Track By Tracks: ORO - Djupets Kall (2019)


This is our first official album release so we wanted to gather the best songs we've written so far since the beginning. Some songs date back to 2014 when we first started out, and some are witten more recently.

We produced the album ourselves, and we spent a lot of time trying out different combinations of pedals and amps to get the right sludgy, harsh guitar and bass sound but with a clear tone, and drums that could crush mountains. We tracked all the instruments and vocals ourselves with the help from Richard Stöök, who also edited and mixed the album. He's a real genius and he made it all sound amazing.

1. Järtecken:

For me, this was the obvious intro song of the album. With heavy, dragging beating on the toms and ominous guitar chords it sets the tone for the entire album perfectly. The song itself combines all the elements I love about our music, crushing weight and melodic beauty. The title “Järtecken” means “Omen” and when I hear the song I envision black clouds towering up in the sky, and the cold mist that caress your face like a kiss from a deceased loved one. Everything you've been running from your whole life is know facing you all at once, and when you hear the bells of death toll your name you welcome it with all your heart.

2. Domen:

This is a very straight forward song and it is one of our favourites to play live. I guess because it's very nice to bang your head to, and it makes the audience go nuts. It doesen't really have an intro it just starts right in your face, which I really like. It's has a lot of cool riffs in it and melodic parts to keep things interesting. The title means “Judgement” and it's about the judgement day in a biblical sense. The demons from hell crawl up from the fiery pits to punish us for our sins. The riders of the apocalypse are awakened to execute the end of days. 

3. Enas i skam:

This is one of the newer songs on the album, and it has a bit of a different structure I think. It basically has two parts. The first part starts very soft, almost like a pop-song, only to explode with intense fury, and then it goes back to a softer pace again. It also has a heavy breakdown part. It creates a very nice dynamic. The second part is based on soaring guitar melodies and heavy riffs. The outro riff was a real pain in the ass to record with the progressive rythm, but it was totally worth it. The title means “Unite in shame” and it's more or less about my frustration of seeing all the shit that goes on around us, but we're too lazy or ignorant to do anything about it. We just go on like mindless drones. It's time to wake up and fight back! 

4. Ensamheten:

I think this is the heaviest and darkest song we've written so far, and I absolutly love it! When Seb (guitar) presented the song it was pretty much finished, and we just added the layers and melodies at our rehearsal place to make it complete. The distorded e-bow in the beginning and the desolate guitar melodies that follows – it doesn't get any more post-doom/sludge than that! And after that it gets even heavier! With the distorded and twisted murmurs in the middle I think the whole song has a disgusting, dissease ridden feel to it. The title means “The solitude” and in the lyrics I've tried to capture what it's like to be utterly alone by choice. When you've cut yourself off from the rest of the world because you are rotten to the core and all you want to do is to watch the world burn. The feeling when you've lost something vital and nothing has any meaning anymore. 

5. Tusen kroppar:

I wrote the accoustic intro for this song many years ago and recorded it on my phone. And when I listened to it afterwards I heard my newborn daughter crying in the background, which I hadn't noticed during the recording. Her crying and the accoustic guitar made it sound creepy as hell, and I knew we had to use this somehow. But it wasn't until a few years later that I actually finished it. The rest of the song pretty much wrote itself and I think it is one of the best songs of the album, if not THE best song. The title means “Thousand bodies” and I wrote the lyrics during the worst refugee catastrophe around the Mediterranean Sea. Seeing all those people risking their lives and the bodies of dead children floating ashore on the greek beaches affected me deeply. 

6. Djupets kall:

John (drums) presented the intro riff to this song and I fell in love with it right away. So simple, so evil, so gloomy! We decided to add the distorded ebow to make it even more evil. The verse riff has, in my opinion, a classical post-metal feel to it. It's almost a bit happy sounding which creates a nice contrast. This is the title track of the album and it means “The call from the deep”. The lyrics are about being drawn down to the deep as a way of cleansing yourself and setting your mind free. You become one with the dark and let it consume you to achive enlightment. 

7. Ögat av glas:

This song stands out a bit from the rest of the album. When we wrote it we allowed ourselves to experiment with different progressive parts and combining them with more traditional sludge parts, which was a lot of fun. The working title for the song was “the Pelican song” because the main riff sounds like the American post-sludge masters Pelican. The real title means “The glass eye”. It had a longer title at first which was (translated) “the mirror behind the glass eye” which is a technique used by taxidermists to make the eyes of the dead animals seem more alive. I thought it was a cool metaphor to use, but then we decided to shorten it to fit in more with the other song titles on the album. There's not many vocals in the song and the few lines of text are about a giant prism (eye of glass) which sheds light, exposing all that is false and fake in our world. 

Well, there you have it. Our debut album Djupets kall explained track by track. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed writing and recording it. 

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