Track By Tracks: NOTSM - Only Death Brings Silence (2024)

About the album as a whole (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

“Only Death Brings Silence” takes listeners on a musical and lyrical adventure that explores some dark aspects of the human experience. The heavy and dynamic musical compositions enhance the emotional impact of the lyrical themes, creating a cohesive and immersive experience for fans of heavy metal.

Track by Track (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

1. Humans:

Lyrically – This song is about the profound negative impact that humans have made on the planet.

Musically – This song has a basic song structure and was written primarily to accommodate the lyrics. The song is fast-paced and is more or less based on the same musical motif throughout its entirety. I’m not a big fan of guitar solos, but I thought a solo would fit nicely in the middle of this song. The section from 2:31-2:41 was written with a live setting in mind and is meant to pump up the crowd before the last verse comes in with a bang.

2. Terminal:

Lyrically – This song is about mortality and how, no matter what we do in our lives, we’re all going to eventually die.

Musically – This is a slower-paced song that has a kind of “doomy” vibe to it. The first part of the song follows a pretty common format, but the second half veers off in a completely different direction ending with a mind-bending drum part.

3. The Hedonic Treadmill:

Lyrically – This song is about how we’re always chasing the next high, even though it rarely leads us to the happiness and fulfillment we are hoping it will.

Musically – This song starts with a headbanger of a riff that is clearly inspired by Meshuggah. The vocals come in pretty heavy during the second riff of the song, and then there’s a weird (what I like to call) “guitar trade-off". A “guitar trade-off” is a technique I use often in my songwriting where each guitar will play a different riff and then, on repeat, they will swap and play the other guitar's riff. After this section, the song is pretty simple from a structural point-of-view until it gets to the fast riff around 3:18. Right before the fast riff though, there’s some neat rhythmic ideas happening: if you listen closely, the guitar chug pattern is in 7/8 time and never changes, but the drums change three different times throughout the course of the riff. The outro starts with a neat guitar melody that’s played on its own, and then the rest of the music comes in with a cool rhythmic pattern that eventually fades out.

4. The Hedonic Treadmill 2:

Lyrically – This song is about how we’re always chasing the next high, even though it rarely leads us to the happiness and fulfillment we are hoping it will.

Musically – This is the second part of a two-part song, and it starts with the same rhythmic pattern that part 1 ends on, but without the melody overtop. The vocals of the song immediately come in and feel like a punch in the face. The rest of the song has a more basic structure than the first part and has a lot of clean guitar and vocal sections, which is meant to contrast Part 1 of the song. After the punchy riff from 3:31 to 3:44, the outro of the song is really chill, ending on a big crescendo that stops dead right at the top.

5. You Make Your Own Luck:

Lyrically – This song is about the role that luck plays in the successes and failures of our lives.

Musically - This song has a basic song structure and was written primarily to accommodate the lyrics. This is another fast-paced song that has a pretty typical structure. When writing the vocals for this one, I wanted to keep them harsh the whole time because of the aggressive nature of where the lyrical content came from. I ultimately decided to let the guitars carry the melody during the choruses.

6. Only Death Brings Silence:

Lyrically – N/A

Musically – This is a long instrumental song that is a rollercoaster ride through many different musical ideas. If you listen closely though, some of the ideas do come back again, either rhythmically or melodically. The original idea I had for this song when I wrote it was to split it up into about 10 different tracks, but I ultimately decided to keep it together as one song because that’s how I always intended it to be listened to.