'Dark Sun' is Dayseeker's moment, catapulting the band beyond the scene's stratosphere.
Orange County is celebrated for their sun-soaked surroundings, as represented by every pop culture reference related to California. But the sun has been blackened for the post-hardcore band, Dayseeker.
As rising stars of the genre since their 2013 debut What It Means To Be Defeated, Dayseeker have been storming the post-hardcore scene with their impressive live shows and sober songbooks. That solemn tone continues to be present in their juxtaposing latest album Dark Sun and coinciding single and music video release for the track ‘Crying While You’re Dancing’.
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In a melancholic prom-style setting, the music video had a Euphoria-inspired direction envisioned by both the team merchandising coordinator and their band manager.
“What’s interesting was we did our headliner in April this year and we got our merch girl, her name is Armani, who loved the song, she picked it as our lead single and she said she saw a Euphoria vibe to it. It was really weird because we hung out with our manager a few days later in Ohio, his name is Corey and then we started talking about it and then he hadn’t talked to Amani at all, but he was also like, “yeah, I just see kind of like a Euphoria vibe”. And it was just weird because they both had this same idea,” explains frontman Rory Rodriguez.
“And so we just brought that kind of idea to the videographer. And we set up like an open kind of casting call to a bunch of our fans via Instagram and we ended up with like 40 or 50 extras. We were just like “just show up in like prom attire and you just have to kind of awkwardly dance around while we would sing”, so I’m really happy with how it came out though.”
The track deciphers the struggles Rodriguez has seen friends go through with suffocating their mental health issues in favour of a relationship with alcohol while the album centres predominantly around Rodriguez’s grief journey. Rodriguez’s father sadly passed away shortly after the birth of the vocalist’s daughter.
“I definitely feel like most of the Dark Sun I ended up writing about my father’s passing, ‘Crying While You’re Dancing’ wasn’t really targeted around that because I didn’t wanna write that many songs just about death. Like I mean we are like a sadder style band. But it’s nice to give a variety of topics,” he says.
“‘Crying While You’re Dancing’ was just more generalized. It’s about people who act like they’re having the time of their lives but it’s so clear to a lot of people that they’re spiralling or just going through a really tough time.”
The heavier subject of his father’s passing is evident in tracks ‘Neon Grave’, ‘Midnight Eternal’, the titular track ‘Dark Sun’ and ‘Parallel’, a track that explores the concept of parallel universes, which is further echoed in their album artwork.
“With ‘Parallel’ the verses are very graphic and explicit in detailing what my experience was like with like watching my dad pass away in hospice for a few days when he was unconscious, and then the choruses are more like – because I had dated this girl was a scientist, very, very briefly, like a year ago, she told me she found some findings from a couple of very smart people who discovered some theory or some equation that basically proved that parallel universes and dimensions were like a real thing. I don’t know how true that is, but I just thought it would be really interesting – so the choruses are about the idea of my dad being like alive and well in a different universe where like, he’s not suffering and he doesn’t have cancer or Parkinson’s,” explains Rodriguez.
It’s not the first time that Rodriguez has referenced his father in his lyrics, but Dark Sun is both a way for Rodriguez to celebrate his father and channel his grief.
“Grief isn’t linear, you know. I mean it was very, very sad, like right when it happened, but there are days where like I feel like it’s horrible but I have acceptance of it and then there are other days that are like a lot harder than others so but I feel like having the chance to write so much about him was really nice and I feel like if he exists in like any other sort of realm of the afterlife, I think he would be like really excited or just happy that we are like highlighting something about him for pretty much like half of the album.I wrote songs about him when he was alive and I know he was always like very happy or excited when we got to do that. So I think he’d be psyched if he knew we ended up writing most of this new album about him.”
Initially meant as a one track life, the topic of Rodriguez’s father was too full to fit in four minutes.
“We wrote ‘Neon Grave’, it was like the first song on the album that we wrote. I thought that we would just squeeze everything in that song about my dad, and then I realized there was just so much more to talk about. Sometimes it’s hard to even finish just one song about one topic but this ended up spanning into like five different songs in the album.”
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Whilst Dark Sun represents the end of a life, it further represents the departure of Dayseeker from the post-hardcore scene as evident in both their new sonic palette and visual direction, particularly with ‘Crying While You’re Dancing’.
“Using dark buildings and clouds and rain and stuff like with the prom scene is probably another reason is that we’re trying to jump a little bit out of the metal hardcore scene, you know? But I think that’s pretty obvious with a lot of the new music. Our brand is just really depressing content so I think it’s reflective of the music.”
Check out Dayseeker’s new direction yourself. Dark Sun is out now via Spinefarm Records.
This article was made in partnership with Bigmouth PR
