Senses Fail
Hell Is In Your Head (indie)
Senses Fail have announced their highly anticipated eighth album "Hell Is In Your Head". The album is set for release
15th July 2022 via Pure Noise Records. Co-produced by Saosin's Beau Burchell, ell Is In Your Head' marks the band's
first studio album since 2018's "If There Is Light, It Will Find You".
Having a kid changes you. Ask most new parents and they'll say that when you bring a child into the world it instils in
you a previously unimagined perspective on existence. Some even go so far as to say that it makes life make sense, that
it gives it a purpose. For Buddy Nielsen, the sole remaining founding member of Senses Fail, it's also made him think
about his own mortality more than ever before. That started during his wife's pregnancy, but it's persisted ever since.
As such, he's found himself staring directly into the black abyss of his mortality a lot recently. It's that heightened
sense of his own impending doom that's at the centre of "Hell Is In Your Head", the band's eighth studio album.
"My wife had a pretty serious childbirth", he says. "I don't want to say she almost died but it was pretty scary for a
minute. And the relationship you have to have with your child is just a constant letting go of yourself in ways that you
didn't necessarily perceive you needed to. I've had to start to come to terms with my own death because my daughter,
who's now four, keeps asking about it. So this felt like an opportunity to maybe address grief and how we process being
- how do you have a kid, how do you be alive, how do you continue to live a meaningful life while also knowing that
you're going to die?".
It's those questions and more that "Hell Is In Your Head" explores and attempts to answer across its 11 dark, brooding
songs. It does so in two very distinct halves. Five of the first six tracks take their titles from the five parts of TS
Eliot's "The Waste Land". They aren't based on the 1922 poem per se, but they're set in its world, and use that setting
as a foundation to explore those topics in a more philosophical, abstract and timeless sense. Nielsen, in fact, says he
views these songs: "more like a play". That's why the portentous, gloomy, atmospheric opener has "references to exiting
and entering the wings of a stage".
"What's the answer to the inevitable trap of the fact that you're going to die?", asks Nielsen. "This record attempts to
go to the dark place of hat is it that we're so afraid of death?' We're afraid of death because of grief. Are we truly
afraid of death because of death? Through my own therapy, I've learned you don't even really have a clear understanding
of death because it's unknowable. And since you literally can't die and come back, I tried to place the record in a much
darker fictional place to help talk about those unanswerable questions".
The second half of the record takes place more in the setting of the real world. Rather than pondering the philosophical
nature of death, its songs are more of a real-time observation of it; tackling both the impending extinction-level
threat of climate change and the contemporary political dystopia in the USA.
Needless to say, the album covers a lot of ground, and does so equally as emotionally as it does so cerebrally.
Throughout, it weaves both Nielsen's natural emotions and existential neuroses, and his philosophies as a practicing
Buddhist into the very fabric of these songs. Not only are its two halves separated thematically - yet also still bound
by the concept of death - Nielsen ensured that they're also split musically. The "Waste Land" section is minor key, the
second in major. The result is a musical journey that embraces the darkness of its subject matter, but then learns to
let go, that indulges in plenty of existential self-reflection, but which also zooms out to paint a more widescreen
picture.
Price
Genre
Format
LP - 1 disk
Release
15-07-2022
Label
Item-nr
1138654
EAN
0810540033853
Availability
Not in stock
Tracks
Title
Artist
1
THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
2
THE FIRE SERMON
3
DEATH BY WATER
4
MILES TO GO
5
HELL IS IN YOUR HEAD
6
GROW AWAY FROM ME
7
END OF THE WORLD/A GAME OF CHESS
8
I AM ERROR
9
WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
10
LUSH RIMBAUGH
11
I'M SORRY I'M LEAVING