"I wrote this song about someone that I could tell was just starting to go down a dark path. Someone who was being manipulated by sensationalist and conspiratorial media and edgy online pundits. I've seen it happen quite a lot. It starts to alienate them from their friends and family until all they have is their ideology and the people that reciprocate it."
Adelaide alternative rock/metalcore band Throwaway are full of surprises. Their sound stretches through melancholic guitar melodies, fists-in-the-air anthems, screamed vocals, and wacky time signatures, all making up for a vibe that's uniquely Throwaway.
The band formed in 2015 and quickly amassed a cult following in their native city. After independently releasing an album, EP and numerous singles, Throwaway have returned with their second EP, Weight. Band members Zak Kerrison, Adrian Emili and Bailey O'Brien have formed a modern metalcore group; you can place them alongside heavy hitters like Bad Omens and chuggers like Northlane.
"As the title suggests, this EP revolves around the theme of Weight, with each of the songs exploring a different feeling associated with weight," the band revealed prior to the EP release.
Continuing, they said, "Crisis is about the state of the world and how quickly everything can come undone due to one small decision. The weight of the world can really be in one person's hands, whereas Bad Vibes is more about social standards and the weight of other people's opinions. Pressure steps into the feeling of standards being set that feel unachievable, but not giving in to the voices telling you to give up. Gone Too Soon is all about the impact the loss of a loved one has on a person, a very heavy feeling that everyone has experienced at some point in their life.
Throughout the entire listening experience Weight has to offer, there’s at least one song that everyone can relate to."
To celebrate the EP release, we caught up with Throwaway for a track-by-track exploration of the band's goals behind Weight.
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Pressure
Bailey: "Pressure is an anthemic and energetic track that resonates with self-empowerment and compels you to keep fighting. The song speaks about getting pushed to your limits and not giving up, taking whatever life throws at you and using it to your advantage."
Bad Vibes
Zak: "I wrote this song about someone that I could tell was just starting to go down a dark path. Someone who was being manipulated by sensationalist and conspiratorial media and edgy online pundits. I've seen it happen quite a lot. It starts to alienate them from their friends and family until all they have is their ideology and the people that reciprocate it. Although it takes a bit of a more critical tone, Bad Vibes recognises all this as self-destructive rather than unforgivably evil and that under all the anger and hate, there can still be a good person if they'd just let it all go."
Getting To Me
Zak: "This song has a pretty classic 'I'm depressed' lyrical theme. The lyrics kinda speak for themselves, they're not too deep, I was just sad and wrote a song about it. I sing about some of my experiences with insomnia, avoidance, self-harm, and loneliness. Basically, everything all at once just building up and really getting to me.
The more interesting part of this song to me is the instrumentation. The verses and bridge are in 7/4 time, which was pretty challenging to get to sound natural, and will definitely be a source of trouble during rehearsals. My favourite part to write was the little guitar solo after the first chorus. The style is a little on the lighter side for a Throwaway track because I had been listening to a bunch of synth-pop before writing it. And I guess the lighter tone plays into the idea of putting on a happy face when you feel like your life is falling apart. The chorus is fun, too, the first two are sung light, with falsetto taking over on the higher notes, whereas the last chorus is sung loud, with a bit of grit taking over the high notes instead."
Denied
Zak: "This song is about the continued rise of the internet and the decline in privacy and security that is coming along with it. You're being tracked through all of your searches and purchases so that companies can more precisely target you with ads and sell you more stuff. It's one of those things that everyone kinda knows, but not everyone really cares all that much about because they value the convenience of being able to have everything at their fingertips more than their privacy. Basically, this song is just advocating for you to download an internet browser ad blocker.
This song is a bit of a stylistic anomaly for us as well. Because of the subject matter, a techno/EDM-inspired bassline seemed fitting, and it is accompanied by a more monotone, almost robotic vocal melody to start with. But by the end, we just go nuts with a breakdown and angry final chorus."
Crisis
Zak: "This is our attempt at a completely balls-to-the-wall, pedal-to-the-metal heavy song. I'm screaming all the way through about how much I hate my life, sometimes it takes the perspective of a dark cloud in my head. I really was just getting everything out of my head and into the angriest song I've ever written."
Gone Too Soon
Bailey: "Gone Too Soon explores the deepened sadness of losing a close friend to suicide. It follows the hardships of reflecting on past memories and begs the ever-lingering question, 'could I have done more?'. Not only does it touch on the loss of a friend, but the song also teeters around an unstable mindset from the author's perspective as they struggle to cope with the impact. All in all, it’s an explosive realisation that there were signs and hints of a declining mental state and that things could have been prevented 'had you let me in'."
The Weight EP is out now; check it out here.