American deathcore extremists Lorna Shore are set to drop their feverishly anticipated album Pain Remains tomorrow.  An album that brutally and magnificently alloys together everything the band has hinted at in their past works, Pain Remains is a statement piece for one of the most deservedly hyped heavy bands on the planet. 

Following their acclaimed 2021 EP…And I Return to Nothingness, Pain Remains was forged from the same struggle and deluge of personal and creative hells that have marked the New Jersey band's career, it is the sound of a band that has honed its sound and identity and is ready to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.

From the opening choral chants and orchestration (composed by guitarist Andrew O’Connor) of Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer straight into a labyrinth of musical twists, turns, technicalities and raw emotion at the core of tracks like Sun Eater or Soulless Existence,  Lorna Shore has woven together a sprawling document of ambition, soul and ability that few can match. It also is the sound of Lorna Shore breaking out of any sort of categorization and stepping into their own as a great extreme metal band.

In the days leading up to the release of Pain Remains, we caught up with vocalist Will Ramos who shared with us five things we didn't know about the making of Pain Remains. 

Five Things You Didn't Know About The Making of  Lorna Shore - Pain Remains 

Anime Inspiration

"I drew a lot of inspiration from the album from an anime that I actually saw a very long time ago, and it's not even like a main premise of the anime, it was just such a small figure in the actual entire overarching story that it was just one character who would just seem a little bit slow. Every time she spoke, she would be speaking monotone and slowly, like: “Hello everybody, how are we doing?”.  And you're like: “Why is this person like this?”. I don't know, sometimes it's the luck of the draw, you know? But it ended up there, and the reason behind it was that she basically was trying to escape her reality at one point, because she just hated living in this world that she was in and she would find her solace and her happiness in her dreams, so she started doing a lot of sleep aids so that she would be dreaming all the time."

"Then now you see her and she's just super slow from obviously all the sleep aids and shit. I thought the idea of that was really interesting because you can't really judge anybody for whatever makes them happy at the end of the day because everybody's just trying to find their happiness somehow. But at the same time, it was also a little bitter because…it's not a very happy way to find happiness, but it's a bittersweet feeling."

"We really wanted to capture that, and I especially wanted to capture that on this album. This was such a small, maybe like 10-minute segment of the actual entire anime where they actually went into that. But that gave me a lot of inspiration to wanna write an album about dreams. And that is how we got to where we are. I couldn't even tell you what that anime was because I saw it when I was like 15 years old and that was a long freaking time ago. One day I'm gonna find out what that anime was!"

Concept Album

"I don't know if this is considered a fun fact, but Pain Remains is a concept album, there is an overarching story between the first song to the last song. I'm not very good at writing 10 different songs about 10 different things, but if you give me the storyline and say write 10 different songs within that, that is something that is more manageable for me. It's like I'm almost writing a book or something like that." 

Unsheathing Samples

"The band is, and me as well, we are big fans of video games, and specifically the Dark Souls games because they're incredibly hard and, for some reason, we like to punish ourselves by playing these horrible games. But they're great, frigging awesome games. In Sun//Eater on the album, we sampled clips from the game Sekiro in the breakdown in the middle of the song, you can't hear it live because Austin hits the China cymbal, or whatever the hell it is. I don't know, I don't play the drums. He hits the cymbal and you can’t hear it, but it is literally the sound of a sword unsheathing from a blade. And it is the coolest thing, I think that is why that song was my favourite because it's just like: if you know, you know, and if you don't, you don't. But if you know, you're like: “This is sick!”.  It's in the breakdown, the breakdown is this line and then the sword comes out and then it repeats the line. But it's all gutturals, it's just super heavy. In my mind, I just think about just pulling out a sword and then you're just slicing people up and shit at that part. That’s my favourite, it was so sick."

Last Minute Wins

"We had an idea of what we wanted for the album, but we didn't really have much of anything written until the day that we got into the studio and then actually started banging it out. A lot of bands come in with full-done songs and they're just like: “All right, we're gonna record this. You're gonna tell me if it's good, and we'll replace the parts that you think are a little strange”. But we came in with pretty much nothing and we all went to our respective rooms and then just brainstormed by ourselves. We would go back at the end of the day, we would go back to the Airbnb, and discuss amongst one another what we thought of all of our ideas. And then we would come back in the next day and lay 'em out. The whole album was pretty much written on the fly. And honestly, I'm kind of a big fan of doing things like that. I think it's for the best. Sometimes you overthink things too much. Maybe just do what you feel is natural, people can feel that." 

Pinball (and coffee) Wizards

"We all became avid pinball players after we left that studio because our studio producer loves pinball. He has seven different pinball machines in his house, it was kind of insane! So, as you can imagine, I played pinball every day. This entire album was partially fuelled by pinball and lots of coffee, Death Wish Coffee. It was so sick. It's like: “Oh, I'm having a brain fart right now. What do we do? Maybe we should just, you know, play a quick game and then get on with it!”. It was great!"

Lorna Shore's Pain Remains will be released tomorrow, Friday, October 14th. 

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