Following the critically acclaimed 2014 LP Deep Fantasy, punks White Lung are back at it with their fourth studio album Paradise, out now via Domino.
Coming in at a succinct yet powerful 28 minutes, Paradise is simmering with desire and pain, love and beauty, and in typical White Lung fashion a journey that travels at a seething urgency, unrelenting until the album closer (and title track) ‘Paradise’.
To celebrate the release of this killer record, the band’s Kenneth William has kindly penned a track by track run dow of the LP which you can check out below along with the LP stream. Give it a spin and if you like what you’re hearing pop by the White Lung Facebook page for more info.
DEAD WEIGHT
Kenneth William: I always wanted this song to start off the record. That quick synth-sounding backwards guitar sample at the beginning reminds me of a video game console turning on or the beginning of some 80s horror movie theme playing behind the studio credits.
It’s also my favourite guitar performance on the record, it’s one part straight through without any prominent overdubs. It’s also the only song that doesn’t use any MIDI sampling so I don’t have to worry about tap dancing on pedals when we play it live.
NARCOLEPTIC
KW: This was written near the end of making the record, Lars told me I should write a song with just bass for part of it so the record wouldn’t be wall to wall guitars. The arrangement for this was all done on my laptop so I didn’t realize it was a nightmare to play live until we started practicing live months later.
The creepy high notes in the verses aren’t keyboards it’s guitar through a Earthquaker organ emulator pedal and a bunch of delay. I think this is the weirdest song on the record and that only our band could’ve written it.
BELOW
KW: For this song I just wrote two very simple guitar parts that loop through the verses and had the bass switch between major and minor keys so it would alternate between feeling hopeful and sad.
To get those high sustained notes we ran through my normal pedal chain backwards, so it went from the delay pedal into the chorus pedal then the distortion. That normally would sound like a mess but since we recorded every held note separately it has this almost comforting quality.
KISS ME WHEN I BLEED
KW: I thought having a guitar solo during the break of this song would end up being super cheesy so we hacked it to pieces in Pro Tools, pitched it up and then bitcrushed it I think. Annie Clark told me it sounded like an angry mosquito.
DEMENTED
KW: Justin Gradin does all our album art and he told me this song sounds like Slipknot. I guess I can imagine the guy in the mask with the pinocchio nose playing garbage can drums to this during that floor tom part.
I think my guitar part sounds like A Flock of Seagulls, so I guess this sounds like A Flock of Seagulls mixed with Slipknot. That sounds hideous but this song is good.
SISTER
KW: This is probably my favorite song on the record to play live. I think it’s pretty funny how obnoxious the guitar part is in the chorus. I took the bridge part of this song from this terrible techno song I made on Fruity Loops years ago and moved it onto guitars and I think it’s strange how just the sequence of notes and the arrangement make it still sound like electronic music.
HUNGRY
KW: My original recording of this was way cleaner and haunting it sounded like a mix between My Bloody Valentine and the Wipers or something. I had a hard time with this song in the studio because the drums changed the vibe of it so much but I got used to the added energy after a while. Finally got to use the tremolo bar on my guitar for a recording.
I BEG YOU
KW: The concept behind the music for this track was to write a song that sounds like a punk cover of a Smiths song that doesn’t exist. I kept the guitars pretty bright and in the same register as the vocals for most of the song so the choruses would feel darker when the power chords come in. I like this song because the guitar parts are pretty bubbly sounding by themselves but with the repetition and the bass part they end up sounding almost oppressive.
VEGAS
KW: This was also one of the last songs written, we needed something angrier to balance out all the softer stuff so I came up with this. I tried to move away from writing guitar parts like this because they all sound somewhat similar to each other and one of my fears is that I’ll find out once the album is released that an identical riff was on a Hatebreed album or something and I’ll get sued. But I think this is a cool diversion from the rest of the record and I really like the outro which is made from a bunch of layers of backwards guitars and drum hits.
PARADISE
KW: This song is kindof a throwback, it’s the fastest song on the record at 280 BPM which is what most of ‘Sorry’ was recorded at and I used the same Space Echo delay I used on that record. All our other records ended with a song that would kind of point the way to the direction we would go in next but since this one was so varied and all over the place for us it felt right to close it with something more familiar. Hope everyone likes it, bye
