The phrase “there’s something in the water” gets thrown around a lot, particularly when Australia’s burgeoning metalcore scene is involved. Over the years it’s given us everything from arena heavyweights to – more recently – forward-thinking music unafraid to blur the lines across sounds from nu metal to pop and prog. New South Wales quartet RELIQA are the latest in that proud tradition, with their debut album Secrets Of The Future dropping on Nuclear Blast this month. We caught up with vocalist Monique Pym – at opposite ends of the day with time differences – to get the lowdown on all things RELIQA.
“All four of us have been friends since the start of high school,” she explains of their beginnings – in fact, for all of them, this is their first band. “We’re friends first, band second. This more or less didn’t start out as anything, we were just friends making music together.” RELIQA’s formation very much lined up with Monique discovering heavy music. “Being friends with them, that’s when I was introduced to heavy music, I wasn’t raised on it. I felt this infectious, dude where’s this been all my life?! Listening then eventually turned into creating, and I started coming into my own as a singer.”
That firm basis in making music as friends came with the underlying feeling that they could, perhaps, eventually turn it into something more. They started going to local shows, and eventually got booked to play some. One thing led to another, and after releasing a few EPs, Nuclear Blast found them and saw – rightly – that RELIQA had something special on their hands. “All four of us have very different listening styles, personal genre preferences,” she begins. “That creates disparity in what you’re coming together to create, but that diversity is something we’ve intentionally tried to explore.”
From Mon’s love of melodic metalcore through to pop, to Miles’ (“the token classically trained member” she laughs) interest in not only prog like POLYPHIA or PLINI but also jazz, and even Brandon [Hutcheson, guitars] being a fan of hardcore alongside K- and J-pop, there’s a huge variety and they’re very conscious not only of a disparity but a real sonic tension across the influences they each bring in. “A lot of bands say they’re genreless; I’m not trying to say anything like that, I just think it’s quite a tough one to pin down,” she grins of their own expansive music.
All of this comes to a head with their upcoming debut album, Secrets Of The Future, one that Mon describes as more than just a debut album, but like a debut for the band all over again now that, through Nuclear Blast, they’re being exposed to a much wider audience. Shifting from what she describes as an almost “production line style” of songwriting whereby one member would deliver demos and the others would help refine, to a far more collaborative process where they tried to “explore the tension between ideas more.”
That’s as apparent on tracks like The Flower as it is Sariah or Keep Yourself Awake; the former sees Mon flowing between twisting melodies and a rap flow, while Sariah is the closest they come to a full ballad with its towering chorus. Keep Yourself Awake meanwhile, finds itself a toe-tapping groove and settles into it, something Mon says they were very conscious and comfortable with doing this time around to help showcase the various styles and tensions between them, giving each time to shine. “It’s part of why we called it Secrets Of The Future too,” she explains. “It feels modern to us, it feels far reaching into the future.”
With such a broad-ranging sound, is there any worry people won’t get it? “It’s a tricky one to introduce people to,” Mon accepts. “There is insecurity in me that the atmosphere we’re creating for ourselves is alienating to anyone. It’s a risky move to make an album that doesn’t confine itself to one aesthetic.” She needn’t worry; Secrets Of The Future oozes authenticity and an unbridled love of exploration. “We like to take risks,” she grins. “People that have latched on, have latched on hard. It feels authentic.”
It’s almost an oxymoron, to be so assured of their identity, and that being ambiguous. “That question of who really is RELIQA, it still exists and it will continue to exist,” Mon enthuses, “the beauty is in leaning into that, this uncertainty of our identity becomes our signature.” The singles so far, Killstar (The Cold World) and Terminal are again, very different-sounding songs, something that she hopes will appeal to people who perhaps don’t typically enjoy either progressive music or metalcore. “There’s something for everyone on that journey, which I really love.”
RELIQA have had a steady rise; for years they’ve put in the work, and to sign to Nuclear Blast is the start of seeing that pay off; to them, it’s an opportunity to seize with both hands. “We’re not afraid to be a little fish in a big pond,” Mon stresses. “Our pond started very small and we outgrew it, but we took everything we learned to the next one. Too many bands think they have to give off big fish energy!” She’s very conscious, as are her bandmates, of where they came from, and that humility shines through; “our roots are the Central Coast, we’re just a bunch of nerds making music together,” she grins.
Secrets Of The Future is out now via Nuclear Blast Records/Greyscale Records.
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