Written by Ana Krunic
MELO-DEATH METALLERS TALK ABOUT THEIR NEW ALBUM AND SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC
Getting a band going from a place where you’re just jamming, to actually recording the things you write, to playing shows and actually booking tours is a monumental effort at the best of times. Hell, even getting four or five people to coordinate enough to grab a beer is hard enough. So imagine you’ve finally gotten there, your set is tight, you’ve gotten t-shirts printed, the whole fiasco of artist travel visas done and over with, you’re SO ready to extend past the moniker of "local band"...
And a once-in-a-century pandemic hits the world. Festivals start cancelling left, right and centre, borders close and your visas are defunct. That’s pretty much exactly what happened to melo-death crew Param-Nesia, from Vancouver.
“We had over a month of tour dates booked,” says drummer Derek Hill. “We were on for a bunch of music festivals in the United States, it was going to be our first time ever performing down there. We paid for all the visas in full and then it all came crashing down so fast.”
“The funny thing is, this tour was planned in the very early days of COVID before it became a serious topic and shut the world down, we thought it would be edgy to call it the 'Survive the Virus Tour' and then it became as serious as it was. Obviously, our tour did not survive the virus,” he laughs.
Luckily, they found other ways to spend their time during the limbo of this past year, and like a lot of artists, used the time to learn and get new material together. Param-Nesia’s melodic sound ranges from thrash/death to metalcore. Their brand-new EP, Aspect of Creation, came out on June 18 and sounds to be the culmination of months of pent-up energy.
“We’ve been extremely overwhelmed by the amount of positive responses [to the EP release],” says Hill. “People that we don’t even know reaching out to tell us how much they like the record. It’s fulfilling to hear, it makes you really want to keep progressing and keep going with the next album.”
Despite what happened with their first tour, at least what they spent on merch doesn’t seem to have been wasted.
“We’ve got all these killer t-shirts that say 'Survive the Virus' on the back. We’re thinking that we can start unloading those now.”
Aspects of Creation is out now.
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