Animals As Leaders recently dropped their latest albumThe Joy Of Motion and it is still on high rotation at Maniacs HQ! Full Metal Jackie recently caught up withTosin AbasiandJavier Reyes to talk about their latest album, check it out below!
Creatively, how blurry is the line that separates technical expertise from instinct and feel and how does using both approaches best suit Animals as Leaders?
TA: I think our intuition is basically what guides us to decide what we decide is good music. Right? I guess why we write technical music is because we have been listening to progressing and technical music for so long that it becomes what we naturally create ourselves. So, we arent being super cerebral in trying to make the song overly complex or anything like that but we have consumed a steady diet of complex music to the point where it is kind of like our bread and butter.
Your music is so intricate. Certainly the sort of music that would be difficult to create just be jamming together so how does collaboration work in this band and how important is collaboration to the end result. In this case the latest record, The Joy of Motion.
TA: We dont collaborate in the conventional sense like in the jam room like you were saying. It is more either Javier or I, we will basically start a song idea on the guitar. It will be maybe four loose parts and for me what I will do, I try not to compose a song fully on the guitar. We will get together, whether it is with Misha or Diego, he produced some songs, where as a band we will record these sort of skeletal parts into a recording program and we will start to program drums there just to build a working framework for the song. We will sequence it from there and it gives us a way of actually being the composer and the listener at the same time. We just add the layers and stuff like that from there.
You have both have been praised as important players in the current metal scene. How do you process that praise without feeling pressure to live up any expectation?
JR: At least for me, I think that I just try to continue on the same path. I try not to pay too much attention to that because like you said it is pressure. If it builds too much then it could have a negative effect. I think just trying to become a better player, a better listener and overall a better writer.
TA: Yeah, I would kind of second that. When I first did the self-titled album it was more that no one had necessarily heard of me and had a years worth of writing that I really wanted to get out to people and it wasnt spurred on by any sort of idea of competition but more of me being inspired by the greatest guitarists that I had ever heard. Then being thrown around in the same sentences as some of the greatest guitarists that I had ever heard it started to change the dynamic to where I felt that I had to maintain a level of technical prowess or maybe exceed what I had done before and that definitely had started to become a negative influence so I think on this album I made a conscious effort to not to compete with myself or anyone else and just do something that was musical.
Check out the rest of the interview at Loudwire
