UK metalcore band Oceans Ate Alaska began their journey unlike most bands. While they were relative unknowns back home in their native Birmingham, the five-piece found their popularity soaring halfway across the world in Asia. At one point, they were the most streamed band from Birmingham, ahead of Black Sabbath, Duran Duran and Judas Priest.
“As a band, we’ve had kind of this really weird journey where we couldn’t lock in a fan base within our home country and, and as you say, kind of across Asia and, and then the United States and stuff, we just started to kind of gather momentum, and that was pretty much the start of Oceans really of, of touring and playing shows and releasing records and things.”
I’m chatting with frontman James Harrison via Zoom about their latest album, Disparity. It’s a fitting title for the times we’re living in right now, that’s for sure. “Yeah. I think it was definitely something we spoke (about) as a band collectively and just thought, how can we kind of wrap everything up and kind of divulge on like the meaning of Disparity? Like the dictionary term is of a great difference. I think that there’s almost, you know, a widespread difference now between the working middle and upper classes in terms of the way the state of the world is and things like that. There’s a lot of divergence and fringing of different beliefs and topics and things going on in the world now about the state of the world in terms of carbon footprint and waste and all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think it was a really poignant title to give the album.
And we kind of tried to explore that with this kind of post-apocalyptic twist half of the album being this kind of really heavy strain of progressive metalcore, almost borderline, some people would say deathcore, and then these kinds of hallucinogenic, experimental low-fi soundscapes. So that’s also musicality-wise, showing two great differences, and we just try to encapsulate that all into the album. And we also chose to place jarringly different songs in the album order as well. So you go from this one extreme of the lo-fi soundscapes to this incredibly noxious heavy deathcore track. And I’ve noticed a few people have commented on that saying it was a bit of an odd choice, but that was a hundred percent meant to be like that, and we discussed that thoroughly at length as a band.”
After Oceans Ate Alaska’s debut album took them around the world, James began to question what was next for him in life, ultimately leading to him taking time away from the band to focus on other things.
“Obviously, most fans will kind of know I checked out of the band for a while. There’s a lot of reasons behind that. Mainly ultimately, for me, coming out of Warped Tour 2016 that was basically my childhood goal to be in a band that do that. I’d grown up in the scene around Birmingham and for me, that was just like, forget the Downloads, forget the Rock Am Rings and things like that. I just wanted to do Warped tour and after that, I pretty much was like, Oh, what do I do with myself now? I dropped out of uni to pursue music, and at the time, I just thought it was the right thing to do to go back to uni, finish my degree and start that.
Jake, who joined the band, was always a part of the band. From the very get-go of kind of touring the UK he would be there either slinging merch or as a stagehand and things for us along the way. So he was a very much part of the band from its inception, even though people wouldn’t have seen him at the forefront of things. And I think that was the natural progression really for him to kind of step up and take that role from me. And then obviously Hikari, our second album, came out, which was a fantastic album. Moving on from the kind of nautical elements of Lost Isles, we then touched on kind of this Japanese experimental side of things. I was also initially in the writing and the background of all of that as well. And then once Hikari came out, the guys did a lot of touring. Jake moved to Scotland, which is about a six, seven-hour drive from where we currently live. And it just turned out that he just wanted to carry on pursuing his tattoo career and his business, which was fair enough. He’s a very, very good tattoo artist. And yeah, I was still in contact with the guys. They just hit me up and said, this is the situation that we’re in at the moment. Do you wanna come back on for another album? We chatted it through, experimented, discussed where we wanted to take it. And I think around that time then the pandemic pretty much hit, and that really solidified Disparity’s themes and musical nuances.”
So how did it feel for James to watch the band from the outside for a while?
“It was weird,” he admits. “I always see Oceans as very sentimental value to me. You know, I was there from its inception with the other guys, and I was one of their biggest supporters as much as I could be. I didn’t get to see them as much as I’d like as friends and stuff cause they were touring a lot in the States and the rest of the world, Australia, Japan, you name it. But overall, I’m just kind of happy to have been able to come back and produce another album with them, really. We’d spoken about it previously, like prior to me leaving, and it was something that we said, you know, might be an opportunity in the future. I didn’t think it would come so soon, but overall, I’m glad to have been able to have written a record that kind of encapsulates everything that’s going on with the state of the world right now. And I think, especially with the pandemic and stuff, it was the prime time to get this themed album out and the world listening, really.
And I think there was definitely more of a formulated view in writing this album as a whole. We kind of all banded together and really honed in on what were the best bits from Lost Isles, what were the best bits from Hakari, and how can we kind of combine them and try and take it to the next level. I think we managed to do that. We don’t lean on a riff or a rhythm for too long. We just give you kind of a fleeting glimpse, and then we’re onto the next little transition or what have you. And for us, it was kind of a conscious effort to keep that, but then also solidified down the kind of rhythms that people can actually just bob their head to and enjoy.”
Watch the full interview below:
