final incarnation of the song was the eighth revision. It pays homage to Edward Snowden and his fight for our electronic freedom."

Colourwave

Smith: "This song was written about how I overcame some pretty severe depression quite some time ago. It's still something that will always follow me around but I've learned that the biggest vehicle for change in my life is always perspective. Through changes in perspective we're able to identify the opportunities in the lows, or persevere through tough times on our way to something better. This is what Colourwave is all about - we are what we create. Life changes through the mantras we use to guide ourselves."

Savage

Smith: "This is one of my favourite sets of lyrics on the record. Savage was inspired by a documentary I watched called Overview, which talked about how astronauts' perspective on the earth changed after they saw it externally, without the human boundaries we use to divide ourselves. It explores our nature, we tend to focus on our immediate interpersonal problems rather than banding together with our differences aside to achieve something far greater, which we have the potential to do, 'humankind's lines don't divide, through the eyes of the sun'."

Solar

Smith: "I consider myself an environmentalist and this topic was definitely something I had to cover on the record, whenever it felt right. As soon as I heard the first demo of Solar it felt perfect and the lyrics flowed out of me like they were destined to be part of the song; for the most part this one was written in an hour, some other songs took months. Solar is about our destructive nature as a species, how we exploit a resource and then move on to the next. We treat the Earth as a whole the same way, and our natural and man-made worlds are colliding. I had the vision of us losing touch with its natural features and becoming accustomed to a man-made horizon. To us all of this feels normal, if we were removed from our planet it would be a vastly different place."

Heartmachine

Bridge: "This song spawned from lyrics I had written a few months before we got into the studio and focuses on the inevitable pain that comes with loss. In my case, it was a relationship coming to an abrupt end, but I wanted to write it in a way that could be applied to other difficult situations. I see the Heartmachine as our bodies fighting with the mind. As much as you want to look forward and forget about the past, anxiety and depression tend to spoil that progress."

Intuition

Smith: "This song was written about how our thoughts, feelings and decisions can be engineered by the society we live in. They are conditioned by the way we are educated and all of the media we consume. We are so caught up in what's going on around us, what frivolous things are distracting us, that we forget about what's important, we forget about what drives us as people and what our hearts are telling us. We forget to follow our intuition."

Zero One

Smith: "A fairly dynamic track, Zero One meanders from a really unique electronic introduction into a rolling chorus and crashes into one of the most shocking breakdowns we've ever written. It was fairly difficult to write lyrics and vocals to this one. This song was inspired by a friend of mine talking about how he wasn't happy with the life decisions he'd made, he felt like his inner creativity and happiness were being swallowed up by the boring corporate job he'd taken up for financial security. This is a common complaint, when we are young we are told we can be anything and as we grow older we are often distracted from our inner vision and live to work. Somehow chasing the dream of achieving success in our western cultural sense of the word."

Fade

Bridge: "Fade is about the death of my father and was an incredibly difficult song to write. I lost my father to an overdose five years ago. He was a troubled man and, as long as I can remember, had always struggled with addiction. He wasn't always the best father, but as time goes on, you start to forget about the bad times and celebrate the good. With the loss of a loved one, there are so many emotions you go through. It's a pain that never goes away but the sadness, anger and confusion slowly fade. I think about him all the time, but the fond memories help treat the sting."

Render

Smith: "This is one of the strangest songs on the record, which follows a really unconventional time signature. A very peculiar soundscape opens up into one of our heaviest ever riffs to kick the song off. I knew that when I wrote lyrics for it they had to be equally abstract. This song was inspired by Bill Hicks, he said that this (life) is just a ride. It's easy to be caught up in our material world, governed by our five senses we have to explore it. It's easy to not question if there is more and stress on day-to-day worries that in the bigger picture really have no significant bearing at all."

Veridian

Smith: "Veridian has the most personal lyrics I've ever written. During the writing process for Mesmer we lost quite a few people close to us. This song is about watching my great grandmother decay through old age. It was extremely difficult for me to watch her be kept alive, in pain against her own will. Thankfully I was able to say goodbye to her while she was in a state where she could communicate with me and this song recounts that conversation. When she passed, for the first time ever I felt relief for her. She was at a point where moving on from this world is what she needed and wanted."

Paragon

Smith: "One of the other people we lost while we were creating Mesmer was Tom Searle, guitarist and songwriter for Architects. Jon wrote the music for this song on the back of the news that he'd lost one of the only people he'd ever looked up to in life, and told me that this song had to be a tribute to Tom. I was happy to oblige. Every lyric within this song is a reference to an Architects line, or the Rise Against track from which they got their namesake. It was extremely painful to write but for us became a eulogy to close out the record which we can be proud of."

Mesmer is out now via UNFD.