The highly anticipated latest album from MIDAS FALL pushes the band’s enormous sounds into thrilling, dark new places. We caught up with Elizabeth Heaton, Rowan Burn and Michael Hamilton about the introduction of a third voice to the music, streamlining their sound and serving the music on Cold Waves Divide Us.
MIDAS FALL have a huge scope for their music, it’s been a pivotal part of their identity sense the start. However, as each new album achieves more than the last, they become more and more confident in knowing when something is right and when it really isn’t. “We’ve been doing this for fucking ages,” Rowan says with jovial frankness. “And if someone’s shit, we can be pretty ruthless with that. And it’s hard when you’re working with other people because you’ve got to take their feelings into consideration. And it’s a bit harder to be as ruthless as maybe you need to be with something when you think it’s shit. Whereas we’ve not really had that problem with Michael.”
“Yeah, I think you can see the song as a whole and, you know, maybe at a point, an instrument needs to be stripped back,” Liz adds. “It doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. Just give this track space or do what’s best for the song as a whole. So I think all three of us are quite good at that.”
“I make a lot of like music by myself, and also do composing for like soundtracks,” Michael continues. “And the reason that it’s helpful for me with MIDAS FALL is that I’m not precious about my parts. Like, there’s a lot of me in this band and a lot of me in the music, but it’s not like if something I’ve written gets cut, I’m thinking ‘oh, no, if you start cutting into my parts, you start cutting into me,’ like that’s not really what it is.”
With the duo now working as a trio, it’s interesting to hear the direction the music has naturally moved to. While the ethereal, magical sounds are still front and centre, things have thickened up and grown darker for Cold Waves Divide Us. “With the introduction of a new person, that’s like a whole new set of influences and a whole new approach that sort of mingles with the existing approach,” Michael notes on his part as the latest member of the band. “Since the last album came out, Rowan‘s approach would have evolved. I think it was interesting, because even when I was doing my parts to some quite sort of bare bones demos. When I heard the songs, even in quite primitive forms, it sort of felt that was where I should have gone with it for my contributions. And I think everybody just kind of felt like that. I’m not really sure where it started. But we all felt this kind of pull towards that direction.”
“I agree with that,” Rowan nods. “And also, I think every time we’ve made an album got progressively better at the production side of things. So, I think this time, we were able to sort of capture a bigger, harder sound on record as well, just from getting much better at working on the production and engineering side of stuff.”
“Yeah like Michael and Rowan said, it just kind of evolved that way,” Liz adds. “Going into it, we never had the intention of making it heavier. Like I think when we start any album, we’d never have a sort of idea of how it’s gonna turn out. But definitely the introduction of five string bass, baritone guitars, it just kind of pulled us in that kind of heavier direction.”
With MIDAS FALL moving ever forward to more expressive and accomplished movements, fans new and old will appreciated their approach to writing. It’s clearer than ever that MIDAS FALL never write for ego, they’re not driven that way at all. Rather, they write to serve the song, whatever it wants to be. “I use my voice as an instrument when I write the vocals,” Liz expands. “I don’t have lyrics at the start of a song. I’ll just kind of put over a melody along to the music that I think flows well. A lot of the times the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought. The way the song is made, I don’t know, it more encapsulates a feeling.”
The writing process on Cold Waves Divide Us encapsulates the huge soundscapes, while taking on the individual voices of all three contributors. Essentially, while they all have skill and intentions as individuals, they would never sacrifice a song been great for one person to shine.
“As you might have noticed, in our music, we tend to layer a lot of things,” Liz smiles. “And I think with this album, as we have the last one, we usually write so many parts and lay them over each other, to the point where we might go, ‘actually, I think there’s too much here’. And then we have to strip things back. There might just be, you know, not enough space in there in the stereo spectrum to put everything to cut through. Like Point Of Diminishing Return. I mean, that was never intended to be an instrumental track. But there’s that sort of delayed synth line that runs through a lot of it. I thought if I sing over this, I’m just going to be competing for space. So we just let the song fly and take the lead.”
Cold Waves Divide Us is out now via Monotreme Records.
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