Track By Tracks: Firmament - A New World If You Can Take It (2025)

Composed over nearly two years, “A New World If You Can Take It” represents the band’s journey into self-sustainability as a project and stays close throughout to the theme of “endings” and “letting go”. The album’s sequence is mostly chronological to how the songs were written and produced, and as they go on, you can hear the growth of the band as we became more proficient at producing, writing, and juggling all of the other duties that are heaped on an independent band.

1. Liquid Lush:

Like many of the songs, Liquid Lush is focused on a central experiment. Around two minutes into the song, you can hear a musical cipher play out, which consists of a rhythmic and melodic section that was formed by creating a ‘magic square’; a mathematical construct that relies on an arrangement of numbers which form a particular sum in any direction that they are added. Sequencing the section accordingly, we then grafted the square onto a 6x6 grid of truncated pyramids and assigned other attributes for a lyrical cipher. Of the 52 monosyllabic words in the song, each was put onto a playing card and then drawn to randomly assign them to the squares on the grid. The remainder of the song plays on themes of alchemy and addiction, and is one of our first forays into self-production for this band.

2. Angels in Vermilion:

Angels in Vermilion starts a 3-part segment of the album, beginning a plot line that is taken up by “Conduit” and finished off with “Deadringer”. The story centers around a man who has lost someone that he dearly loved and, feeling wronged by the circumstances, sets out to try and regain his lost love.

The song was a first attempt at writing a “pop song” for the album, and we streamlined the writing process as much as possible. The song was released as a single with a simple music video and garnered quite a bit of attention, which made us feel better about pursuing more of the streamlined “poppy” songs later on in the album.

The title and single cover are a nod to a particular book and its subject.

3. Conduit:

Continuing the plot, our protagonist takes up mediumship to try and contact his dearly departed. Both the music and lyrics of the song are fairly straightforward and were inspired by Victor Hugo’s foray into the spiritualist movement. Hugo, the writer of classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, became interested in attending seances after receiving what he believed to be communications from his deceased daughter. As his interest grew, he became interested in channeling spirits for himself, and claimed to have received messages from figures ranging from Shakespeare and Plato, to Jesus and even aliens from Mercury. A couple of the lines of lyrics were taken from messages that Hugo received when asking about the nature of the afterlife.

4. Lunar Caustic:

The name for “silver nitrate” in ancient alchemy, the lunar caustic, had and continues to have various uses, from cauterization of wounds to acting as a chemical precursor to silver. Its ancient relationship to the moon found new meaning when it came to be used in photographic film, where it served as an agent to capture light and forever reflect it back as a photograph.

The track functions as a “chemical precursor” intro to “Deadringer”, reframing the coming song in a new light.

5. Deadringer:

The capstone of the three-song storyline, Deadringer tells us the results of the protagonist’s search for a way to restore his lost love. As these stories often happen, things do not go as planned.

The deadringer is a distorted carnival-mirror image of those who brought it into being, and gave us a space to reflect on ideas which concretize into something more; an egregore or temporal-memetic entity. After dropping the pretense of the storyline somewhat, the idea is expanded into musing on how similar entities are at play in the world today, given animation through technology or through the actions of people who become possessed by them.

6. Decomposure:

This song showcases a balance that we have been trying to strike with our music. It branches into various musical territories, trying to bridge the gap between progressive post-hardcore and melodic metalcore.

Lyrically, Decomposure plays with the alchemical process of dissolution, and relates it to a moment in life where dissolution can be felt on an interpersonal level.

7. High as in Low:

Whereas most of the album is a reflection on “endings”, “High as in low” focuses on the theme of perseverance. When faced with an ending on the horizon, we can choose to follow the prescriptions of some of the other songs, and solemnly accept it, or we can choose to breathe deeply with our chests out and face it head-on.

Much like the previous song, High as in Low is playing towards a balance in the music between various styles, hopefully synthesizing them into something unique.

8. A New World If You Can Take It: Autocult:

The literal and thematic centerpiece of the album, the title track lays down all of the main themes at their most explicit. The first half of the song “A New World If You Can Take It” describes a coming apocalypse over a dark, ambient orchestration. In the most poetic terms we could muster, we lay out a somewhat cynical philosophical introspection into the place that our world finds itself in. The phrase “behold the eschaton” rings in an aggressive fusion of the heavier genres the album is playing with, which carries through into the second half of the song.

The lyrics owe a lot to a small group of apocalyptic Hare Krishna monks living in the foothills of West Virginia, whom we met and stayed with around the time that we were writing the song. They strongly believed that the world was coming to an end, and that the demonic rot was beginning to take the centres of civilization first. In order to escape the worst, they urged us, and everyone else, to flee to the countryside, set up self-sustainable farming projects, and chant the name of lord Krishna.

The song was conceived as a “modular song,” meaning that the halves can be separated and reused. The second half, “Autocult”, was also released as a single of its own, but can be swapped out for other tracks that can slot into that same space and provide alternate endings for the song. Each alternate ending provides a different apocalypse, each represented by a different “seal” from the book of Revelation (as depicted by Ruldolph Steiner and Clara Rettich).

“Autocult” is the representative apocalypse of the modern day, describing a world in which the pursuit of a technological teleology devises systems by which culture is segmented and deranged automatically, as a process of the system. Though we leave the interpretation of what these systems are up to the listener, there are some suggestions that you can draw from the song.

9. Meltwater Pulse:

A meltwater pulse is a geological event where there is a rapid acceleration in sea level rise, usually following an ice age as the glaciers melt. These events throughout history of caused massive and sudden changes to the landscape of the places where they happen.

The song is a representation of such an event, and is used to set up the next song's aqueous themes.

10. After Me, The Flood:

The title is taken from the French phrase “Après moi, le déluge”, which is attributed to King Louis XV of France, representing a solipsistic lack of care for what happens after you are gone.

For the single artwork, we used a modified version of Francis Danby’s 1840 painting “The Déluge”. The original painting is a representation of the biblical flood, full of potent symbolism. We painted in an underpass, traced from a photograph that we took in our hometown, to call to mind the themes as they can be expressed in modern times, or in everyday life. The artwork helped to set the grandiose tone that we were going for in the song.

After Me, The Flood was one of the first songs that we started writing for the album, and probably took the longest to finish. It was a nice surprise when the song took off more than expected, becoming our most listened to song. The song structure is a little more progressive than some of the other songs, but it came out with a nice balance of progressive and listenable. Lyrically, most of the song is fairly straightforward, using the symbolism of the deluge as something to own and overcome. The bridge lays out something like an alchemical formula, with fiery language contrasting the rest of the song to burn away the dross of “the flood” and perfect oneself in their conquest of the deluge.

11. A Prohibition on Dreaming:

The lyrics of “A Prohibition on Dreaming” came out of thinking about the role that prophetic dreams play in various religious beliefs.

In Orthodox Christianity, figures like St Ignatius warn us that nearly all dreams can be a portal for demons to warp our minds and lead us astray. However, figures like the clairvoyant ”sleeping prophet”, Edgar Cayce, made dreams the center of their spiritual journey.

For us, dreaming is an important part of the creative process about which there is too much to say for this write-up or just one song.

12. Beneddictional (feat. Alex Hunter):

We wanted at least one song on the record to be modeled after a Max Martin single. Beneddictional was the result of us trying out that style of songwriting, and became the “lead single” as we moved into promoting the album.

The title is a portmanteau of “Benediction” (a prayer or song that is used to give a congregation a blessing towards the end of a church service) and “Addiction”. The song plays with the balance between wishing someone farewell at the end of a hard relationship and the struggle of feeling stuck in such a situation or jaded to it. The lyrics to the pre-chorus play on the “Aaronic Blessing”, a benediction found in the book of Numbers and widely used by various sects of Jews and Christians.

The version of the song on the album features Alex Hunter, the singer from the post-grunge band “Present”. Her parts helped to balance out the themes of the song, giving a voice to the “other half” in the relationship dynamic.

13. Eclipse:

Eclipse is a more ambient track, which sets up and re-frames the rhythmic motif for the following song, Cherub. The dark ambience of the first half of the track is reiterated in the final song of the album.

14. Cherub:

This song was inspired by a collection of ecstatic spiritual experiences that we’ve had, bookended by our first total solar eclipse in 2017 and the latest in 2024. In the interim, there were experiences that we have found hard to put into words, and that I wouldn’t bother trying to convince people that they were “real”. This song is to give voice to that feeling of overwhelming mystery and personal ecstasy.

15. Antimony:

The spoken word “Antimony” was inspired by the films of David Lynch, especially “Lost Highway” - we wanted to set up the proper ambience for the following song. The scene is set by a woman recounting a recurring dream, which was inspired by the alchemy-tinted dreams of Zosimos of Panopolis, a 3rd-century gnostic alchemist. In alchemy, antimony is sometimes called “the true bath of gold”, and is linked to the “animal nature” of humanity.

16. A Silence Made For Two:

“A Silence Made For Two” picks up in the setting of its intro and is a more narrative song. Musically, it is a kind of fulfillment of the blend of genres and sounds that the rest of the album has been playing with up to this point. It contains some of the most delicate and heaviest parts of the album, and neatly wraps up the sound of the album into a single song.

The song again deals with the theme of “endings”, whether personal or on a larger scale. Motifs from the rest of the album are taken and given a final expression. The song’s title and fragments of the bridge are a play on the late 1800s song “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)”, and its usage in speech synthesis by IBM in the 60s. “Daisy Bell” also plays an important role in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in reference to the first song “sung” by a computer.

Another motif in the song references “Dies Irae”, a medieval Latin poem and musical theme that is found in countless film scores and musical pieces as a representation of tragedy, death, or the apocalypse. As a musical quote, the sequence of notes from the Gregorian melody has been utilized by numerous composers, from Berlioz and Holst to Led Zeppelin and The Melvins.

Across the album, there are many more quotes, ciphers, and mysteries left for the listener to find and make meaning from. Hopefully, in writing this, we gave people an idea of some of the things to look and listen for, but it is not a replacement for your own exploration of the themes and music.

You can find our music and more here: https://ffm.to/firmamentband

Check out “A New World If You Can Take It” when it releases on May 2nd 2025.