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- Hi guys, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
> Hello VENTS, we’ve been good! It’s always kind of strange reaching the point where a record starts existing in the world, but it feels good, justified, and fitting to the zeitgeist.
- So your new record DOGMA explores a society that seems to be participating in its own collapse. What first sparked the album’s central ideas, and when did you realize these themes would shape the record as a whole?
> It started less with a single event and more with observing the world around us. There’s just something unsettling about watching people recognize that something is fundamentally wrong while simultaneously continuing to participate in it, and that’s what we wanted to capture.
At some point, it became clear that DOGMA wasn’t just going to be a collection of unrelated songs. The idea of belief became the connecting thread. What we accept as truth, what we inherit, what we fear, and what we obey without even realizing we’re doing it. From our perspective, religion, as part of that, has done so much wrong over the centuries that we figured it was okay for us to just pull from it now, butcher the imagery even.
- The album deals with fear, division, manufactured dilemmas, and the normalization of obedience. How did you translate these broad social concerns into something personal and emotionally resonant through the music?
> All of these observations are very true and made us feel agitated and sort of helpless. So, in consequence, this album is meant to make your guts ache; it’s not to be an easy listening experience that you can just set aside and forget about, as you would do when you try to ignore the world’s issues and injustices. It’s a heavy record that isn’t a lecture or pointing fingers; we just want the listener to feel what we feel.
- Your description of DOGMA seems to suggest that the damage explored on the album may already be irreversible. Was that sense of hopelessness difficult to write from, or did it allow you to approach the material with greater honesty?
> It’s tempting to always try and provide a solution: tear everything down, wake up, break free, whatever. But real life rarely gives you that kind of clean ending. You know, once you’re past certain thresholds, you’ll have to come to terms with how things are, and that might have made this an honest album. The cards are dealt, the story is told, we’re pretty much f*cked.
- “Psalm” is accompanied by this great one-take vocal performance. What made that format the right way to present the song, and what did you want the performance to reveal that a conventional music video might not?
> “Psalm” is a very stripped-down and almost ritualistic song, so doing something overly constructed visually would have taken away from what makes it uncomfortable. The one-take performance puts the focus back on the physicality of the song. There’s nowhere to hide. No cuts, no spectacle, no way of disguising the moment. We wanted it to feel almost like witnessing something raw, rather than watching a performance that had been packaged for a consumer.
- Musically, you guys do a great job by balancing this serene, spacious passages with djenty breakdowns, blasts, and d-beat intensity. How do you approach creating that contrast without making the album feel fragmented?
> Thanks! We don’t really see the quieter moments and the heavy moments separated from one another. They’re different ways of creating tension. If everything is at maximum intensity all the time, eventually nothing feels intense anymore. We wanted the album to breathe but not necessarily comfortably.
- “Fear Is The New Belief” and “Weather Eye” offer different entry points into the world of DOGMA. What do these singles reveal about the album’s emotional and sonic range?
> You’ll have to find out for yourself haha. What I can tell is that those two songs are confrontational and almost suffocating in their aggression, representing core parts of the album.
- With SOMA, millions of streams, and extensive touring across Europe behind you, how has Half Me’s approach to songwriting and experimentation changed since the debut?
> We’ve become much less interested in proving what Half Me can do and more in creating what we want to see and hear in this space. Touring has been a lot of experiences that made their way into the subconscious writing process.
- Metalcore is a genre with many established conventions. When you enter the writing process, do you consciously try to challenge those conventions, or does the band’s sound evolve more instinctively?
> It’s probably a good mix of both. We try not to make experimentation a goal in itself, however. Breaking conventions for the sake of breaking conventions is likely to make you end up creating another convention.
For us it’s more about what the song needs and what makes it feel right, even if that means doing something that doesn’t necessarily make sense within the genre.
- DOGMA asks listeners to question what is presented as absolute truth and to examine the systems around them. What do you hope people confront (or reconsider) after spending time with the record?
> Hopefully themselves. At least a little. We don’t want people to arrive at the same conclusions we did, but in our modern age there’s so much noise, and so many thoughts are just regurgitated. We’d rather have people listen to the record and simply ask themselves: Why do I believe this? That can be uncomfortable, but perhaps discomfort is a healthier place to start than irrefutable certainty.
- As the album’s October 23 release approaches, what feels most exciting to you about this chapter of Half Me, and what do you still feel the band has yet to explore?
> DOGMA is a world of its own, and we’re always curious what people discover and interpret into it. We can’t wait to hear which conclusions will be drawn.
As for what we haven’t explored yet: probably a lot more than we know.
