ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 6 SEPTEMBER 2022
Reliqa is a bright new band on the national prog metal circuit. Since gaining attention in 2018 with their very first release, they have already notched up a few milestones others can take much longer to achieve, from BIGSOUND showcases to international opening slots and touring festivals with major acts like Karnivool and Northlane. The band’s third EP I Don’t Know What I Am is a reflection of their persona as an unclassifiable creative juggernaut combining catchy djent riffs and grooves, blazing solos, electronica, melodic vocals and rap. A day or two after their Sydney appearance at Monolith, we took a few minutes with the charming Monique Pym
I got to see you live for the first time in Sydney with Caligula’s Horse. You didn’t have your bass player that night but you played the show anyway, which I really applaud, and I thought you pulled it off pretty well.
We were just so excited to be back on the road, and back on the stage, that we just wanted to make it work however we could, and I think that it worked out very well under the circumstances. We’re just glad we got to be there.
Reliqa’s new EP is called I Don’t Know What I Am, but right up until just before this interview started, I was actually calling it I Don’t Know WHO I Am!
So many people have been saying that! It’s what makes most sense, right? But it truly is an objective “what”. I’m not only talking about who I am as a person, but it’s also representational of what we are as a band, and our sound, and us as musicians within the industry. So it’s kind of like us as a collective ‘what’, rather than a singular ‘who’.
The arrangements are very weird, and there’s a lot of layering going on – there’s a lot in a short time, because your songs aren’t that long. There’s so much happening, and that can be hard to achieve without making it sound too stacked, which Reliqa doesn’t.
It’s definitely an interesting one to digest, I’ll stand with you there. It may take a few listens to really wrap your head around it. I think that’s one of the good things about condensing those ideas into a radio-length track, the three- or four-minute mark. We kind of go in all these different directions but we keep it… accessible. If you dive into a prog album, there’s two or three tracks on there that are ten to fifteen minutes long, which is fantastic, but we wanted to take that level of exploration and turn it into something that’s a little bit more accessible to a wider audience.
Often rapping can pull a listener out of the song, wondering what’s going on. With your songs it doesn’t seem that out of place.
Thank you, I’m glad you think so. I get a few questions about that, and the way I explain that is that I am not a scream vocalist. I could learn. I might, someday. I’m definitely not going to limit myself to not learning. But I’m pretty content with not having that in my arsenal right now because I try to use other techniques as a way to not use a standard melodic moment here, I want to use something more abrasive or aggressive – but what is it? Rap makes a lot of sense, and you can get a lot of ideas in. You should see the length of our lyric doc! For a four minute song, we’ve got a two page moment… it’s exhausting! It’s probably the coolest way we could get our ideas into the song in a tangible way that doesn’t involve your tradition metalcore screams or harsh vocals.
That adds a different kind of tension to your music, and obviously you can always get someone else to come in and do a growl or something, like Sean Harmanis does on Safety.
That’s right. I think that’s even cooler, because you’re bringing in other people who have things that are beyond the scope of your band, and you’re kind of appealing to their audience as well, so it’s kind of a tool to bring attention from other people. But it’s using these also other flavours and stuff you don’t have access to in the arsenal of your band. So I think that’s one of the cooler ways to incorporate that sort of style.
The heavy music scene has really picked up in Australia in recent years and that means we’re getting bands like Reliqa coming through and getting some great opportunities. Monolith, of course, must have been amazing.
It has been incredible. We are just swimming amongst giants right now!
You’ve done a couple of other big shows too.
We did Full Tilt earlier this year. That was incredible – Northlane, Void of Vision, Thy Art. We played with Thy Art earlier this year in Brisbane too. We’ve had a lot of cool shows coming through, and a few more to announce, which is exciting.
What was it like working with Chris Blancato?
Chris Blancato was incredible to work with. One of the key things about this EP for us is that’s it’s a massive step up in production quality, and you’ll definitely hear that for listeners who’ve heard our earlier material and Eventide, stuff like that. This is definitely a step up in production. It was really cool because we not only did the recording work with Chris, we also did a lot of pre-production work so we sat down and did some work on the songs as they were as demos, and he gave us an outsider perspective. We picked apart the songs a little bit and that was so valuable. I think we would definitely do that again on new music, and we’ll 100% work with Chris again. He was incredible.
The EP is out on the 16th. What have you got coming up in the meantime?
We’ve got the final leg of Monolith, so we’re trekking over to Perth. That’s actually the day after the EP releases, so that’s going to be cool. We’re going to be on a plane, with the EP out, and we’re not going to be able to watch in real time how the EP’s going. I think what’s going to happen is, we’re going to wake up in the morning, the EP will be out, we’ll be on a plane for five hours, and then when we get our wifi back on, hopefully we’ll have a lot of messages and stuff! It’s going to be like a present, for when we get over to the other side.
Does it feel in some ways like the first EP you’ve done, rather than the second or third release?
That’s actually a really good question, and actually I think it kind of does. Because, as they say, there’s a first time for everything, and there’s been a lot of first in this campaign: first time releasing under new management, first time releasing with a bookings team – that is, a wider release, first time for this, that, and the other. It’s definitely a new approach to releasing, and it definitely feels like the first time. There’s been a few people who’ve mistaken it for our debut, and it’s not – but it kind of is, in some ways. I understand the feeling that it could be.
For a band that really hasn’t been around that long, you’ve already played quite a lot of big shows with some major names: Northlane, Karnivool, Thy Art is Murder, Sevendust.
Definitely, but I will never forget the shows we started with. The local shows on the Coast, just doing that cycle over and over, just the rest of the bands on the line-up and two payers! The fact that we played those types of shows not that long ago – just over two years ago – is an asset to the shows we’re doing now, because it keeps us excited. It keeps us humble, I guess, because we were literally there only a little while ago. The energy of those shows, and the bands that played those local shows, is off the hook. Taking that energy and moving into a bigger stage setting has been a really big asset to us.
