Interview by Kris Peters
US metal outfit Baroness perfectly encapsulate the notion of the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Approaching their sixth album Stone - which is due out on September 15 - Baroness have managed to maintain a trademark sound while at the same time delivering something fresh and original with every release. They have a sound identifiably their own but allow themselves enough scope for adventure to avoid alienating longtime fans while still satiating their own desire to evolve musically.
It is a fine balancing act, but one which Baroness have mastered beautifully, crafting a reliable vulnerability that forms the DNA of every album.
Frontman John Baizley joined HEAVY to talk more about that growth on Stone.
"I'm feeling very, very, very ready to release it," he smiled. "We've had this record in the bag for a while. This is potentially the first record we have on my label that I would have spent the adequate time preparing and marketing and promoting and distributing for. The past couple of records have either been rushed or I don't know what I'm doing well enough to understand timelines and schedules. So this time we really decided to take our time and release it as well as we could, but it's been excruciating. I just want everybody to hear what you and I are talking about. I just want somebody to hear it."
We ask him to explain Stone in greater detail musically.
"This was… I've gone from hate to love on this record over the course of the nearly three years that it would have been in the works," he measured. "In 2020 we had just released Gold & Grey, our last record, and we had been on tour in Europe all through late 2019 and coming back in 2020 we were excited about putting together the actual tour for that record. Which was going to start with a trip to Australia and Japan. We were four days away from flying out of the country when the lockdown occurred. Even up to four days before lockdown I still thought we were gonna do it. It was really like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. What followed were several months of extreme confusion and frustration, everybody can identify with that. But what we decided to do mid 2020 was start writing a new record. We planned on how to make it as the global situation developed. What became apparent to us was that we were in for the long haul, so our idea - which incidently was an idea we've had for many years and finally felt like the right time to do it - was to rent an Airbnb cabin in the woods. My rhythm section is in New York, and I'm in Philadelphia, so we chose a spot that was as distant and into the bush as we could but was equidistant from both Philadelphia and New York, so it was roughly two and a half hours up into the country. We found a cabin, but it was more like a big house that had a huge ceiling and tonnes of space and not a tonne of walls, and it had a great sound for tracking. So we rented the place for a month. For 15 years I have been on classifieds and E-Bay buying studio equipment, and we built our own studio in about 36 hours in a house that was not equipped to be a studio but had all the acoustic plusses that we wanted. It was big, and it was a good creative space for us and there was no distractions, no businesses nearby. The nearest grocery was an hour away. No bars, no businesses, nothing. We dedicated ourselves for that month to write and record a record simultaneously. In the course of that month there were only ever four people involved. We had no assistance, no technicians. We had only ourselves and our bullshit ingenuity to get us through the record and I think because of that we were able to dive into some musical territory that was really exciting and compelling for us and a situation I've always wanted to be in where you're just always working and having ideas. And recording and rehearsing 12 to 14 hours a day and really developing a strong musical bond. Whenever we were nearly finished writing we would record to get that early anxious energy into the songs where we hadn't worked everything out. We improvised a lot on the record. There's a tonne of unscripted, unknown things that we captured on tape and ended up turning into songs. It was a pretty exciting thing."
In the full interview, John talks more about the writing process, how the environment contributed to the finished product, the opening acoustic track Embers and the thought process behind having it first up, musical direction and growth, touring plans and more.