Feature: Peaks! Give Us A Track by Track For New EP Futurephobia

Italian duo Peaks! have given us a track by track for the recent EP Futurephobia.

The duo comments:

“The concept behind Futurephobia is the realisation of how a certain moment can influence life and determine the future. Highs and lows can be pivotal, time is relative, would you bite or be eaten? Do you wanna play dead or live? Do you wanna stand up for your rights? Do you wanna change or live with regrets? Would your past become a future phobia? The choice is yours.”

Black Guns/White Drugs

Lorenzo: I clearly remember when we wrote this song. It was 2019, me and Luca were driving (don’t really remember where) and we were rocking with Rage Against The Machine. I said to Luca: “We should write a banger like that” and he said: “Let’s do this now”.
We made a U-turn and we came back in our home studio. The main riff was already in my head and in 10 minutes: “BOOM” the song was 80% ready.
It was so natural to come out with the whole song that I was sure it would’ve ended to become one of our singles and part of a record someday.

Fun fact: the “big toms” before the chorus was recorded by playing a “pedalboard soft case” with drumsticks. This is something that we always do. We use to sample things from our surroundings like objects, TV, radio and then we destroy those samples to obtain a fresh, new, unique sound.

WØLF

Lorenzo: for this song we combined 2 ideas that we wrote separately.
It all started with the howling that you can hear throughout the song. I had this unfinished project with basically just a verse and a drum pattern.
One day Luca came into my studio and I was freaking out because I loved the howling and the verse, but I couldn’t come out with a chorus.
He said, I have this chorus but I really can’t find the perfect verse (his chorus was in a different key and a slightly different tempo).
We started to complain about how difficult is sometimes to come out with new ideas and, in a moment, I realized what we had to do. I looked at Luca, he had a smile on his face, and I said: “Are you thinking the same thing that I do?”, we both said: “we should try to blend those two songs together!”.

That’s how the song has been written.

Bitebybite

Lorenzo: ‘bitebybite’ is a representation of how our desires are eating away at us from the inside.
We crave things that we don’t have, we point fingers at people that have different opinions, we’re all convinced that we’re the next star to shine. We tried to portray this culture of individualism by building a very dark and intense atmosphere, where desires are demons, waiting out there to eat us bite by bite.

This song is the quintessential of chopping and sampling. Except for the guitars and the vocals, everything that you hear in the song has been created by us using different samples and combining them into new shapes and sounds. As we said, we mostly use samples to create new samples and that is fun as hell.

Dead

Luca: we were mid pandemic when we wrote this song. Everything was uncertain and it seems that we couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It was a grey day, the night was about to come and it felt, simply, heavy.

Have you ever dreamed about your own death? Have you ever wish to be dead instead of keep going on and being stuck in the same routine over and over?
These are some of the thoughts that led us to the writing process of Dead. I remember that we had the lyrics and a sort of melody/beat and we were writing everything remotely using Zoom and sharing our screen and project on the DAW. We were playing this drum loop over and over and we thought that we had to portray that sense of loop even in the song (that’s why the chorus happens 5 times in the song).
We wanted something creepy, sad but grotesque at the same time, you know what I mean. Like something that is sad but you end up to laugh about.

Fun Fact: the Reverse Vocals in the bridge section is actually the second verse chopped, reversed and pitched down.

Turin

Luca: this song has a special place in my heart. I was living in Turin at that time but I wasn’t happy. Sometimes in the city you feel like you’re surrounded by people who calls you only when they need your help for something.
Turin is renowned for being always grey and I was feeling the same. I was driving back home and I started singing the chorus (cause Turin is grey, and so are you, think that I need a change, so save your regrets for another day) and I thought: “Well, that’s not bad at all”. I didn’t track anything and I think I forgot the lyrics as well.
Days later, I was rewatching the Fight Club for the millionth time and, in the final scene, when “Where is My Mind” kicks in, I found myself singing that chorus I thought I forgot on top of the main riff of the song and then, finally, I decided to track down the whole song using just an acoustic guitar and a mic.
I sent the idea to Lorenzo and he loved it. He added all the production things that you can hear in the final version: the hip hop beat, the strings and pizzicato part, the 90ish guitars and the powerful rock drums.

Listen to the EP here

Check out the track Wolf, below: