Interview: Guiltless
In the past I’ve focused on politics and everything negative that’s going on so it was a challenge to try and block a lot of that shit out and to be more introspective, rather than just attacking everything else that’s on the outside. To me, the positivity is there but when I go back and read the lyrics, they’re still pretty dark.
When the world at large seems to be spiralling into chaos, it’s understandable to feel lost, frustrated or hopeless and it’s all too easy to lose sight of something – hope. With previous outfit A Storm Of Light, Josh Graham was sometimes guilty of this, steeped as it was in societal and environmental collapse, but with his latest venture Guiltless, formed with former members of A Storm Of Light, Intronaut and U.S. Christmas, he has shown that it is still possible to remain thankful for the few bright shards that remain within the murk. With their debut full-length Teeth To Sky having just seen the light of day, David Bowes spoke to Josh to discuss hope, creativity and the spirit of collaboration.
E&D: Congratulations on the new album, it sounds fantastic. It feels like a departure from the Thorns EP in a lot of ways. You said that you wanted this to be a more collaborative effort. Was that always what you had in mind for the band?
Josh: Yeah, that was an important thing in what I wanted to do with starting this band. In A Storm Of Light I was kind of responsible for writing all the material; not that I wrote everyone’s parts but every single song started with something that I came up with and it went from there. That was something I really didn’t want in another band. With Thorns, I needed to sit down and try to figure out what exactly I wanted to do musically so that I could then invite Dan (Hawkins, guitar), Sacha (Dunable, bass) and Billy (Graves, drums) to play. We finished the Thorns songs based on what I wrote in a similar fashion to A Storm Of Light but what I said to them initially was, “We can either finish these four songs as-is or we can tear them apart and rework them, but from here on regardless I want an equal input from everyone.” This record really is that – I started three of the songs, Dan started three of the songs and Sacha started two of them so it’s a much wider musical representation, which is cool.
E&D: Even though you had worked with Dan and Billy previously, do you feel like that EP was necessary to get you into the groove of working as a new band?
Josh: I knew that I wanted to start something heavier than A Storm Of Light but my wife and I live outside of Seattle now and there aren’t a lot of like-minded musicians in our area, so it’s kind of impossible. We’re in four different states, separated by thousands of miles, and I had an idea of who I wanted to play in this project but I needed to get an idea for a body of sound so I could say, “Hey guys, do you want to join this band” versus just emailing them and saying, “I want to make a heavy band, let’s try to make something up.” It maybe could have gone the same way but we definitely got a big jump start. We initially did those four songs as a demo to share with Neurot and ultimately, it ended up of a better recording quality than we thought so we thought we may as well put them out and write more songs for an actual full-length.
E&D: How did you find the process of working collaboratively, but also doing that remotely? Do you think it gives you more time for reflection?
Josh: Yeah, definitely. We’re still getting some of the end result of being in a room together as we’re taking each other’s ideas and individually reinterpreting them then passing them back, then passing them back again, versus it happening immediately in a room but when we were sending ideas, we were sending songs, with several parts and loose arrangements, so when you get these ideas from the guys it’s obvious that time and care has gone into it. That’s different from if you’re practicing three nights a week in a rehearsal space where you might only have time to come up with a riff. People take time to write stuff that they think will work with what we want to do, and when we get ideas we have a lot of time on our own to try new things with it. It’s cool. I think on the next one we might try to do some live video-calls, push it a little more, but we’ll see.
E&D: Have you had the chance to rehearse yet? You have that amazing tour coming up with Coalesce and Kowloon Walled City!
Josh: No, it’s insane! We haven’t actually been able to play any of these songs together yet. We shot the music video for ‘One Is Two’ in L.A. where we had to do band photos for the album, so we faked playing that song in a room for about eight hours. We’re flying into L.A. on the 19th, practicing all day on the 20th and playing on the 21th. We have some experience of doing this from touring and playing remote, especially with A Storm Of Light, but the idea that we have two releases out, we’re playing with Coalesce and Kowloon Walled City, and it’s literally our first show and we won’t play the songs together until the day before…
E&D: No pressure! You said that you wanted Teeth To Sky to have more optimism, or maybe light, in its message. Do you think that came through and did having others involved in the writing process help with that?
Josh: The idea of some sort of positivity, that came later with the lyrics, which is cool. We weren’t writing music to have any specific mood, we were just picking out the stuff that we liked best and made sense with the sound that we had established on Thorns but was also going somewhere else. We ended up with a really tight timeline as we decided that we were going to write a record to follow up Thorns about a month before it came out and we wanted it to come out a year after Thorns. We got in touch with Kurt Ballou and asked when he was available. He said July 21st and that was our deadline. This was January 10th and we had until then to get a record done.
Generally, with vocals I’m in front of a microphone playing the songs and I record whatever comes to mind. There are no lyrics, it’s just to get an idea of phrasing ideas and to have a more visceral response to the music to see if what is there can become the lead vocal, and that works quite a bit with this. We were working with the dummy vocals for quite a while. That was a big thing for me over the course of those seven months, like “What the hell am I going to write about on this record?” Thorns was the darkest lyrics I’d ever written – there are some tongue-in-cheek moments – but I didn’t want to continue with that. It’s a challenge to not repeat yourself in many ways, musically and lyrically. I started working on the lyrics in June and that’s when I was looking at Thorns, trying to figure out how I could change that narrative. In the past I’ve focused on politics and everything negative that’s going on so it was a challenge to try and block a lot of that shit out and to be more introspective, rather than just attacking everything else that’s on the outside. To me, the positivity is there but when I go back and read the lyrics, they’re still pretty dark.
E&D: It’s such an easy trap to fall into these days, so it’s refreshing to hear someone take a more optimistic outlook.
Josh: The US is a tragedy at the moment but our lives? I have a house. There’s a lot of bad stuff but we’re not refugees in Palestine who have had everything they’ve ever known blown up. Stuff might suck but you really have to be honest with that and that’s what led me to try and include some positivity in there.
E&D: The songwriting on this record is really ambitious at points. Were there any songs on the record where you felt that you really pushed yourself?
Josh: Working with Sacha’s ideas really pushed Dan and me. Dan and I originally started playing together when we were 15 and though we haven’t played together that whole time we have a really long history. We’re rooted more in the simplicity of punk rock and stuff like Godflesh; it’s more about mood than technicality. Sacha is way more of an advanced musician. Intronaut is obviously very mathematical so he was sending ideas to us and our initial reactions was, “Uhhh, what?” The thing is, we’re all writing on all instruments. Sacha plays bass in this band but it wasn’t like we told him he could only submit basslines. He would send us ideas with two guitar parts, bass and drum ideas. There were a few panic moments but those songs, ‘Teeth To Sky’ and ‘Lone Blue Vale’, I was surprised by how well we were able to keep the original intent and also make it fit with what we identify as Guiltless and really meld it together, make it feel just right. That can be a big pitfall with remote writing and people that have pretty strong identities in their own bands. This record could have been like, “Here’s the Storm Of Light song, here’s the Intronaut song” but I’m most proud of how we melded all of it together. None of it sounds foreign, it all fits. It’s definitely gone somewhere new but still holds true to the initial identity that was on Thorns.
E&D: With the cover art for this, was it sculptural or CG?
Josh: It was CG – Cinema 4D with Redshift, which is a newer renderer, as in from within the last 10 years. It balances light and you can achieve much more photo-real elements with it than you could previously. I’ve been using that program with motion design for 25 years, something like that. Some of it on print work here and there over the course of my design career but this is the first one that is completely built in 3D. You can move the sun around, move the camera, get a better view of the sculpture. The idea of the art for this was to take the 2D symbol we had designed for Thorns and try to create an actual sculptural element out of it in what could be perceived as a real-world scenario.
E&D: It’s really impressive. You’ve spoken several times about your use of AI as a visual artist but do you see any scope for using it as a musician, or do you already?
Josh: No. AI is weird, I dunno. For ‘Dead-Eye’ on Thorns we did an AI video. I actually love it. It’s kind of disgusting at certain points but it pushes the body horror, that AI in its early stages is not really able to correctly interpret the human body. There are places for AI to be used. There were people that were pissed that we did an AI video, saying that I stole money from the people that I would have hired to help make the video but the fact of the matter is that we made a completely insane photoreal apocalyptic video that tied directly into the album art. It either would have been AI or it wouldn’t have happened. It would have been completely impossible to make. So that, I think, has an interesting side of exploring what it can do, and it was photorealistic. You can argue that it was trained on vintage war photography, stuff like that, and that is definitely murky but when you get into AI and you’re saying, “I want to have the painting style of Picasso” or something, you start ripping off current artists, that’s completely different. I still think there is a way to use it responsibly and also be creative.
As far as music goes, I would never even think about it. It’s super-cringey! I can’t imagine going there. Maybe if I won the lottery and had a billion dollars, I’m on my gold toilet and I can’t write a metal riff anymore, but I don’t think that’s going to happen! But yeah, using AI artwork for a full album cover, I think that’s lame. The interesting thing with Photoshop and the like, there’s ingrained AI in the program now which helps a lot. I used it for our social media. Like, that cover took me 300 hours or something to make but it’s square. If you go on Facebook, the banner is wide so in Photoshop you can tell it to expand the side of it and it just fills it in. I can do that by hand but it would take a lot longer. To me, that is great but it’s just another tool, like another filter in Photoshop, and who gives a shit about social media? You need to have stuff that fits in their specs, and the specs change all the time, so it can be usable. I work in motion design and I worked on this job which is about how they’re using AI to interpret satellite imagery exponentially faster than the scientists can actually figure it out to combat the fires that recently happened in Los Angeles. Like it or not, it’s here to stay and I guess it’s up to each person to figure out what they think is acceptable, and whatever their fanbase thinks is acceptable as well.
E&D: Same as with any tool, it really just comes down to responsible use.
Josh: There’s some jackass on Instagram called The AI Cop, freaking out over the video and saying that we stole all these jobs. Dude, I’ve directed like 25 music videos! I didn’t steal anyone’s jobs.
E&D: That part did confuse me. You’ve always done the visuals yourself so whose job are you taking here?
Josh: For motion design, we’re not using AI in the creative process but what it is being used for is, for example, if you get a concept from a client, there’s what you envision as the concept, but then you think, “Are there any other ideas, totally different angles that you can look at it from”, put some prompts in AI and it will kick something back that’s completely different. Then your perspective has changed a little bit, you didn’t even have to use any of the AI stuff but as a tool to inspire creativity. It’s also murky in that people are using what’s being generated for that, as a final product. Plus, AI is using so much energy that it’s creating a whole other pollution, but the people at the helm of all this, nothing’s going to stop them. They’re all rich and money-hungry. I don’t think there’s any win as far as being a human right now.
E&D: As far as that cover art, you’ve said in the past that it’s based around the idea of nuclear semiotics. Does that have any bearing on the lyrical content for Teeth To Sky?
Josh: The songs ‘Landscape of Thorns’ is a callback to Thorns and that references more specifically the concept of nuclear semiotics but generally, no. It uses it in a way to call back Thorns and say at the end of the song, “Is this really what we’re going to leave behind? Can we change it and stop this from being our legacy in 10000 years, when the next generation of humans are having to figure out if this land is still contaminated by crazy, menacing architecture?” It’s a weird potential legacy, like if we were Egyptians and people were just finding stuff randomly 10000 years from now.
E&D: It’s only been two days but how have you been finding the reaction to the record so far?
Josh: It seems to have been really good but I’m hesitant to get the hopes up too far. It seems to be exceeding expectations as far as traction, new people finding us on social media, and reviews have been really good. We will be playing two festivals in Belgium and Netherlands in October, and we’re trying to play some shows in the UK. Promoters are still figuring out who we are – as we all know, just because it has members of bands doesn’t mean it’s great – so we’re hoping the press will be enough to convince promoters that we’re worth having us play at their venue. While I’m super-happy, we’re still in the beginning stages of knowing where we’ll end up but it feels good so far.
E&D: What else is on the cards? Have you started writing anything else?
Josh: We were thinking about that a couple of days ago and trying to figure out what the next step is. I’m thinking some kind of collaboration would be cool, maybe an EP. Something that’s not like a full album cycle, just something cool in the interim. We know that if we were to do that it would have to move pretty quickly. We should probably start writing again this year, at some point, to keep any kind of momentum going. Right now, we’re just trying to get the shows set for this year so we can feel like we’re doing what we can. There won’t be any extended band tours but there will be a week or two here and there, and fly-in shows. Big fingers crossed for European festivals and stuff like that.
