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Code Orange: “We wanted to drop this thing like a bomb”

With their new album, Code Orange are winning over new fans in record time. Give them a chance and you’ll soon be theirs.

Code Orange: “We wanted to drop this thing like a bomb”

The best hardcore bands are the ones bold enough to look at the line that borders their designated genre with an eye of disdain, before taking a defiant step over it. One foot may still be planted firmly in the hardcore camp, but they’re not afraid to have a kick around with other challenging tones and techniques with that liberated appendage.

Not convinced? Look at the likes of Converge, Botch, The Dillinger Escape Plan, even the less complicated bands that toy around with unexpected turns of pace, and with their third album ‘Forever’ now firmly under their belts, Code Orange could be next to ascend to that league.

“We love hard, heavy music,” says the Pittsburgh four-piece’s drummer and lead vocalist, Jami Morgan. “But I feel like a lot of the bands that are more artistic in some kind of way lose that love for those hard parts. To me, though, those harder parts are still something we’re all totally in love with.”

Throughout the course of Jami’s half-hour phone call with Upset, which he answers from Seattle while on a victorious US headline tour, he speaks as passionately about Hatebreed and Earth Crisis as much as he does Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails.

“I feel like that was the line I wanted to walk,” he says with vehement pride for the band’s Pennsylvanian upbringing. “Being from Pittsburgh, we learned about the most violent forms of hardcore, and we also learned about art music in the same city. Both of those scenes kind of thrive in that city, so it almost creates these sort of hybrid people.”

It’s this love for hybridity that Jami, guitarist Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose, bassist Joe Goldman and guitarist Reba Meyers push to its gasping limits on ‘Forever’, an album that nails a tricky balance between intricate and incendiary, perplexing and punishingly heavy.

“I knew that some people wouldn’t like it, but who gives a shit?”

From the second the album and its eponymous track opens with a demonic, distorted muttering (“When hands are caught in my brother’s pocket / I’ll burn my gods down…”), it is instantly one of the most intense records of this generation before anyone’s played a single note.

When a band put their name to 35 minutes of pure metallic hardcore nihilism like ‘Forever’, one feels compelled to get under the skin of Jami and the rest of Code Orange and unearth the fucked up feelings that drove them to write their most brutal album to date.

While most bands from the north-eastern states – now, more than ever – favour heart-on-sleeve ideals and straight-from-the-diary lyricism, Code Orange prefer to communicate in a more enigmatic dialect; rarely speaking about their personal lives, and sharing cryptic lines and lyrics that are almost biblical in tone on social media.

“I think [being private about our lives] is a calculated part of what we want to do,” suggests Jami. “The whole marketing standpoint of everyone having to know when you’re recording, what you’re recording, what you’re doing, what you’re eating is super lame, I think it sucks. We didn’t want to release a bunch of pictures of us in the studio [on social media], we just wanted to drop this thing like a bomb.

“People don’t need to know about the work that’s gone into it because we know that we put a lot of cold, hard, calculated work into this record, and that it conveys the moods that we wanted to convey. We’ve definitely taken things from our [personal] lives and from our lives as a band, and I wanted to make a broader, wider-scoped record through the eyes of not just a hardcore record, but where every vocal sounded furious and urgent.

“Urgency is what a lot of heavy bands tend to lose when they start to drift into a more artistic territory, but I wanted to make it urgent and artistic [at the same time].”

Something that Jami also speaks candidly about is the amount of will that Code Orange have in compromising, whether it’s with their most fervent fans or harshest critics. That, of course, being non-existent. Even after setting the bar to a practically unreachable height with 2014’s ‘I Am King’, and upon enticing larger and more diverse audiences with their new record, pandering to the masses is a move that’s completely out of the question.

“The only pressure I ever feel is our self-pressure,” Jami says confidently. “I feel that I will know if [the record] is not good, and I’ll know that it’s not what it needs to be in the current music landscape. I always knew what ‘Forever’ needed to be, it was just about putting all the puzzle pieces together, which is hard and it’s where a lot of people fuck up.

“I think we put it together in a way that we like. I feel like there’s a lot more we can do, but I don’t really care; people tend to be cynical anyway, so it doesn’t bother us so much.

“If the record was awesome when we listened to it, then a lot of people were going to like it too. I think our ears are pretty close to the ground in that sense. I knew that some people wouldn’t like it also, but who gives a shit? I just want to do something that I would like to listen to!”

So, when the time eventually came to reunite with producer and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou in the studio, ‘Forever’ was clearly an album that Code Orange were going to make on their own timescale and their own terms…

For all the skull-crushing riffs and sludgy beatdowns that it has to offer, the true heaviness of ‘Forever’ lies not only in the crunching of Reba’s and Eric’s guitars and the pummelling of Joe and Jami’s rhythms, but also in the cinematic electronic elements. Code Orange have had their flirtations with synths and samples on their previous records, but here they add a daring and disturbing new dimension to the band.

“People have used electronics in really dark ways over the years, and I knew that we had our own take on it,” explains Jami, while mentioning the likes of Godflesh and the ever-influential Trent Reznor as reference points. “Our goal was to take those things that we like and inject them into what we’re doing but in a different way to what we’ve seen being done before.”

If the double kick-drum barrages of ‘Kill The Creator’ and ‘Real’ are the aural equivalents of a perpetual facial bludgeoning, then the industrial churns, swirls and pulses that are woven into them represent the menacing, nightmarish glare of your assailant. Fuelled by his love his soundtracks and dark electronic music, guitarist Eric put in the hours and elbow grease into learning how to operate the software and synthesisers, slowly but surely making them an integral part of Code Orange.

“It was something that I thought could thicken everything up and make it feel more like records that are sort of out of our world,” says Jami. “The reason why I feel like people connect with those records so deeply is that, even with rap records, when you put your headphones on, there’s so much going on and the production is so deep that it touches places sonically that you can’t touch with guitars and drums and bass.”

“We just want to show people how good we can be.”

If the abundance of electronics doesn’t offer up enough curveballs, then one track that serves as the defining moment of ‘Forever’ in terms of its unfettering attitude is ‘Bleeding In The Blur’. A rock anthem of cataclysmic proportions, Reba takes centre stage in spectacular fashion prompting thousands of fans to rummage for their phones to check that they hadn’t put all their artists on shuffle.

However, taking into account the dalliances that they have had with alternative rock, shoegaze and emo, is ‘Bleeding In The Blur’ really even that much of a risk for Code Orange to have taken?

“Hell no!” laughs Jami. “It’s just what we do, it’s what we’ve always done, and we’re good at it, and we’re getting way better and more focussed at it. Even the last record has a couple of those moments that just weren’t nearly as put-together because we’re still growing and we didn’t go as out on a limb with them.

“This is really what I’ve wanted to condition people to all along. People see as like some big turn, but to me, it’s just natural, it’s always how we’re going to be, but the difference with us is that we’re not fully going in that direction. We just want to show people how good we can be in that direction… and then just take it away! That’s kind of like the sick thrill that I get out of it.

Touring in their native USA is yet to push Code Orange beyond the dingy clubs riddled with stage divers, but with a European and UK tour in support of the titanic Gojira looming, audiences of 200 will soon be replaced by audiences of 2,000, and the band will find themselves faced with a fresh crop of the uninitiated and the unassuming.

“We’re going to win those fans; I’m telling you now,” Jami promises with not a scrap of insincerity in his voice. “We’re not going to win them all, but anytime I’ve been at one of those kinds of shows, all I can sit and think about is ‘If we were up there, they’d be mine’.”

With each and every step they make on both sides of that hardcore line, we can only hope that there’s a generation of interesting hardcore bands that look up to this band in the same light that Jami regards his peers. For all the complexities, the courage, and the downright chaos created by their hands, Code Orange really might be Forever.

Code Orange’s album ‘Forever’ is out now.

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