For Melbourne punk-rock five piece Captives, 2021 has been a year of enduring long days in lockdown but fruitful in terms of recording and releasing new music. Today they unleash their blistering new single 'Villain’, which attacks all your senses at once creating a raw and electrifying follow up to ‘Buried and Bones’.
The track was recorded at The Alamo studio in Melbourne and produced and mixed by Tyson Fish (Vance Joy, Mammal, Children Collide) and mastered by Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Cog, Shihad).
“This track was sitting around for a while, it was definitely one of the first ones that got put down in the demo process. I’m pretty sure it began with a bit of a boozy night (no doubt) over at Tommy’s place pre-pandemic times. Tom wrote the lyrics, and I just got the pleasure of singing it, so it was a bit like doing karaoke for me but it’s a killer tune. In the studio Tyson (producer) added the Greta Thunberg sample at the start and middle of the track and now when I hear the song it’s definitely got some kind of an environmental theme about it, but I’m not sure that’s what the song was even about in the first place haha," explained frontman Aaron Damon.
This was the first time the band had attempted writing digitally and remotely due to Melbourne’s challenging lockdown. Thankfully ‘Villain’ hasn’t lost any of the punch of their previous singles.
“For us, you can’t beat having all 5 of us in a room and creating tunes with the energy from us all. Thankfully, we were able to get into a studio in between Melbourne lockdowns and track the record. I think if anything, we’ve learnt to adapt our writing process and it’s only going to benefit us in the long run. In saying that, I can’t wait to be in a room with the band and just be able to play some songs again," added drummer Matthew Damon
Aaron continued, “It’s definitely been a challenging time trying to create music. We got pretty lucky in a sense with the timing of it all. In between lockdowns in Melbourne, we try to get as much done as we can in the studio then we seem to run into a wall of more lockdowns, so it’s slowed the process to a degree, but I guess it doesn’t really matter because there isn’t a lot going on anywhere yet. The whole industry is suffering with these border closures.”
‘Villain’ is accompanied by a highly polished lyric video created by some of their talented friends. Speaing of the new clip, Mattew explained, “Alex Hingston and Dave Hunter did an amazing job to pull the video together. We’ve never done a ‘lyric video’ before, but I feel like it’s got a bit more to offer than just your standard lyric video.”
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