The past year in the lives of In Hearts Wake has been marked by secrets. A secret booklet, a secret song, and a secret album, which only recently was revealed as the second part of a project that’s been years in the making.
The Byron Bay metalcore vanguards’ latest full-length effort, Skydancer, is not only the follow-up to last year’s Earthwalker, but slated for release exactly 364 days after its predecessor, it is that album’s second half.
To explore how this ambitious project came together and probe the secrets that have led to the release of In Hearts Wake’s new album (slated to drop Friday, 1st May), Tone Deaf caught up with frontman Jake Taylor, who took us behind the scenes of Skydancer.
The Big Story
“From the start there was a big story to be told. We really wanted to get that across in a way that just couldn’t be done on one album. I feel that the divine feminine and the divine masculine had to be separated and isolated to really have a focus, each of their own.
“It couldn’t just be a duality in one album. So that was the initial thought, pulling it off is a lot harder than actually doing it [laughs] And as we found out, coming up with material that is quality, not just quantity, is a challenge.”
Two Halves of a Whole
“We’re thrilled that we pulled it off and we separated the tracks, both to each side. Usually with the lyrical content relating to how the music was written, whether it would be more of a rigid and punchy, very aggressive sound, that would form the masculine side of things, usually fitted with masculine lyrics.
“For instance, they might be about a war or pharmaceuticals, evil, things that are the shadow of the masculine psyche. Whereas the feminine was very much Mother Nature and stories of someone that we’d lost, a girl that we’d lost very close to us.”
“It came from one large session that went over a year and in that year songs, for me being the lyricist, quickly distinguished themselves as the feminine or the masculine for me. They appeared and made themselves known which was which.”
Establishing Balance
“The way we see the world at the moment, travelling to all these different cities, whilst coming from a very natural habitat, I’ve come to see the world as very out of balance between the two worlds – masculine and feminine.
“It’s pretty much swayed towards the masculine, the way that our buildings are built, the way that our political systems run, the economic systems, it’s all about making the money, and that’s a product of the masculine world.
“So with this concept, I wanted to get across that both are so important, each is as important as the other, but we need to respect both, and realise that we need a balance between the two.
“And how I related that personally is through my mother and father who separated when I was seven and there’s a similarity between the two of them, don’t get me wrong, but they’re two different people.
“And I found myself going into their worlds – weekdays with my mother and the weekends with my father – and in that process I realised how I needed to have a part of both within me in order to be me.”
Hidden Secrets
“With the booklet, I believe it was a last minute call when we were doing the artwork for Earthwalker and I really wanted to put something in there that would leave a clue and it would make the two make sense when people would look back on it.
“So I had a quick chat with our manager, Luke, and between him and I we worked it out that the best way to do this would be to use the ‘Breakway’ lyrics, which is the single from the second album and put those next to the clue, the riddle that says: ‘Mother and father are part of the same, both of them born from one fathomless name.’”
Opening Up
“Sonically, there’s definitely [a difference]. ‘Wild Flower’ is a good example, we call it a pretty track, it’s more melodic. There’s a lot more singing than on Earthwalker and that delves into the emotional pool there and that’s something seen much more in the feminine world.
“The feminine world is a lot more open with its emotions and a lot more accepting of that world, whereas you’ll find a lot of males won’t let you know that they’ve cried or they won’t show any emotion other than anger or strength.”
Delivering The Message
“The tracklisting on both records mirror each other perfectly. The outro tracks are both spoken words from a Native American Indian and the intros both mirror each other as well as ‘Earthwalker’, with Joel from The Amity Affliction featuring. This was the mirror to that – ‘Skydancer’ featuring Jonathan Vigil.
“People heard the track about two years ago — a year and a half, so 18 months — I believe, and that was a demo version of the track, so we really wanted to bring it back, because a lot of the fans we have now have never heard it.
“We had toured with The Ghost Inside in Australia in September of last year and we got on like a house on fire with those guys. Within the first week of the tour we were already sharing tour stories and hanging out and having barbecues, so it was just a really natural collaboration, that one.
“And Vigil is such a beautiful dude, the way he speaks on stage and he really connects to the audience, so he was the perfect guy for the message in ‘Skydancer’.”
Localising
“Going back a year to Earthwalker, because that was all to do with carbon neutrality and planting trees in Australia and that was really focusing our attention here on the land and the earth within Australia.
“So for Skydancer, it being from a bird’s eye perspective is how I would picture it, it’s much more of a global view. We would need something that involved the bigger picture by definition and Local Futures was the perfect one for it.
“What it is is a movement that aims for localisation as opposed to globalisation. And for those that don’t know what localisation is, it’s a movement that’s really about localising your own economy and that can be everything from building your own community, to going to the farmer’s markets, to purchasing food straight from the farmer that has no carbon footprint.
“And what that does is it keeps the dollar within the community and it raises health, happiness, there’s an unbelievable amount of things that it can do.”
“That’s the movement that we want to be a part of. It can be almost a global movement if everyone localises and that’s the key, I think, to sustaining this planet.”
An Epic Feat
“The ‘Breakaway’ music video, I wrote it myself, I wrote the story, and I produced it, which was a very stressful ordeal, and I worked it on it with my friend Dylan Vihan and he’s an incredible man behind the camera as well as editor and visual effects artist. He has this way of doing things that is very unique and it just brings out the best results.
“So ‘Breakaway’ is the story of a wizard. It sounds cheesy, but at the divine masculine there is really this power that goes back centuries. If you can cultivate the four elements — earth, wind, air, and fire — you can literally be whole and in harmony and that’s what this wizard’s journey is, going through the four elements to cast away the shadows and find his true power. And I feel that this is our best video yet and I hope that everybody gets on board with it, because it’s quite an epic feat, but for three minutes of video, a lot went into it.”
Plans
“We’re just on the Stick to Your Guns tour right now in America, we’re in Texas right now. We finish in a week and then we start the Ghost Inside headline tour throughout America, so we’ll be touring with those guys for a month, and then we’ll be back in the country and we will have some exciting news dropping very, very shortly, with some very special guests that will be on our Australian tour, which everyone can find out about very soon.
“And then after that we’re playing about a month of European festivals, playing Download and just the key ones and that’s gonna be taking our music to the bigger stages, it’s gonna be very exciting.”
In Hearts Wake’s latest album, ‘Skydancer’, is slated for release Friday, 1st May via UNFD. Pre-order the album now via the official Skydancer website.
