People deal with grief in different ways, but as a musician the power of music is often the best avenue toward solace.
After losing co-vocalist and keyboard player Kyle Pavone four years ago, metalcore legends We Came As Romans did just that, knuckling down and writing an album in direct tribute to their fallen brother.
It became a long process, but the end goal never wavered.
With the recent release of Darkbloom, We Came As Romans have delivered a beautifully brutal musical eulogy to Pavone, with the deeply personal subject matter allowing each member to contribute something over and above anything attempted before. It is a triumphant farewell and one which guitarist Joshua Moore explained in greater detail when HEAVY got the chance to sit down for a chat with him.
We start by asking how the early response to the album has been.
"It has been insane," he smiled, "better than I could have ever expected. Especially because we had such a long period in between albums. Our last album Cold Like War came out in 2017 and for anyone that follows the band, obviously we lost our singer Kyle shortly after that. It took some time to figure out if we could even be a band any more. If we wanted to be a band any more. And it took some time to write a record that is solely about our grieving process that we dealt with, everything that we went through emotionally navigating the loss of Kyle."
Without wanting to dwell on Kyle's loss too much, we ask if the dedication to their former band mate is more musically or lyrically, to which Moore replied.
"First and foremost musically we wanted to write an album that we thought Kyle would love if he was still with us," he measured. "And I think we nailed that one on the head. Musically, all of us love the album. I think it is the best version of We Came As Romans that we have put out yet. Lyrically the songs are about different emotions that we felt on our way navigating through the grieving process, because you learn alot going through that. It's not just 'oh, I'm going to be sad all the time because I lost my friend'. There's a lot of different emotions that are felt and we wanted to give all of those things their own place in the song. Each song is very different in what it talks about and how it describes the things that we were going through, which was really important because no-one wants to hear an album of ten songs that say the same thing over and over again. So we did our best to make it as different as possible with the topic of each song."
In the full interview, Joshua talks about how writing this album helped with the grieving process, if they did anything differently because the subject matter was so personal, the overall feel of Darkbloom, the early days of We Came As Romans and where the band fit in, introducing elements such as orchestral instrumentalisation and keyboards into their music and how they made it work, whittling the album down from more than 30 songs and how they did it and more.