Nightmares (Commentary)

Stuart Brookes:

So "Nightmares" with Gallie Fisher. This was a lot of fun writing this track. It's got a lot of weird, creepy vibes and sounds. We were exploring with a lot of weird chords. Very atypical stuff.

Joachim Speidel:

Feel like horror movie, like kind of atmosphere.

Stuart:

Yeah, yeah, there's this really cool sample that I kind of put together. It's made with a violin, basically what you would do is you just pluck all the different strings in completely random order, just plucking them. And then splicing a whole bunch of those on top of each other. Like this kind of creepy crawly feel. And that was a really cool sound wе had in the build up.

So the idea of thе track is there's a narrator who's facing all these problems, the nightmares. And the idea is she's scared of them at first, but as she thinks about it more and processes what they really are, she's able to gain confidence and fight them back. So there's kind of pivot point in the track, where instead of her being scared of the nightmares, it's actually the nightmares that should be now scared of her. As she hopes they're ready for a fight.

Joachim:

It's funny because Gallie was known for like super melodic feelsy sad vocals. And I was like, "Hey, you know what, I love your sad vocals, but we want to make something scary and heavy and kind of like eerie." And she was down, so that was great.

Stuart:

And she got really involved. She started sending us all these crazy ideas and all these great things, and they were awesome, and we started trying to incorporate all the ideas into the track. And that was it, it was a really fun one to make. It's got all these heavy orchestral sounds.

Joachim:

I think there's also like a parallel to sleep paralysis. Where it's like you basically are in third person and you see this demon figure and eventually you're able to learn how to wake up from that. It's like, oh, you squeeze your hands, your toes, whatever.

Stuart:

Just fighting through these battles when it feels like you can't, and they get too overwhelming.