Triangular Dream: In Conversation with Bosse-de-Nage’s Bryan Manning

Abstract both in sound and theme, since the first note of their 2010 self-titled debut release, Bosse-de-Nage have been on a malevolent ascent.

Comprising of Bryan Manning (vocals), Michael Smith-Brenden (guitar), Drew Bonel (bass) and Harry Cantwell (drums), the San Francisco band feed off a brittle energy and rawness far removed from any of their contemporaries. Through the realms of atmospheric, ecstatic black metal, while the likes of Deafheaven and, more recently, Agriculture and Lucerne Hammer have possessed the power to pierce the heart, instead, Bosse-de-Nage take a sledgehammer to it.

Like the sound of a plane smashing into the side of a mountain, Bosse-de-Nage’s intensity is led by Manning. His performance, so close to chaos that it crystallises a reality that few others can match. The perfect case in point is the band’s fourth release, All Fours. Celebrating its tenth-year anniversary last year, nothing has touched it. Until now. Bosse-de-Nage, outdoing themselves with one of 2026’s album of the year contenders in Hidden Fires Burn Hottest.

Speaking to Manning last week via Zoom about the band’s sixth full-length release and their first since 2018’s Further Still, naturally, our conversation brushes over Bosse-de-Nage’s history. Speaking on Further Still, Manning offers that, “It was recorded in a very punk style.” The most direct and abrasive release in their canon, it was recorded in two days despite the band having booked the studio for four. “It felt really appropriate to what we were doing, or the approach we were trying to take of being really concise and very intense.”

Talk moves to the band’s previous albums, too. The aptly titled III, a portal that ultimately led to All Fours. Manning, a deep thinker on how each album was presented at the time and how each has fared since. “After you’ve been doing it for a long time, you start to think about that stuff more,” he says. “I think that as a young band, we weren’t considering the recording that much. Everything sounds amazing when you’re listening on studio monitors, which probably cost $10,000 to $20,000.”

Manning explains that listening in the studio can create a bubble-like situation. “Because you’ve listened to this stuff so many times, you hear all the details. But then a couple years later, you don’t hear it with the same ears. I imagine I’m not the only artist who feels an overall dissatisfaction with art and thinking I could have tweaked something that would have reflected my idea better.”

There are no such reservations about Hidden Fires Burn Hottest. Tracked by Jack Shirley and mastered by Agriculture’s Richard Chowenhill, it’s Bosse-de-Nage’s most captivating release. The album title says it all. Powder keg fury, as Manning gives the performance of his life. And backed by searing walls of sound from Smith-Brenden, Bonel and Cantwell, Hidden Fires Burn Hottest both sounds and feels like an existential crisis committed to tape.

Led by Where to Now? where, amid “the starless sky”, Manning shrieks, “Everywhere I turn / Impassable walls stand in my way”). It’s an urgent blast that forms a tableau of punk and black metal. The menacing one-two of No Such Place and Underwater follow on a similar path. Both, sweeping, dynamic compositions that hang on knife’s edge. It’s music designed to leave indelible marks. And wedged between both tracks, the fractured interlude, Triangular Dream, rounds out the band’s fiercest moment yet.

These aren’t the only defining snapshots. From the salvos of Mementos and the guardrail-scraping Frenzy, to the punk and post-hardcore collisions of In the Name of the Moth and Leviathan, Bosse-de-Nage showcase the multi-layered, abstract majesty of Hidden Fires Burn Hottest. A rolling hell storm that sees the band reach the peak of their creative arc.

Now working full time at the band’s label, The Flenser, Manning shares further insight into Hidden Fires Burn Hottest. From its conception and his own writing processes, to inspirations and more.

Sun 13: When you write a song, do you think it reveals new parts of yourself?

Bryan Manning: “That’s an interesting question. Yeah, probably a little bit. Most of the lyrics that I write come from some personal moment. It’s pretty cryptic stuff, and I don’t usually write anything super direct – it’s all metaphorical, or abstract, in a way. But I would say that underlying all of that, there are personal emotions, and things are based on feelings, generally. I tend to write during low moments. That’s when the best stuff, I would say, comes about. It’s very cathartic to have solidified something in the real world that just lurks in my head.

“Music wise, I don’t think that’s really the case. We have a very democratic music writing process where everyone’s involved with structuring the tracks. Everyone brings their own parts to the table, of course, but as a band, we direct the songs together. I’m usually the one with the least input and the least musically inclined of the of the group. Sonically, I’m not sure our guitar player [Smith-Brenden] would say that some of the stuff he writes reveals stuff about him. In a way, it’s much more abstract than lyrics.”

S13: It’s been eight years since Further Still. Was that gap intentional?

BM: “Not at all. We started writing pretty much immediately after finishing that album. Some of the songs from Hidden Fires Burn Hottest are from that era. I would also say that a lot of this album is a reaction to our own unease with how that album turned out in the long run for us. We were very intentionally trying to do something with that, and I think we did, but then we didn’t quite appreciate the results so much. So, we were eager to keep writing more stuff and something different from that album. Then the pandemic happened, among other things, and really threw a wrench in the whole writing process that left us not seeing each other for about a year, as a band. We’re all close friends, so we see each other in other capacities all the time.

“I wish we could have put this out sooner. In some ways, this long path or trajectory allowed us to really take more time than we ever had with our songs. To really consider each part and how they fit together, and how it fit in our overall catalogue. So, there’s a lot more consideration as a result of having that extra time. It won’t be the same for the next one, because we’ve already been working on other material. Hopefully it won’t be more than a year or two before that’s ready.”

S13: Hidden Fires Burn Hottest is your most accomplished release yet. Was your approach any different from your previous releases?

BM: “The process was pretty similar, but there were some differences, just because there was so much time. We had a lot more riffs that [Michael] had written to choose from, so we could pick and choose. Our bass player [Bonel] contributed a lot more. In the past, I did a lot of the synthesiser parts on the albums, just textural elements here and there. But he did all that for this album. So that was a little different.

“Just the sheer amount of time that it took to formulate all this stuff was very much a different process than previous albums. Like I said about Further Still, we were really trying to write something that was very concise and punishing to listen to, and we put some restrictions on ourselves in terms of how long we wanted the tracks to be. I think we accomplished that, but then the result wasn’t all that satisfying to us. There are some things about the recording that we didn’t like, so we were going in reacting to that, which we haven’t really done in the past.”

S13: What was the most important aspect that you wanted to capture with the record?

BM: “We wanted it to be more sprawling and epic sounding. I don’t know if that’s what we accomplished, but there’s certainly more variety and texture to this than the previous album. I don’t know if there’s more than All Fours, because that one’s pretty varied as well. But we also really wanted to shake things up with the recording itself, and I was really pushing to step out of our comfort zone. This time, we had someone else mix and master the album. Richard Chowenhill from Agriculture, he’s a wizard in the studio. We did work with Jack Shirley again for the actual tracking, who is a guy we obviously like working with because we’ve done three albums with them now. But I did want to change up something with the recording process. I think that really paid off in the final result.”

S13: Alongside No Such Place, Underwater also feels like two songs smashed together. Going through your discography, it got me thinking about All Fours. Is there a connection between this record and that one?

BM: “In a way, I would say I agree with you. The variety of textures and just the overall approach was more similar to that album than to Further Still, or even III. That’s also something that I’m proud of, but I don’t think the recording is amazing on that album. I would say that Hidden Fires… is probably spiritually most connected to All Fours, in a way. Although when we were writing Hidden Fires…, it was quite a while before there was even a blast beat in the album.”

S13: That’s surprising…

BM: “There was a period where we were kind of like, ‘Are there even going to be any blast beats in this album?’ And then there are, of course, but it took a little while to get there. Underwater was one of the first songs we were working on, and I also would say I agree with you that those two are very connected, somehow. I don’t know how to explain that, but a few of us, I think, would say that the No Such Place into Underwater is some of our best material that we’ve done. Those two songs work really well together. The interlude pieces that surround No Such Place came together really well that, to us, is kind of the centerpiece of the album.”

S13: I agree. Along with Where To Now?, I think those three tracks reveal the dark thread that has always run through the band’s songs. I get a Kafka vibe with all of them. Is literature something that inspires you as a lyricist?

BM: “Yeah, absolutely. I’m a big reader, and Kafka is a very big influence for me. I would say I find that the stuff I write – I don’t know if this translates to other people – but to me, there’s a similar humour to it. Kafka is really funny to me. When I read his books, I’m laughing like the whole time. I would like to think that I accomplish that to some extent with what I write, too, because there’s an absurdist thread in there. I don’t know if Kafka could be considered an absurdist, but maybe?

“A lot of the literature I’m most attracted it to comes from Eastern Europe and European literature more broadly. There are other writers from that region that are very influential to me. Bruno Schulz is another one. I’m very much influenced by literature, and I would think that translates to the way the songs are structured lyrically. It’s usually like a paragraph rather than verse. For most songs, anyway.”

S13: Interesting…

BM: “That’s another thing that was a bit different on this album than the previous ones. Again, with all the time, I had a lot more pieces prepared as lyrics. With previous albums, I was writing them as we were writing the albums. This time, I came with a whole litany of pieces already prepared, and then I was able to pick and choose what felt thematically connected to the songs themselves and also to each other. I don’t know if there’s really a hard theme that goes through all the pieces or not, but…”

S13: Based on that approach, do you write lyrics every day, or keep a scrapbook or notes on your phone to jot down ideas?

BM: “I’ve been so busy with work the last year and a half that I haven’t been writing as much. If I could think of something, then yeah, I have a note app that I jot down phrases or ideas that I return to. That’s usually how I form stuff. Some idea will strike me at some point, and I’ll write it down, then revisit it and flesh it out over time. Usually, I’ll think I’m done with it, and then I’ll be in the shower or walking my dog, and something will strike, and I know that I have to go back and change something about it. Usually, these things should have taken me months. There are a few of them that just flowed out and crystallised immediately. But generally, I’m thinking of stuff and writing things in a document that I return to and jot down ideas.”

S13: Going back to writing influences, and In the Name of the Moth to me has a sci-fi echo to it…

BM: “Yeah. I felt like I was kind of channelling a surrealist mode for that one. Like that kind of dream imagery and the juxtaposition of images that don’t necessarily fit together and words that don’t necessarily pertain to the usual image that I’m using. Like stuttering clouds. What does that mean? It’s a free flow of weird ideas and that all came together in that dream logic way.

“Another big influence – especially when I was younger – was the surrealist literary movement and poetry. All that stuff was big for me. Not so much anymore, but I felt like channeling that somehow for that one.”

S13: The artwork is interesting to me. What was the inspirations behind that?

BM: “Well, that one’s a little trickier to answer, because that came together later. We commissioned an artist to do it, and they didn’t want to be credited. I don’t know why necessarily, because we hired this person, and they gave us this idea, and it wasn’t really what we wanted. We kind of pushed them in this direction that maybe went out of their normal comfort zone as an artist. I think the result is very interesting and weird. When I first saw it, I was like, ‘I’ve never seen an album cover like this’. So, I was immediately attracted to it in that regard.

“We just wanted to do something maximal – or whatever word is appropriate – that was just colourful and bizarre and overwhelming to look at. I think the result does achieves that. I imagine that some people are going to look at it and be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It could also be spiritually connected to All Fours again in the same way, because that’s another weird one that doesn’t really look like other album art that I’ve seen. Especially in the metal realm.”

S13: Yeah, it’s funny, because I can draw a line to it from the interlude, Triangular Dream. Like, it really does feel like that would be something you’d envision in a such a dream…

BM: (Laughs) “Yeah, the Triangular Dream is a reference to this Portuguese writer called Fernando Pessoa. I have his book, The Book of Disquiet, and in the translation I have, there are several pieces that are titled Triangular Dream. I was always attracted to that and referenced that book a little bit on All Fours as well.”

S13: Despite the aggressive nature of the band’s music, I think there’s also a tenderness and honesty that is quite immediate. It feels like Bosse-de-Nage is an accurate reflection of your personality…

BM: (Laughs) “Possibly, yeah. I think everyone that isn’t a sociopath is experiencing emotions constantly. Whether they want to acknowledge it or not, we’re all emotional beings. I think that stuff is pretty ripe for being addressed with metal, maybe more obliquely, which I think that I do. It’s one of those things where I think I’m doing something, and who knows if that’s how it’s received on the other end? I hope it’s received the same way I’m intending it to be. But I also don’t want to force whatever I’m feeling onto the receiving end like that. People can interpret that stuff themselves. As a human being, I experience emotions. We all do, and I think that is translated into our work.

“We’re not a black metal band at this point. That is part of our DNA, but if you’re putting Hidden Fires Burn Hottest on and comparing it to a Darkthrone album, or some of the classic ’90s black metal stuff, it’s not going to feel like it’s the same thing. But I think that’s also a part of pushing art forward and music in general. If they stagnate, they will just wither up and be forgotten, so I think you always have to be pushing that stuff as an artist. I think most musicians have a pretty broad listening palette, too, and are bringing in other influences, especially these days. Most things are some kind of genre mash up now.”

S13: That’s why I think Bosse-de-Nage have always been ahead of the curve. The ecstatic black metal thing is in vogue, but you have been away from that, and smashing genres into each other for years now. Punk and post-hardcore, for a start …

BM: “Yeah, I would agree with that, for sure. I can only hope that people come to recognise that. We’re not the biggest band out there, but I hope that over time, people can come and appreciate that we’ve been doing this for a long time and hope to continue to do it in the future. What’s interesting to me is mixing all these different influences; that’s how you really make your stamp as an artist. You tend to start out imitating or mimicking the things that you like, and then you take your own path that maybe references those influences but sets it on an individual path. That’s where the best art comes from.”

S13: Is there any creative tension in the band? And if so, does it make the music better?

BM: “In the past, there hasn’t been that much tension. Like I said earlier, we’re very democratic in writing these songs, so everyone’s bringing ideas to the table. I’m sure that there are times where an idea didn’t end up how the person suggested it, and that probably does build some tension, to some extent. We’re all close friends and can read each other at this point. Whatever tension is there, it isn’t serious. I think when you suggest something and everyone else shoots it down, there’s probably a tension there. You have to shrug it off and just keep moving forward.

“I can’t speak for the other guys. But if I suggest something and we go in a different direction and I feel a little resentment about it, in the end I’ll come around and think, ‘Actually, you guys are right’ (laughs). I hope that’s the same for everyone else.”

S13: You’ve always had a working relationship alongside The Flenser. How important has the label been during the band’s journey?

BM: “Yeah, pretty important. I work there. I didn’t when we first started the band. We didn’t know what we were doing at all. We wrote an album, and we didn’t know what to do with it, and felt like the band had run its course. And then Jonathan [Tuite] from The Flenser approached us when he was just starting the label. Our first album was pretty much the second thing he put out. So, in that sense, he came along and revived the band, in a way. Not intentionally, but after we were approached by [him], we fired the band up again and wrote the second album pretty quickly after that.

“We went to Profound Lore for a couple albums with no ill feelings. It made sense at the time, even though The Flenser also released the vinyl versions of those, so there’s a thread that connects everything. Then I started to work at the label more seriously. Since meeting Jonathan, I’ve always done little odd jobs for the label… putting together album layouts or ads for magazines. But then I actually became an employee, and at that point, I thought, ‘Let’s bring the band back here’.

“In some ways, it’s nice to be disconnected from that process and have someone else working on that stuff. But then in other ways, you have your hands in everything, or I do (laughs). The Flenser has really grown over the years, not only changing and shifting with the kind of music that’s being put out, but also the size of the label has changed since the beginning. I’ve been there witnessing all that, and that’s been really cool to see and watch unfold. It’s still happening, so hopefully the next 10 years are as good as the last 10.

S13: Do you consider yourselves as a political band?

BM: “Not really. I think it’s impossible to not be political as a person. Especially in the modern or current, news and social media environment where you’re kind of forced into picking sides. But as a band, we have our own personal political beliefs that all line up generally. We’re from San Francisco, and I think you can read between the lines where we are as people. We all grew up in California, in the Bay Area, so progressive thinking is just part of us at this point.

“I’m not really interested in addressing that stuff in any direct way as an artist. I think that certainly shows up in the lyrics, in some sense, because you know everything around you is always influencing you, even if you don’t recognize that in the moment. I’m more interested in abstract thinking, in terms of the art itself. I don’t especially want to make a super political song or make a statement as a band that paints us in a certain light. I’d rather just let the art do its own thing and speak for itself as a separate entity, rather than addressing anything politically head on.”

Hidden Fires Burn Hottest is out via The Flenser. Purchase from Bandcamp.