Great Falls Interview: “I write these lyrics about a fear of a reality that I see may be coming”

The best artists don’t do things by halves, and with their fire and brimstone, Seattle’s Great Falls are one of them.

Having played together since the turn of the century in Playing Enemy and Hemingway, 2012 saw vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling deliver the first excerpt from Great Falls story with split single, Stargazing and Violence / Everything but Lighting. Their debut LP, Accidents Grotesque followed a year later, and from there the pair spent a decade dragging their audience across the landscapes of hell.

Following their 2018 LP, A Sense of Rest, Objects Without Pain sees Great Falls turn up the heat to astonishing new temperatures.

Featuring new drummer Nickolis Parks (Gaythiest, Bastard Feast), who joined the band prior to the release of this year’s Great Falls’ EP, Funny What Survives, through the debris, the three-song seven-minute explosion opened up a new portal of hell, largely brought about by Parks’ radical percussion that has unlocked a new primal dissonance for the band.

Listening to Great Falls is likened to being on a plane nosediving. Turbulence committed to tape unlike anything this year, and with the chaos harnessed from behind the studio glass by Kowloon Walled City’s Scott Evans, Objects Without Pain is a snapshot of some seriously bleak images which sees Great Falls tackle turmoil head on.

Johnston’s brutal honesty is haunting, capturing the fragility of human emotion and the catastrophic thoughts we constantly harbour in the realm of ‘what if’?

Raging with impending dread, Great Falls ride through the ire of a burning world, starting with Dragged Home Alive. A heavy crust-punk assault that is later mirrored during the equally frightening penultimate track, The Starveling.

Meanwhile Trap Feeding and Born as an Argument both contain the kind of bolt rumbling freight train speed that sparks all the senses. Thematically, both are steeped in suffering, like a knife flaying skin from bone. And if that’s not enough, Old Worlds Worn Thin and Spill in the Aisle are lik a heavying avalanche of sound delivered in dynamic new ways with an unhinged intensity that’s almost too much to bear.

It feeds into the roaring pillar that is Thrown Against the Waves. Both sonically menacing and lyrically soul crushing, as Johnston parts with more morose vignettes (“I slide the key under the door / I don’t want the weight”).

Flustered, disheveled and undoubtedly hard-edged, Objects Without Pain caps off what is Great Falls best moment committed to tape. 54 minutes of shattering noise that crumbles under the weight of despair.

In the week leading up to the release of Objects Without Pain, Johnston and Mehling answered some of our questions about the album, the band’s history, and more.

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Sun 13: Before forming Great Falls, had you always been drawn to the heavier sounding music, or was it more of a case of that style being more aligned to the subjects in your songs?

Demian Johnston: “I have been interested in heavy music since I was a kid. I joined my first band between 16 and 17 and did my first US tour at 17 with a hardcore band called Undertow. Since then, it’s been a constant in my life. I think I just think screaming stuff sounds the coolest. I like plenty of music that doesn’t have a person yelling at me, but nothing resonates quite the same.”  

S13: From the album’s title to the listening experience itself, Objects Without Pain really does feel like an out-of-body experience that goes beyond anything you’ve recorded. Can you tell us some of the ideas behind the album?

DJ: “It deals with loss and insecurities mostly. Relationships take a lot of work to keep together. You can find yourself moving apart from people you were once very close to, and it feels terrible. My partner and I have been together for a long time, but it hasn’t always been smooth. We’ve spent some time apart and we can find ourselves not being attentive to each other as we should, due to work, life, and other obligations.

“Sometimes those distances can cause some real damage that you have to work to repair. I write these lyrics about a fear of a reality that I see may be coming. It’s almost a way to prepare for what might happen. I find writing the lyrics to be pretty helpful in getting these feelings out though. I’m not certain if it is actually healthy and I wouldn’t recommend writing fearful, angry lyrics in lieu of actually talking with your partner, but it still helps.” 

S13: With it being an album steeped in so much personal unrest, did the lyrics come before the music?

DJ: “No, we work on music first. I actually don’t enjoy writing lyrics very much. It just sort [of] has to happen but I do enjoy having written them, if that makes sense. I avoid singing or writing as long as humanly possible, but I think that could be a strength because when I write a record, I have a pretty strong theme in mind. That’s my current excuse for not writing more. Consistency through procrastination.” 

S13: Nickolis featured on the Funny What Survives EP earlier this year, and I think he’s added so much ferocity to an already intense experience. Especially on the likes of Old Words Worn Thin and Ceilings Inch Closer. How did the collaboration with him come about?

Shane Mehling: “Thanks, we very much agree. When we parted ways with our old drummer, Nick was our number one choice. We weren’t sure if he would be able to be a full-time replacement, but we’ve known him for 20 years and love his playing. He lives about three hours south of our practice space, so we weren’t sure if he would be able to commit, but after a couple practices all of us were so happy we decided to make it permanent.” 

S13: Thrown Against the Waves is the best track you’ve written, in my opinion, and it’s because of the sheer emotional despair of the lyrics. Did you know this would be the final song from the album when you wrote it?

DJ: “Pretty much. Like I mentioned before, I write all the lyrics within a month or so of tracking vocals. We knew where this song would land long before that. It certainly helped with the themes.” 

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S13: The line that resonated the most was “It can hurt being happy”. Do you think that feeling of happiness is tarnished because of the past, or are you a believer in time being a great healer?

DJ: “Both, I guess. Time and perspective can certainly take the sting out of an emotional trauma. I’m sure not many people are too broken up over a junior high relationship that may have ended poorly decades earlier. That said, the pain at the moment was real and you can certainly revisit that moment if you want. When I said that line I was meaning that when things are good in my life or in a relationship there is a certain part of me that knows I may fuck it all up and bring so much pain that I may not be able to suddenly enjoy the happiness. It’s anxiety of living a life in my own skin where I have made many mistakes that I am not certain I have properly paid for yet.” 

S13: Scott Evans worked on the record with you. It feels like an album with very few overdubs, with most of it recorded live to capture the raw intensity. Was this the case?

SM: “That’s great to hear, and for the basic instruments, there is really only some guitar overdubs, but we added a lot of other instrumentation and noise into the overall live sound. But it’s a huge credit to Scott that he was able to blend it so seamlessly that it does have that live and raw effect. And that does better reflect how we play these songs live.” 

S13: There also feels like a lot of creative tension in your music which I think makes it better. Is there a lot of push and pull and compromise when the band is thrashing out ideas? 

SM: “That is a good question, and something that changed during the writing of the record, because we went from being a three-piece where everything was incredibly democratic, which definitely slowed us down, to being more that Demian and I would put together a bulk of the song and then Nick would come in and play to it, but play to it so well and uniquely that it would fundamentally change parts and the structure of the songs. It’s still democratic in that we’re all happy with it, but Demian and I have more freedom to go down our little rabbit holes.” 

S13: To me at least, sonically Great Falls have always moved forward the idea that Neurosis captured with Times of Grace. How did you guys come to work with Steve and Neurot Recordings?

SM: “Well, thank you deeply for that comparison. As to how this happened, aside from being an all-star engineer and mixer, Scott Evans is also in the incredible band Kowloon Walled City, who are also on Neurot. When we were looking for a label, he was kind enough to hand the record to Steve. Steve believed in it, contacted us and it all went great after that.” 

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S13: Has your approach to songwriting changed over the years, and has there been any new challenges as you’ve released more music?

SM: “Similar to the answer about creative tension I think we feel a little more in control of how things are coming together because Demian and I are super close and have this alien shorthand that not everyone can really follow. Now that a lot of the foundational work is done by just us it seems to be going quicker.

“The biggest challenge is always trying to find new ‘things’, as we call them. We like every song we do to have a ‘thing’, which just means something that specifically makes that song its own, whether it’s one weird part or a different kind of ending, etc. And the more songs we write the harder it is to think of things we haven’t done yet. But that is also part of the fun.” 

S13: Seattle has always struck me as a city that has always been fertile ground for underground music. How much does the city influence your work? 

DJ: “Seattle has sort of broken my heart a little. It’s yet another city that has been stripped of a lot of its charm and comfort by capitalism via the most recent wave of tech bros and a lack of housing. When no one really wanted to live here it was great, but once it became a hub for tech it kind of got cleaned up. In a sucky way. There [are] not many venues, it’s really expensive to live and eat here. The schools are good, but the city doesn’t really invest in its people.

“A lot of people have moved away to neighbouring cities like Tacoma or Everett. And even those smaller cities are getting crunched. Seattle needs to build about a zillion more homes before it becomes what it was at one point. A place for artists and musicians. It’s either build, build, build, or murder all the tech workers. I am fine with either but the first one has a potential to offer more jobs and could even be created by public housing, which I am a big supporter of. So, how does it inspire my work? I guess it constantly disappoints me and makes me angry which makes me want to scream at people. So it’s great!”

S13: I imagine playing these songs live will be a cathartic experience. Is playing live the best representation of Great Falls?

SM: “I hope so. It’s the time when we’re least inside our heads about this music and lyrics and just sort of get to scream and exhaust ourselves and hopefully not injure ourselves or anyone else too badly. We’re all really proud of this record and how it sounds, and we worked incredibly hard on it. But the messy, blown out, slightly dangerous live show is where we really want people to experience this.”

Objects Without Pain is out now via Neurot Recordings. Purchase from Bandcamp.