Today, As Everything Unfolds release their highly-anticipated new album, DID YOU ASK TO BE SET FREE?, via Century Media. “People often reference and say that their album has been a journey process for them in their experiences, a form of therapy if you will,” says As Everything Unfolds frontwoman Charlie Rolfe. “I’ve never related to something so deeply as I have with this record. This album’s process started in an extremely positive part of my life, we started writing the record, things were going well, music was flowing we had about ten demos at this point, I was living in harmony and happiness, finally starting to feel at peace in life with my bandmates, friends, family and partner, only to be hit with the shift of losing more than I can even describe.” “I had to move from my home, drugs/alcohol were corrupting people around me,” she continues. “Alongside this my boyfriend, and fellow bandmate Jamie, passed away. Going through all of this trauma and grief left me in a state of numbness, losing all sense of myself. After some time we decided to tackle writing again, I started journaling after my therapy sessions a lot and turning those entries into lyrics, and it rolled from there into a lot of the songs you hear on this record. Given the nature of Jamie’s passing and other traumas happening midway through the process, you really get the sense of change, the sonic and lyrical dynamic shift in the music, and as hard as it is, to listen to some of the tracks, knowing what I’d been through, knowing that some tracks Jamie had either heard or he hadn’t, even now it’s still hard to process, but that process, that movement and passage of time it’s what makes it a journey of our experiences.” “I found a lot of comfort in my passions during my time alone. I spent a lot of time waiting for days to go by, experiencing what I now know to be maladaptive daydreaming, just to get myself out of my own life and human experience whenever I could. I started to play with the idea of writing this record through the perspective of escapism, mirroring my own escape from trauma into daydreams, movies and music. Films like Blade Runner, Donnie Darko, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Shining allowed me to express my thoughts and feelings with a protective barrier, pretending to be someone else rather than living these experiences in real time as Charlie.” “I was really seeking new musical inspiration after our second album. Reading ‘The Creative Act’ by Rick Rubin changed the way I wrote melodies and lyrics, and how I viewed creativity as a whole. I spent a lot of time writing subconsciously while driving, walking or cooking. For example, I was blasting the Gasoline instrumental demo while cooking and wrote the whole chorus almost in one take, voice noting it immediately, and it didn’t change much from there to the final version.” “I ended up going backwards to my teenage years for inspiration, pulling from music I feel so connected to like My Chemical Romance, Thirty Seconds to Mars’ A Beautiful Lie and Flyleaf’s Memento Mori, alongside the New Wave and New Romantic music I was brought up on. Bands like Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, Duran Duran and Adam & The Ants influenced the album visually, while peers like Vukovi, Rivals, Enter Shikari, The Throwaway Scene and South Arcade helped shape it in the present.” |
