CREAK has today shared a new single, Hare in the Woods. The track is the third song to be taken from CREAK‘s upcoming debut album, Depth Perception, which is due out via Prosthetic Records on August 18, and sees the band continue to push the limits of their volatile mix of metalcore, hardcore and nu-metal.
LISTEN TO HARE IN THE WOODS BELOW.
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Speaking on the single release, CREAK vocalist Jack Dunn comments: “This was the first song we wrote for the album cycle, and it was the excitement from hearing it come together that led to us deciding to do a bigger album project.”
Guitarist Patrick Morton continues: “We wanted to take some of the heavier, and chaotic elements of our influences and see how far we could take our sound with them in mind.”
Dunn adds: “For us as a band this feels like the closest we’ve got to the sound we have in our heads when we think of the name CREAK. If there’s one song on the album we want people to think of us as then it would be this one.
“Lyrically when putting this song together I’d felt like I was stuck in a hole and I’d gotten so used to feeling like that it had become my normal at the time. Looking back this song was a way for me to put things into perspective and break the filter that I’d started to see life through.”
The four piece from Newcastle set out initially to craft a new EP to follow on from 2020’s rapturously-received Bitter Picture vignette, but once writing was underway, the ideas kept on coming. Channeling the same furious vitriol found on their earlier singles and the EP, CREAK managed to push their boundaries further still – finding room for experimentation within their chaotic vision. Citing influences such as Yüth Forever and Sworn In, their background in hardcore is rarely far from view, but eerie Lynchian interludes, clean vocals and metallic sensibilities contribute additional layers that elevate their sound.
Of the Lynchian elements, CREAK comments on the Restless Dreams music video: “We worked with Zak Pinchin again, as we’d built a really good relationship with him on our previous videos, and he was into nearly all of the media we were taking influence from. We watched a lot of old ‘arthouse’ horror films like Blood of a Poet or anything from David Lynch and we were really inspired by how desperate the tone of those works felt.
“With the band, we never wanted the horror element to be for the sake of having it for shock value. What we liked about those films was how they got across those feelings of anxiety or dread just by how they looked, and we wanted to try and capture some of that.”
Lyrically and thematically the tracks are saturated with pure emotion, fuelled by – amongst other things – the anguish that accompanied Dunn’s mother’s journey with cancer. Using CREAK as an outlet for processing his feelings during that time, he adds: “I was feeling guilty about my own emotions, and going over things in a circle in my own head trying to get to a point where I could try to become comfortable with them.” Finding it easier to work through his feelings through his lyrics than to verbalise in ‘real life’, Depth Perception is something of an anthology of dread, pain, mortality – and hope.
The album took shape over several months between 2021 and 2022, with Connor Sweeney (formerly of Loathe) reprising the role he took on for Bitter Picture, producing, mixing and mastering the twelve blistering tracks. The live recording achieves the near-impossible task of capturing the frenetic, unbridled vigor of their live show; their angular metalcore punctuating an eerie soundscape permeated with anxious energy. With high hopes and boundless enthusiasm, CREAK are gathering pace as an unstoppable force.