6th November 2019

Exclusive Interview: More Than Machines talk “Paradigm”!

Dublin, Ireland Tech-Infused Metalcore quartet More Than Machines unveiled their labour of love “Paradigm” in October and we had the pleasure of reviewing it before it was available to the masses. After hearing it, we had a few questions for the band so here’s what they had to say…

The American accented clean vocals, that are prominent on Paradigm, was that a deliberate thing, or just the way it panned out with your influences?

Conor: It definitely wasn’t a deliberate thing. I didn’t make a conscious effort to sound American. Everybody has always passed comment on my accent and I’m very susceptible to being influenced. But I didn’t go into it(the album) saying “I’m going to sound like this American singer that I like”. Maybe it is because of the type of music that we listen to that it subconsciously came out like that.

Your debut was two years in the works and the time and effort shows in the final product, was there ever a thought to putting out an EP rather than a full length to get something out there?

Anthony: So, at some point, we had put so much work into it that we were always going to make it into an album. But there was definitely a point in the middle where it got very difficult to keep going. Originally we had planned for the album to take only a year and then it ended up being two.

Sam: I think we didn’t really know what to expect going into it.

Conor: Yeah, and first there was the transition of our old singer leaving the band and me joining. It was a big transitional period in our lives. Sam and I were busy in college. We didn’t want to rush the album.

With such a wide variety of styles within the sound, was there any thought to going less is more or was it always a “Let’s just go for it” approach?

Anthony: I do think we have some self-control where we backtracked a little bit. But we predominantly followed a “Let’s just go for it” approach.

Conor: I completely agree, in a “Let’s just go for it” approach. We were very lucky in the sense that when we were writing, we were coming to the table from different angles. We tried to combine them, and include elements of all our favourite musical styles in there. And I think it worked out well.

Anthony: Yeah, from my perspective, when we were writing stuff, every song we wrote would start with like one sentence describing what we wanted to do. For example, “An Issues influenced dubstep breakdown driven song.” We definitely went at it with lots of these ‘sentences’ and we would just consider it once it was done, and take some stuff back out again. So, it ended up with a balance of a lot of stuff but I think it definitely could have been more. We reined ourselves in a little bit.

Conor: Yeah, exactly it was never less is more. We never came to the table going “let’s not do this”. We came to the table saying “How about this?”. If it didn’t work then fine, it got scrapped but we definitely tried.

The clean vocals are very impressive, have you ever had any vocal coaching to enable you to get some of the different tones and pitches in your gloriously techni-coloured voice?

Conor: Yeah so I have been coached, I was brought up with a classical background. Starting with piano lessons and then saxophone lessons. It was only before I was going to college that I started taking singing lessons. I didn’t have the best experience with my first teacher. She used to be my piano teacher and then one day she said: “I think I might do singing lessons”. So I said, “Sure why not?”. She taught me for a year and then after that, I got into college and got a proper vocal coach. I got vocal lessons from Virginia Kerr who is a well-renowned opera singer in Ireland and I was classically trained as a tenor for 4 years.

If you could get picked up for a trip around Europe from any band around the world for a run of shows, who would you fancy?

Sam: Probably Oceans Ate Alaska.

Anthony: Yeah, that would be pretty great, I think for me it would probably be Northlane.

Conor: I would say Normandie, that would be pretty sick.