Northlane
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Northlane

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In July 2015, Northlane unveiled their third LP, Node, and this week the Sydney quintet will kick off their Australian album tour. Beat speaks with guitarist Josh Smith and bassist Alex Milovic about their volatile 12 months.

As with Northlane’s past releases, guitarist Jon Deiley laid down the musical foundations for Node before presenting his ideas to the rest of the band. While Deiley often brings in close to completed arrangements, the impression of him as a dictator who tells the rest of the band exactly what to do isn’t entirely valid.

“On the last two albums he’s been writing on the road,” says Milovic. “So he’ll be like half way through and idea and then he’ll show the rest of us and someone will be like, ‘Maybe you could go in this direction.’ He’s relaxing a little more. He used to be very, like, ‘Until the song is done, no one’s hearing it’.

He writes probably 90 per cent of the music as it is and goes, ‘OK this is a song,’ then we’ll give it to Josh and Marcus to write lyrics and me and Nic [Pettersen] to do the bass and the drums to it. But he’s never closed off to ideas. I know Nic’s put his own flavour to the drums and I’ve done some stuff on my end.”

“When it comes to who does what in our band, instead of having a clear democracy, we each take care of what we’re best at,” says Smith. “I think that really gets the best out of people and it’s definitely the right formula for us to work with.”

There’s a range of moods and textures featured on Node – notably an increase in ambient atmospherics compared to past releases, but still plenty of drilling heaviness. Produced by Thy Art Is Murder affiliate Will Putney, there’s a good balance between explosive sounds and relatively muted sounds.

“The sonic characteristics of the record are something that really come to life in the studio with the assistance of a producer,” says Smith. “Over time you learn to give up more control to a producer because you’re paying them to produce your record. You’re paying them to do their job because you trust them to do it. I remember when we did our first record [Discoveries 2011], we were more set in what we wanted to do for that record. Over time we’ve learnt to listen to other people a bit more. We’ve become a lot better at discussing ideas and trialling different approaches. Rather than being like, ‘No. This is what I’m going to record this with and I’m going to do everything how I want to do it.’ Because you don’t always know best.”

The Node Australian tour kicks off this weekend. Northlane have already carried out a couple of overseas tours since the album came out and in contrast to past records, they didn’t face too many hurdles in re-presenting the Node material live.

“Every time you go into the studio, you’ve learned from the last time you did it and you have a better understanding of how it’s going to translate in a live sense,” says Smith. “Node was written so that the songs would translate live better than anything we’d done before. And they definitely have the impact we want them to have when we play them live, without having to make any compromises or extensively use backing tracks or any bullshit like that.”

BY AUGUSTUS WELBY