Demons (member of Mae) releasing debut LP 'Embrace Wolf' (stream a track)
Virginia’s Demons is a new band led by Mae guitarist Zach Gehring, but Demons is a much heavier musical endeavor than Mae. Zach released Demons’ debut EP Great Dismal in 2015, and he’ll release their first full-length, Embrace Wolf, on December 1 via Spartan Records (pre-order). They added guitarist/accompanying vocalist Chris Mathews to the lineup of Gehring, Jonathan Anderson (bass), and Drew Orton (drums) for this album, and they say “[this time around] we’ve started behaving more like a band.”
You can get a taste of their new collaborative approach on “Always Your Own,” which premieres in this post. It’s sort of a mix of Hot Water Music’s aggressive punk and Queens of the Stone Age’s hypnotic hard rock, but it also has too much spirit to just be boiled down to a couple comparisons. Here’s what Zach tells us about the song:
I came up with the initial idea idea for the song in Austin (while on tour with Mae). We were playing the Mohawk and it was storming really bad so the show was delayed. I had all this nervous energy waiting to see if we were going to be able to play or not, and I started going between these two chords and it kind of caught my mood at the time – anxious, frustrated, uncertain. Once I brought it to Demons it developed really quick. I love how short it is, we love playing the song live because of that break down, and it was the first song that was written for the new record. Lyrically the song is about cowardice; self-critical black holes, self-imposed limitations, and the rationalizations of those limitations that can disguise the root of the problem.
Listen below:
