What led you to tackle that one?īrubaker: “I’m a big fan of that show and soundtrack. The Westworld theme is considerably heavier, but also continues the instrumentally expansive and adventurous approach of the “reprise” tracks. Like, 'Oh, this part would be cool to use this vibe…' It was very in-the-moment. “I took Dustin's leads and re-amped them, and then we just kind of went through each section of the song and added what we could. “Then he re-recorded all the leads on the clean channel and when he was done with that he passed the track off to me and our producer. thank you, Dustin, because I didn't have to do it! Dustin's actually responsible for writing the music for Extinct by Instinct, and for both of these songs what we did was, Dustin recorded all the rhythm guitars on acoustic which. That's kind of how things have always gone when we've done these acoustic versions. How did you approach the guitars when it came to rearranging them?īrubaker: “It was very on the fly. So we held two songs back, which are the tracks Standing in the Storm and Icarus We had extra material after finishing Guardians because we didn't want a 13 song record – it just felt too dense. So two completely different songs came from those reprises, which is very cool.” “Extinct by Instinct definitely lent itself to be a “reprise” track because it already had a lot of atmospheric stuff in it, and Paramount was fun as well because it's more rhythmic – those types of songs are really fun to tackle because you can add a lot of new ideas that are very rhythm-based.

But when you strip them down and remove those elements there's a lot more room to add these other elements that you can't fit in there otherwise. It's a considerably lighter approach.ĭustin Davidson: “I think what's really fun about it is, these songs, the way they are on Guardians with the metal guitars and the distortion, that all takes up a lot of space. The two “reprise” tracks receive a much different reading here than on Guardians. “But then during the pandemic we had a lot of downtime, of course, and so we recorded the two acoustic “reprise” versions of two Guardians songs, as well as the Chop Suey cover and the Westworld theme.”

So we held two songs back, which are the tracks Standing in the Storm and Icarus. Was the majority of the material we hear on the new Guardians Sessions EP recorded at the same time as the Guardians album? “And then you're just like, ‘Okay, we've done that, let's do something new.’” “You can only write so many breakdowns and Swedish metal riffs and that kind of stuff,” Brubaker adds. It makes it possible for the band to continue to grow and evolve.” But something like this EP allows us to get really experimental while not turning off any kind of our regular fanbase. That goes for our playing, too, and learning new sounds and new scales to help us take the music in different directions.”ĭavidson sat down with guitarists JB Brubaker and Brent Rambler to discuss these different directions, and how that mindset played out in the creation of the Guardians Sessions EP.Įxplains Rambler, “We've had a core group of fans for 18 years that we don't want to turn away by being too experimental. “But at the same time we have such a wide range of things we can do musically, and I feel like the sky's the limit for what we can throw into a song. “We have this home-base that we always come back to, and that's the heavy side of our music. “We always want to push the boundaries on our sound,” bassist Dustin Davidson tells Guitar World. Something like this EP allows us to get really experimental while not turning off any kind of our regular fanbase Brent Rambler

August burns red chop suey