A Q&A with Perseide

Intense, melodic, modern metal from Lyon – here’s Julien from Perseide…

How did you get the title of your latest release, and what does it mean to you?
Our new song is called ‘Siren In The Distance’ and it deals with the feeling of fake reality that you can encounter when you’re high or locked in the prison of social media… You can crave for more as far as possible, but the siren of reality will always sound in the distance. We share the message that happiness is possible to find in real life without fighting useless struggles. This song is taken from our album The Only Thing.

What was the hardest part about putting this release together, and why?
As we are not professional musicians, each member of the band usually spends a lot of time at work… In consequence, the recording process for the album was long… but quite enjoyable. For a few months, we met each other to record the album step by step. It was the hardest part about putting this release together, but we really liked writing and recording it, because it gave us the chance to spend time together and enjoy our friendship.

What do enjoy most about producing your own material?
It is very enjoyable for us because it allows us to record an album that sounds like who we really are, uncompromisingly. We put everything we love in this album, with all our heart and all our energy!

What do you want the listener to take away from listening to your music?
All that we want for our listeners is to enjoy. To feel free to love the music as we love it, no matter the style or influence. We have a lot of music influences and we always wanted to enjoy them together even if they could be contradictory. In a day of your life, you can be happy, sad, angry or crazy. The best way to live these emotions is to let them flow through you and to express them without holding back… That’s what we want to share with our music: you can be all these things at once and music helps us to escape; even for the time of a song. Living and sharing this with our listeners to make them live these emotions with us to feel better is the more important thing for us.

How does a track normally come together? Can you tell us something about the process?
Adrien (lead guitar) and I usually start a song with a pre-established framework that we propose to the other musicians. Then, they make musical arrangements to fit to everyone’s taste and we play the song in rehearsal and then we play it live. If the song pleases the audience, we keep the final version for recording and drop it right to your ears!

What band/artists have influenced you the most since you started this project, and why?
We have a lot of inspirations: personally, I came into metal music with classic bands like Metallica or Slayer. Adrien (lead guitar) was educated with progressive metal and Guillaume (bass) is a big nu metal fan! As for Anthony (drums), he’s into electro music and that’s why he loves to kick his bass drum so much!!! But when it comes to modern music, the bands that have inspired us the most are Avenged Sevenfold, In Flames, The Used and Enter Shikari!

When the world is back to normal where would like to tour, and why?
If possible, we would like to drop a big rock party in our hometown to enjoy the return to a normal situation and share with our homies. We are planning to postpone the release show of our album for spring 2021 and we’re crossing every one of our fingers for the quarantine being over until this… During this time, we carry on working on new stuff and we are ready to record new songs very soon and took advantage of the lockdown to prepare a lot of surprises when the crisis will be over!

If you could pick one track for our readers to listen to in order to get a taste of your music, what would you pick, and why?
The first single of our album, ‘Sell Yourself’, is a true love story because it was the beginning of a new story for the band with the release of the album. It deals with the paradoxical love-hate relationship that we live with our screens: we love them for what they can bring in our life, but we hate them when we sell ourselves for fake glory.

What ambitions do you have for the band/your career?
We would like to be more popular than The Beatles (laughs).

Finally, as you leave the stage, what are your parting words?
“How can Guillaume still play tuned notes after drinking so much before going on stage?” (laughs)

For more info visit: facebook.com/perseidemusic