Feature: Of Concrete Gods Give Us A Track By Track Of New EP Out Today

The EP has been a bit of a labour of love over the last few years. Technically we started recording it at the beginning of 2020, but the process was halted by a couple of factors. Firstly Covid got in everyone’s way, not just ours. But in the middle of Covid our drummer Paul was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a form of Leukaemia.

This meant that once restrictions were lifted from Covid, we found ourselves without a drummer as he had more than a year’s worth of treatment ahead of him. We didn’t want to put someone else in his seat so we wrote, recorded, and released an acoustic EP “Our Trauma is not a Competition” which was released last summer.

Paul came back to us full time last year, once that EP had been released, and we started to work on the remainder of “HurtPeopleHurtPeople”

Recording was finished over February of 2023, and the shape of the EP had changed somewhat since we started recording in 2020 – making the acoustic album had moved our headspace away from being particularly heavy, and we’d leaned more into melody and harmonies. So some of the newer songs really reflect that.

The final EP contains two songs from those original 2020 sessions, and three songs that have been written in the interim. It also serves thematically as a prequel to the Trauma EP- – where Trauma was the story of a man digging himself out of the aftermath of rock bottom, Hurt is the story of how he ended up there.

Track by Track

Her Embrace is a track about co-dependency and depression, and how illogical these things can sometimes be. The main song is driven by a rant, trying to find ways for the things that are wrong to be the fault of an external source. It’s very much “this is not my fault, it must be yours” but then there is a key change after the solo that flips the mood to “please don’t leave me.” This inconsistency is a key part of the journey of depression and where it can lead you to, and sets the tone for the EP

Good Samaritan is arguably the heaviest track on the album, and by far the shortest. It is a quick slap to the face intended to highlight an aspect of human nature. Every person believes that they are the protagonist in their own story. People don’t do bad things because they are bad people, for the most part, they believe themselves to be good people who have been forced into a bad decision that they are not responsible for. Everyone believes themselves to be a Good Samaritan, but in reality, we should not write off the bad things we have done, we should hold ourselves accountable for them. We need to stop lying to ourselves

Chasing Clichés is a track about the wait for “The One” to show up and sweep us off our feet. This Disneyfication of love and friendship forces us into holding people to impossible standards, and frequently being disappointed in people when we should instead be thankful to have them in our lives. It is also often the case that we hold everyone else to a higher standard than we hold ourselves and as much as we try to change that, when tomorrow comes we all make the same mistakes

Death of the Fool is the dark centre of the EP, there is no other way to describe the track than as a suicide note signifying the arrival of rock bottom. It is the thoughts of a man who has realised that he is at the root of his problems, these things are not the fault of other people. He wraps up all his hopes and dreams and sews them inside of himself, so that he can carry them into a new world, one where he can hopefully be less prideful

Obsidian is a song in three parts, ultimately acting as a bridge between the fall of Hurt and the rise of Trauma. Our character finds himself in conversation with the mirror, at first sad, but then angry. He knows that he has had to kill off the old version of himself, but he acknowledges that there are parts of him he cannot change. He has to accept the paradox of things he feels he can’t do but knows that he will do, and the knowledge that it will burn everything down to do so. The track ends with a solo that allows him a few moments of reflection, before starting the climb back up into society

We’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to record all of our songs so far with the same Producer. Tim Kramer at Signal House Studios has become the proverbial sixth member of the band, and we likely would not have been able to meet the vision of this EP (both EPs to be fair) without his hard work and input. We’re really looking forward to hearing from listeners who take the journey with us.

Check out the bands track Her Embrace, below: