Sydney alternative outfit Reliqa have had a bumper year already.
As well as a recent appearance on the national run of Monolith shows alongside COG and Karnivool, the band are also preparing to launch their new EP I Don’t Know What I Am on September 16, with anticipation already growing following their knockout live performances.
The title of the EP says it all.
I Don’t Know Who I Am is a collection of six tracks that explores that notion and how you deal with the isolation and loneliness that comes with it.
This will be Reliqa’s third EP in their brief existence and looks set to further enhance their growing reputation, with vocalist Monique Pym joining HEAVY earlier today to chat about the release.
"Basically, it's all the name. As long as we've been a band we've been getting this feedback that keeps coming back to what are you guys? A lot of it is trying to shoehorn us into a genre but it's not really working. We fit both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, I find. At least for other people's perspective that's what people are saying. Are we prog? Are we metal? Are we metalcore? Are we this, that or the other? We're not quite sure. All we know is we're really making music that feels good to us. It's basically drawn from a lot of different, far reaching inspirations and musically it comes together into this amalgamation of a whole bunch of different sounds we wanted to explore, except in saying that we wanted to keep it accessible in the sense that it wasn't just this absolute mess of sounds. It was also cohesive and listenable. So we've really taken those inspirations and we've worked together with our producer Chris Blancato and all of us together have refined our sound into compressing all these far reaching ideas into radio length tracks of three to four minutes. It was a real challenge to get there, and I'm really interested to hear what peoples thoughts are, because we're still discovering what it means and what it is and who we are as musicians and I think when I say that it's all in the name it is in a sense of we are really wearing our hearts on our sleeve's here. We're finding an identity and really carving out a sound that is totally signature to us and that's our goal here and I think we have achieved it pretty well. I'm really interested to hear what other people will have to say about it."
In the full interview Monique runs more through the musical aspect of the EP, how it differs from the last EP Eventide, runs us through each track individually and the meanings behind them, the recent Monolith shows, the band's own shows coming up and more.
Intro track PISTONFIST 'On The Run'