Strange Paradise: In Conversation with Grails’ Emil Amos & Alex Hall – Part 1

Authenticity, illuminated and celebrated in more innocent times. The once spectacular, now boiled down to the mundane. These are the themes that Grails confront on their latest crusade, Miracle Music.

Another defining statement during a tenure that has had many, Miracle Music sees Grails pulling from the past to maintain an artistic relevance in the present. Before the music industry became a parody of itself; metrics and cringe-worthy self-promotion, now cultural norms. Miracle Music exists to combat all of that. Resistance in a bid to maintain inventive significance, and the results see Grails reach the darkest frontiers imaginable. After all, where else is there left to go?

Led by co-founders Emil Amos and Alex Hall with Jesse Bates, Ilyas Ahmed and AE Pattera, Grails have always existed to colour outside the lines. From their earliest incarnation which spawned the spiritual fractured folk of The Burden of Hope (2003) and Redlight (2004) leading to the Eastern-tinged post-rock assaults of Burning Off Impurities (2007) and Take Refuge In Clean Living (2008) to the black acid nightmare of Doomsdayer’s Holiday (2008), this chapter of the Grails story culminated with the excellent Deep Politics (2011).

The second phase of the Grails journey came on the back of Amos and Hall’s mind-bending odyssey as Lilacs & Champagne. The duo’s sharpest pivot, Chalice Hymnal, arriving in early 2017 in what was a warm, cinematic lustre that dealt heavy in catharsis. It’s here where Grails’ spiritual resonance eclipsed the aesthetic pursuit so many of their contemporaries were still in search of.

Six years later, this resonance continued on Anches En Maat. With beautiful ebbs and flows, Anches En Maat was a filmic blur that travelled deep through the emotional well. Joining Amos and Hall in 2018, Bates, Ahmed and Pattera helped maintain a new baseline since the days of Zak Riles being in the band, and it’s this continuity, stability and trust that makes Miracle Music the triumph that it is.

In Amos’ words during our conversation alongside Hall via Zoom in April, the dark “military green” that adorns Miracle Music’s cover, landing in the same melancholic sphere as the Holy Sons’ landmark, Raw and Disfigured. There’s no better example of this than the defining penultimate track, Visible Darkness. A sunken gloom that overshadows the rest of the album, exposing new corners in the same abyss that Grails occupied during their gruelling Black Tar Prophecies series.

Produced by Amos, on Miracle Music, Grails are the chief architects of the illusion. It’s Grails 3.0 in what is a brain rewiring exercise that defies sound and vision. An avatar of the band’s remit: one that exists to dismantle the core principles of rock music as they ride into the crescendo.

Starting with the urgent rush of Silver Bells. A siren call of fractured chords, bleeps and drones that makes you vibrate with the music, it’s a new form of head music. A fresh collage, and and Grails provide new parts to it on Primeval Lite I-III. A gorgeously dark acoustic-led piece that extends with rich horn sections and Amos’ sharp percussion, slicing through the mix with butcher’s blade precision.

Elsewhere, the beautifully sombre Earthly Life and Strange Paradise open more new reality tunnels. Ones that are deeper and more reflective, reaching the band’s emotive core in what is some of their most defining moments committed to tape.

And there are more, of course. The thrumming cadence of Homemade Crucifix and Perfect Etecruss – mangled, hip-hop-inspired noise pulled from the outer reaches and given the proper Grails treatment. So too Harmonious Living, but with the kind of narcotic effect that cross-pollinates with Amos and Hall’s Lilacs & Champagne endeavours.

Miracle Music exists not just to break principles, but to make new ones. In title, idea and sound, Grails have delivered something completely untethered from everything, including themselves, and given their fundamental approach to art, this is the baseline. It always has been. They’ve been making art for so long that they’ve just become more refined at it.

In first of a two-part interview, Amos and Hall discuss the band’s earlier days and how culture and the band’s mission statement have moved so far apart, that the only way for Grails to exist within the current paradigm is to try and destroy it completely.

Corridors of Power: 20 Years with Grails

Sun 13: Miracle Music seems like an intentionally loaded title. Can you tell us how you came up with it and how the record sits within the larger arc of the band’s history?

Emil Amos: “The title was a lateral accident… like a lot of our choices. This band has been around for so long now and being 25 years into the story is a totally different position than a band that’s only one record in. You’ve taken up enough real estate of people’s time so there’s a sense you may need to start cobbling all of this into some kind of larger narrative statement.

“For the title, we were riffing on impressionistic jacket covers from old 10 inches of Ghédalia Tazartès to Les Paul. Maybe because we were originally talking about doing Miracle Music parts one and two. I was convinced that the cover had to be a dark military green… like an old industrial record might’ve presented itself, because we thought the record was going to have that spirit. An attitude where you throw your body into the gears of society to try and stop the machine.

“And those Les Paul 10 inches would’ve featured a specifically cheesy cursive font… sort of how library LPs had picturesque and firm concepts behind them, so as a joke I said it could have yellow cursive across the front that said ‘Music Miracles’. And Alex turned it around and made it Miracle Music, which, when you have a good artistic partner, they might generally say, ‘Why don’t you do the obvious, better thing instead?’”

Alex Hall: “Coming up with album titles is so hard. If you stumble upon something that’s ‘loaded’ in a powerful way you may just have to go with it. There’s something sort of unpretentious about this one too, though. It’s very direct, and when you come up with something that’s open-ended but also immediate, those titles are really hard to come by, so you may just have to roll with it. Everything else can fit within that idea.

“I was always partial to pseudo-medieval imagery, or somewhat Orthodox Christian theological themes… ideas that existed in the early Grails material. So this seemed like a cool way to circle back to some of that.”

S13: It’s been the quickest turnaround in album releases since the mid ’00s-era for the band. With this current line-up that includes Jesse, Ilyas and AE, it seems you’ve regained some of that hunger of your younger selves. Would that be fair to say?

EA: “Yeah, totally. But if you’re comparing the two eras, there’s a specific difference to what’s going on in the world and what felt acceptable back then. In the early era, the world of playing in a band and getting in a van was still such a concrete thing. The interchange with people at shows and the press felt very concrete and consistent. Re-hybridising music history to build a new language for the 21st century seemed like an exciting pursuit to us, and the internet was still really new.

“Looking back now, it can seem a little silly to fuck around with guitars and imagine that its gravely important in the grander scheme. The movement we were part of was taking itself pretty seriously. But you could usually tell Grails was trying to step back and disengage from being a ‘rock band’ that was coming to your town with sponsored ads and a briefcase in their hand etc. We were always trying to stay in that special ‘Research and Development’ phase before a band really becomes a business.

“When I was 13, it seemed pretty normal to have a sceptical sense of bands that were trying to become a business. They’d start coming to your town too much and existing as a vehicle to vacuum up what money is out there. The spiritual revelations you’d had as a fan began to fade as a kind of partition seemed to lower down between you. So as a kid, you kind of pulled out of that band’s lane and had to go look somewhere else for something exciting and progressive.”

S13: Right. 

AH: “Back at that time, in the hyper-prolific period where the records were coming out really fast, we were probably a little naive. We were buying CD reissues of German stuff that had been really hard to find and were so excited by it. There was this new vein of information, and we were really inspired and excited, so that was driving a lot of it. But now, it’s much different. We still consume music as much as we ever have and still have a need for it, but nothing seems rare anymore. It’s a totally different music culture we’re living in now that has different needs.”

EA: “In the early era we were artistically hungry because we smelled blood in the water in terms of freedom. We thought, ‘There’s something we can do with this opportunity that’s really exciting’… and everybody adjacent to us also seemed to believe there were things that still hadn’t quite been done yet. Then as the next decade set in, Grails sort of dropped out for a bit while we did Lilacs & Champagne in search of something more novel because we became a little tired of the classic-rock band frontier.

“So if it’s true that we’re re-engaging with an early idealist part of ourselves, I think it’s because a special kind of motivating terror has possibly woken back up. The first time around it was driven by a kind of urgency; a youthful enthusiasm and a cultural rising up. But now we know where that culture and the internet was leading us, as everything has become a bland assault of advertisements. So if we’re going to return to any kind of idealist frame of mind again, it seems to need to be driven by a special kind of super dissatisfaction with what’s going on this time around.”

S13: That’s interesting…

EA: “In skateboarding, you’ve got the old school, loose and free, glory days, and now we’re living in this hyper-accelerated business-oriented version of those memories 35 years later. Music culture mirrors the exact same thing.

“Back in the mid-’00s, it took a minimal amount of effort to stand out. People were getting away with murder in the aesthetic world because the internet hadn’t quite caught up to show people this shit had been done much better beforehand. Bands and performers were raking in money under the guise that they were the new Stockhausens, but they weren’t a fraction as interesting as Stockhausen. And then the internet washed over everything like a tsunami wave and took all this information over to young people being born 10 years after a lot of those records had come out… and I think some of the music around our early era has been revealed to be a bit of a hoax.

“We’re older now, and we have to prove that we meant something, maybe even just to ourselves… and that internal pressure is getting louder. We can’t just toss off a record and hope it sounds interesting to someone out there anymore.”  

S13: Primeval Lite I-III calls to mind the recent tour where you were revisiting material from The Burden of Hope and Redlight. By reaching back to part of Grails’ history, did that unlock something in moving forward?

EA: “Even if we decidedly set out to make the most abstract and vague sketch, something distinctively melancholy that sounds like ‘Grails’ would be born inside of it. Silver Bells sounds like it could just be an Egyptian Lover-inspired piece at first, but there’s still this sad, Popol Vuh thing that eventually emanates out of it. I don’t know where that comes from in our DNA, but it’s this forlorn, old world medieval thing that seems to rise up.

“There’s something so dark and romantic about the fact that at one point a player had nothing but a lute to display the internal orchestra in their mind, and now we have everything but the fucking lute. So, in a world where you end up shoving your big statement down into this tiny Spotify square, I don’t think a band can necessarily approach cracking any kind of major code of the universe. But each record can still momentarily return to that glimmer of sincerity on The Burden of Hope without too much of an overly sentimental look-back.

“Maybe there are two personalities within the core of the band: there’s the sound we have, and then there’s this need to reject ourselves. This impulse to get outside of ourselves, which is not unlike the original philosophical / psychological impulse in the attempt to see yourself.

“Everybody knows entertainment’s a grift now. We’ve trusted this product-based mindset blindly for so long now… we trusted the Johnny Carson format, as if entertainment was going really going to lead us somewhere. But we know better now that the curtain is fully down. And art must maintain some level of trust going forward into this new blizzard of total distrust.”

S13: Since Anches En Maat, you’ve had various tours, as well as releasing the new Lilacs & Champagne record last year [Fantasy World]. I’m trying to piece together how you got Miracle Music done so quickly. Can you tell us about the process behind it?

AH: “It might have seemed that way, but it was a solid year of work, which started around the backend of 2023 after the last European tour.”

EA: “Grails has always made a record, gone out on a couple tours, and then come home and effectively broken up… everybody tends to go back to their lives and get extremely busy.

“Anches En Maat had set us up for a kind of stylistic blank slate. For that record we were really just kind of getting the guys together and updating the sound. It wasn’t as much of a summation of what we’d been listening to or where we were going, it was just a project to get Grails to a new baseline point

“So as soon as we got home from tour, I flew out to Portland to keep the train going, and Ilyas and I looked up Jason Powers, who’d recorded the first two Grails records at this classic studio called Type Foundry 23 years beforehand. We went back into that same studio and recorded Strange Paradise and Primeval Light I-III there very quickly and the band became real again.

“Then the final phase of the record began when I got home with all the files and went into a very deep and slightly insane weed-fantasy exploration of remixing everything. Alex sent over two tracks that really grounded the record with a melancholy spirit that he’d done in Sweden: Earthly Life and Visible Darkness. And I’d been putting together Silver Bells and Perfect Etercuss for an aggressive, industrial solo record that was still unfinished. It seemed like braiding all these styles would just coalesce in their own way as they had on Deep Politics or earlier records, but somehow this one turned into one of the most personal Grails records.”

AH: “I think it hangs together remarkably cohesively. Since Grails records have always been pretty angular stylistically with a lot of strange turns, when listening back I might find myself skipping certain tracks depending on my mood. But this one I’ll play front to back every time. It just holds together in a really unique way, which is just kind of luck. There’s always a lot of luck involved, but that’s just how it manifested this time.”

S13: Talking about Earthly Life and the song you recorded in Portland [Strange Paradise], those reminded me a bit of the eponymous track on Anches. We discussed that specific track last year and the emotional force behind it. I feel like that aesthetic is carried through to these two tracks in particular. Did you see that zone as a portal into these two new tracks? 

EA: “During the recording of the song Anches, everybody was playing together in the tracking room at our friend’s studio in Georgia… so that song is really what the band sounds like if we’re just sitting around together these days. It was fully improv-ed and then remixed similarly. 

“‘Sad music’ can be a kind of grift so songs like these have to transcend or come from a deeper place. I don’t think our band is that interested in sadness as a central emotion… it just always seems to find its way in naturally. In hearing the relationship between songs like Anches and Strange Paradise, I think you’re talking about a specific ambition to travel into a particular emotional unknown. Those last synth chords of Anches spiral into this kind of unresolved black hole. It’s the opposite of resolution. 

“That’s more of the pull for this band, in terms of always going towards the unknown… there’s confusion and an unresolved tension there, which is what ostensibly drew you to record these feelings you’re trying to bottle in the first place. So I think what you’re nailing is that this record has a certain allegiance to the fact that you can only get to beauty through the weeds, briars and darkness… and through that more conflicted path, will be whatever redemption there is.” 

Read part 2 here.

Miracle Music is out now via Temporary Residence. Purchase here.