FUNERAL PSALMS IS FIVE

Happy birthday to our beautiful little pandemic album. Funeral Psalms was released 5 years ago today. 

We’d love it if you gave it a listen today. Tag us. Post about it. Make sure to tag Solid State 10 times today. They won’t engage in any posts about it. Hahahahahah. 

Story time? 

Fall of 2019 - we played with Fall of Troy and ended our first ever year of shows on a very very high note. 

Early 2020 - got a show offer to play with The Red Jumpsuit App in March and we were stoked to get another good Brick by Brick opportunity. We had one song in the hopper (Who’s Afraid of Eleven Wolves?) and then…. 

March 2020 - the world shut down. Shows cancelled. Everything cancelled. So…we got busy and recorded Wolves at our houses. I went to Brents to record vocals. 

May 2020 - Getting set to release Wolves… we got approached by Blood Blast Distribution. They wanted to release it via their distribution platform. So we pinged our buddy Joey and he said hold on a sec - and he got on the horn with a couple labels. Solid State was interested in signing us. Wait what???? 

May 2020 - released Wolves and then got to work on writing Funeral Psalms. We didn’t hear from Solid State for a whole month (they were dealing with internal things….)

June - July 2020 - write write write. 

August 2020 - we headed to the Vibeatorium in Vista, CA with Joey Bradford to record for a full month. 5 days a week for 4 weeks. Pretty rad opportunity. We were working from the studio, taking meetings in the backrooms. Chaos. But we made it work. Shout out to our families for allowing us the time to do all that. I know it wasn’t easy. 

We went into the studio with 4-5 finished songs. And 4-5 thoughts. Took some effort but we did it. Finished an 11 song album in 4 weeks. I’m linking to every video we made and posted about our studio time. Was pretty special. 

Then we waited. Solid State wanted to announce us in February of 2021. And we released Oh, Negative in February. Reception to our music was odd…. We found a lot and I say A LOT of new friends. People who understood what we were going for. But at the same time, there were some detractors. We aren’t a Christian band and a lot of the old school Tooth and Nail people weren’t happy that they signed another non-christian band. You can read the YouTube comments. There was one guy in the comments of every Facebook post saying we were ripping riffs off from other bands. You can kinda fudge the memory a little bit but I went and found some of the comments. Haha. Nothing particularly “rude” but we could tell people weren’t super vibing. 

Not to get dour right away, but Funeral Psalms wasn’t particularly well received by the industry. We did a ton of podcasts and press but without shows and tours around the release, I don’t think people were looking for a new small band around that time. Solid State didn’t renew our option after the album came out cause they said we didn’t have high enough Spotify numbers or instagram followers. They didn’t promote or share any of our tour fliers (the story is that Lightworker and us did a tour together and Solid State only posted about the tour once it was over…). All kinda odd. But overall, bucket list and overall, such a huge life goal to release an album on one of our favorite labels. So grateful. So proud of what we did. 

Now all the positive. This album rules haha. Pandemic album. Written in a few months. Made with friends. Shout out Joey Bradford. Shout out Adam Skatula. Shout out Fresh Cut Flowers for the album artwork. 

No one can ever take away what we accomplished here. We love this album. We love those songs. One day we’ll do a full play through of the album. Do Plague live. Finally play I Really Don’t Want To Be Here. I’m giving the album its flowers today cause 5 is a good number. We don’t do this again til 10 years. 

Would be curious to hear what everyone thinks of this baby 5 years later? Favorite songs? Favorite lyrics? Maybe we can all share some thoughts. 

Thanks for being part of our journey. 

Side note - LP2 is going to be a big monkey off our back. Doing one album feels like a huge accomplishment but doing two… it’s not a flash in the pan. This next album is going to absolutely crush.