Sydney’s Northlane offers “a different kind of heavy” on sixth album Obsidian
This award-winning Sydney quartet continues to develop its innovative sound on album No.6, which blends metal with elements of electronic music.
Heavy metal wears a black cloak that can be more aesthetic than rooted in reality. Despite all the skull-adorned band logos and fire-flanked live sets before headbanging crowds, those who dedicate their lives to these sounds are often among the sweetest and most well-adjusted people you’ll find in the performing arts.
Occasionally, though, an individual has access to a deep well of darkness in their lived experience which comes to inform their creative expression.
Marcus Bridge of Sydney metal band Northlane is one of those artists, but it took the singer a while to work up the courage to stop looking around him – and up into the stars and space – for songwriting inspiration, and instead look inside himself and his troubled upbringing in Kings Cross as the son of parents addicted to drugs and alcohol.
The result was Alien, the band’s fifth album and its fourth with Bridge at the helm as frontman since he joined in 2014. Released in 2019, it went on to win an ARIA Award for best hard rock or heavy metal album – the band’s third win in that category – and its success saw Northlane playing to its biggest audiences both in Australia and overseas.
Yet, for Bridge, the highly personal nature of its subject matter came at a cost – one so steep that he was unwilling to go there again for Obsidian, the band’s newly released sixth album.
“Alien was a very personal record that delved deep into a lot of personal issues and stuff that I went through growing up,” he tells Review. “As a side effect of that, a bunch of family members of mine had a lot to say, in a negative sense, about me telling this story. In my mind, that isn’t really fair as it is my experience – but it did bring me a lot of guilt, and I didn’t really want to keep going into those kinds of stories.”
The album’s atmospheric, shapeshifting final track, Sleepless, was written as a brutal goodbye to Bridge’s mother, from whom the singer was estranged. Its lyrics begin: “I can’t reach your hand / I can’t liberate you / I know you’re alive, but in my heart I’ve said goodbye / So tonight, I’m sleepless.” It’s a song that Bridge is no longer comfortable performing live.
“Not long after Alien was released, my mum actually passed away, so there’s this connotation around that and this feeling that I left our relationship on a bit of a sour note, and that really bums me out,” he says.
“I feel like what I’d written with Sleepless was completely fair, but it still gives me a lot of guilt and I feel like there’s a lot of unanswered questions associated with that song. For me, that’s a bit of a tough one to revisit.”
There’s a phrase that comes to mind when discussing these matters: “misery porn”, a literary genre that dwells on traumatic trials suffered by protagonists.
When applied to nonfiction, as in Bridge’s songwriting for Alien, he has been navigating similar tensions felt by all artists who choose to exorcise their demons through their art. The challenge, then, is to not get trapped into reliving those traumas just because the audience responded positively to it.
“I still hold Alien really close to my heart, but also, I didn’t want to feel like I was just a one-trick pony, where I found that I could just talk about how much my life sucked, and people would keep wanting to hear that,” he says.
“I feel like that’s a weird thing to do, to indulge in the fact that you’re talking about how bad your life was, or how bad the upbringing was – but it’s kind of what’s made you successful. For me, that just felt a bit wrong.”
Writing for album No. 6, then, was a chance to look outward again. “Totally indulging in your misery is something I wanted to try and not do – but that being said, this album is still quite miserable,” says the singer with a laugh.
“But it doesn’t feel to me like I’m writing a ‘sob story’ about why my upbringing was so hard; it’s just talking about the same experiences I’m sure a lot of people have experienced over the last couple of years,” he says, referring to the pandemic. “For Obsidian, it felt like it was time to be a bit broader, and talk about stuff that we could all relate to. ”
Chiefly composed by guitarist and songwriter Jon Deiley – with the quartet completed by guitarist Josh Smith and drummer Nic Pettersen – Obsidian contains a fascinating extension of the band’s innovative sonic approach, which blends metal with rhythms more at home on a dancefloor than a moshpit.
“With people being so receptive to Alien, it felt like we were given permission to dive even deeper into those sounds,” says Bridge. “We don’t want to alienate anyone, but we’re also people who want to make music that we’re passionate about.
“Our fans encouraged us to keep pushing some of these more electronic elements in our music even further. We’ve done the best we can to make sure that we’re maintaining the elements that people love of Northlane, which is the heavier side of things – but also implementing these electronic elements, which are a different kind of heavy in their own way.”
When Review connects with Bridge in late March, the band has recently completed a headline performance at Full Tilt Festival in Melbourne. Held at Reunion Park, not far from the CBD, it was a joyful return to stage after more than two years between gigs due to the pandemic, barring a small warm-up show at a pub in Albury, NSW the night before.
“It was quite surreal to be in this centre where there’s big corporate buildings around the site of the festival, and people catching their trams home and just seeing this loud, raucous, music coming from this tent,” says the singer, laughing again.
Metal remains relatively niche in Australia, with Northlane one of few acts able to play at larger venues in capital cities, alongside bigger bands such as Parkway Drive and The Amity Affliction.
But its audience continues to grow, here and abroad, and the central locale of Full Tilt Melbourne reminded Bridge of his experiences performing at overseas festivals held in similarly urban environs, where the locals would see “this horde of black-shirted people everywhere,” he recalls. “That’s always so funny to see people double and even triple-take: ‘What is happening to my nice little town?’ ”
Obsidian is out now via Believe. Northlane performs at Full Tilt Brisbane on April 23, followed by an album tour that starts in Perth (June 16) and ends in Brisbane (June 25).
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