​ Since 2002 Misery Signals have been at the forefront of metalcore. 2004’s Of Malice and the Magnum Heart is still a staple to every metalcore listener to this day. The band has seen its ups and downs over the years but still tried and true the band is back with a new album, Ultraviolet releasing on August 7^th. The band has also released a video alongside the single for the song ‘River King’, which is our first glimpse of the forthcoming album. I was fortunate to speak with founding member and lead guitarist Ryan Morgan to learn more about the album, and what the band has been doing in the Covid-19 world. 

GA: It has been 7 years since Absent Light was released, and now the band is set to debut your newest album Utraviolet on August 7th. What was the process behind making the album? It must be exciting to have everyone back together for this album.

RM: We are super excited to have the old crew back, it is the same group from our very first record. We have not been in a situation that we have writing stuff together since that first record, so it’s kind of a homecoming for the band. We are super stoked to have put the album together. It has been a bit of a long process in the amount time it has taken to come out with since our last album, but that was an outcome of where everyone is now in life, and the dynamic of the group. We are all a bit older; we have more responsibilities now; the guys are dividing their time between musical projects and their daily jobs now. Its kind of a new look with the old team, but it is an awesome thing. 

GA:  Can you tell what your writing process was behind writing and working into creating an album? I am a fellow guitar player, and you have some killer grooves on the album, especially on ‘River King’ and ‘Through Vales of Fire.’

RM: I always start with a guitar in my hands, as that is my thinking instrument. It helps me to follow ideas better because I can follow along in real time. The process for me is trying out what feels good in my hands when I am riffing, and that will be the starting point as for guitar riffs. I am looking for things that make me respond; emotionally or move me physically. So, it is a good sign when riffing if I can feel my body rocking. I try to pay attention to stuff that gives me that sensation, that I can move along to this. It helps me to stand up and turn an amp up when I am in that phase, I am just going from zero to a riff. I will go through a bunch of riffs when writing and video tape myself playing it so I can come back to it. I can go through and point out the things I was excited about when playing, and if I am still excited about it when I come back to it then its worth flushing out. Sometimes it will feel like I am on to something, a riff or progression, and when I come back to it, it does not hold up. So, the criteria for me is it has to stay exciting to me on reflection not just on the initial. Once I have a couple of those parts, we will start jamming on them as a band and deciding what we want to do with those. That is kind of how it all works with us and song writing. 

GA: I watched a few older interviews of the band in preparing for our interview. In one, you were talking about being hands on and producing parts of your last album. How hands on were you this time on Ultraviolet outside of performing?

RM: Much less this time around, I still recorded some of the guitars on my own in my studio. The vast majority of the album was done with other producers, and I am really glad that we did it that way. It put me in a different seat mentally as far as creating the record. It is cool to produce your own stuff, but there are so many considerations and decisions being made at different times, that it takes a lot of bandwidth to do writing and recording and producing. It was nice to have a bunch of badasspeople doing those jobs along with me this time. 

GA: Who else did you work with to put together the album?

RM: There were several producers who were involved: we had Tim Creviston who is kind of a up and coming producer out of Vancouver BC. He worked with us on the guitars and bass, he has produced for a bunch of Vancouver bands. I kind of forecast him to be the ‘man’ soon that everyone is going to want to go to, to work with. Look for Tim Creviston because he is awesome! We worked with Devin Townsend a tiny bit; we have recorded with him in the past. We worked with him on the vocals mostly. He has fully produced two of our records, and he is also amazing. Our schedules unfortunately did not line up, so we did not get to work with him more. We also worked with Pat Bayless out of Seattle, who is a classic producer who has done things for many years. He has worked with Isis, Minus the Bear, Obituary, and Botch; he came up in the hey day of grunge and worked with a lot of Seattle bands back in the day, he evenassisted on a few Pearl Jam albums. We recorded our drums at Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam’s guitarists studio which was really cool. We also had my good friend Greg Thomas from Silver Bullet Studios, who was a member of Misery Signals on the last album and helped produce Absent Light. He helped us finish out the record, finishing up on vocals and mixing which he did with his partner Teddy. It was a long cast of characters, but it was a lot of talented people who all added their own little bits to Ultraviolet. I do not know if that is the right way to go about things, but there were all these people we were excited about to include in the process. It pulled us in a lot of directions, and I am unsure if we would do another record like this, but it made for some really cool results. 

GA: What gear are you currently using? 

RM: I have always been a 5150 guy at heart, so my Peavey amps have always been the basis of my live playing. There are a bunch of amps I like for studio tones, but live I keep falling back to the Peavey. I have a couple different guitars I am excited about right now. I have been with PRS (Paul Reed Smith) as an endorsee for awhile now, they make some of the most awesome crafted guitars out there. I cannot say enough good things about the company, my custom 24 PRS is like the perfect instrument. I am excited about a new guitar I just got. I used one of their guitars for recording a little bit on the album. It is a guitar from Mobius Guitars, they are a small company out of San Francisco. They make a lot of 7 and 8 string fan fret guitars, which are sweet, but I am more of a traditional player. I happen to be friends with the guy that runs the company and he made me a 6 string that was a little more laid back. It is an amazing piece of craftsmanship. It has some wild pickups in it, they are Oil City Pickups boutique pickups made in the UK. I can get some interesting sounds out of them; you can make them really aggressive and over the top if you really push them. Oil City Pickups are worth looking into and listening to. 

GA: What are your thoughts on the current state of music in the Covid – 19 world? I am loving that bands are being creative and are releasing new material, but I am jonesingfor some shows.

RM: It definitely presents a challenge for artists to do interesting things. Since we cannot play shows I have seen a lot of people putting out live streams, and videos. Some of the video content they are putting out is split screen, so that you can see all the members of the band and see all the layers performing at the same time have been really cool. It is kind of nice to see people are shifting and adapting to that challenge, but it is hard to fill that void of a live performances. Without live performances it has been tough, especially economically for bands. It is tough to replace that stream of income becausetouring is an essential part of being able to make any money as a musician.  It is interesting to see how we reboot back from all of this. There is a part of me that is a little happy to stay home, because I would be on tour right now if we weren’t shut down. It is bittersweet, I love touring, but it is a lot of work. I would be out there putting pressure on myself because we would have to be touring since we put all this time into the new record; but I am kind of dodging that since we can’t tour. I hope people don’t take this the wrong way when they hear me say this: I want to play songs but it is a little bit of a relief to put aside the things about touring that are difficult, and that are increasing difficult as an adult right now. I get to have a little time after the album dropping to regroup and be ready for when we get the green light to hit the road again, and I am looking forward to it when it gets here.

GA:  Misery Signals have been a band since 2002, as one of the tenured metal core bands, what are your thoughts of where the genre is now, and what do you think could be the next evolution?

RM: I am not sure, and to be fair I am not up on all of what the genre is doing currently, as I was when I was touring with all the bands. This is because I got to meet everyone and see everyone while playing live. We would be at festivals and get to see every sick band that is out, and I am just not right now; we have Covid, on top of we are touring less these days, regardless if touring was a thing going on right now. I would be remiss if I thought I was a good person to gauge what is going on in the genre right now. I do hear bands that are exciting all the time. I really like the ease of how a cool sounding album can now be produced currently. I think it opens up a lot of creativity for people, because they don’t have to have a big budget to make a cool sounding record. You don’t have to have a big budget to get music released either. So, it is cool to see that there are some of the economic barriers being taken out of the mix. 

GA: Your band and my band both share a dynamic: the fact that you play with your brother in the band, my band has a set of brothers in it as well. What is it like for you to continue working with Branden and creating music after all these years? It has to be somewhat surreal after all this time.

RM: It has been the best. I love playing with Branden, he is a super dedicated musician. I am inspired by him all the time; he puts so much time into his craft, it is humbling. The fact that he is my literal brother and I grew up making noise with him all my formative musical endeavors are with him. I could only imagine doing a band without him, because playing with him is all I have ever done, and it just seems right. I know some people have difficult relationships with their brother/s, but he and I are so easy going that we don’t have that complex of a relationship, it is all just good vibes. So, it is the best. 

GA: What are the future plans for Misery Signals, have you guys thought about planning out a late 2020 or even 2021 schedule yet?

RM: All our touring plans that were for the release of the album have been pushed back to the end of this year. They are still scheduled for that, but there are some thoughts about if touring will be back by that point or if we will have to move them again. Tentatively we are set to tour at the end of this year, and if not, we will be touring once we can. Outside of that it is kind of hard to say, we are a couple weeks out from the album release at the time of this interview, and it has been impossible to see the peak of that mountain. It feels like I have been climbing this mountain for a very long time, so I am excited for the album to be out there in the world. I am excited to be releasing the record and super stoked to be playing these songs out live because I think it is going to be a rewarding experience. 

Be sure to check out Misery Signals new album Ultraviolet when it drops on Friday August 7^th. It will be available on all major streaming platforms. For more news on the band please follow them on Facebook and Instagram for all updates to touring scheduling and promotional drops. 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MiserySignals/

Instagram: @miserysignals 

Twitter: @miserysignals

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George Archibald

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