Recently, The Daily Cardinal spoke with Nathan Latona of the pioneering math-rock and experimental band Tera Melos about their upcoming album X’ed Out, which is set to release April 16.
When listening to X’ed out, it quickly becomes obvious it is not in the same vein as past Tera Melos records; the absurd riffing and incalculable time signatures of past releases are certainly not the center of attention. More so, there is a nuanced feel to their new record.
“This seemed like some territory that we hadn’t covered yet that we [felt] like we could cover well,” Latona said. “It was kind of exciting to do that. We don’t want to make any record twice, that’s just not fun. We went into this with kind of a different thought process like ‘Let’s not over-think a lot of these parts.’”
Maybe the most notable song on Tera Melos’ new album is the final track “X’ed Out and Tired,” which is mostly acoustic guitar and features no drums or bass guitar. Latona expressed he is particularly enthusiastic about this song.
“As far as [the] song that I’m excited for people to hear, I’m going to go with the last song on the record, it’s called ‘X’ed Out and Tired,’ because that is even more so definitely something that we have never done before,” Latona said. “It’s an acoustic song. I think it’s our take on an acoustic song. I don’t think it’s going to be too shocking to anybody, but I’m really curious to hear what people think because at one point I think we tweeted ‘Oh there’s an acoustic song on the new record,’ and it got met with like a really confused response.”
Since there is a stark difference between the songwriting on X’ed Out and past Tera Melos releases, it seemed appropriate to ask Latona if the band was planning to play older material on their upcoming tour. Latona said they were currently trying to figure out exactly what songs to prep for their tour with TTNG.
“I myself am really excited to play new stuff,” Latona said. “It’s going to happen to every band from here to the end of time: people are going to want them to play their old stuff, right? You know at this point, I’m not even sure what people mean when they say ‘old stuff,’ because we’ve had so many different, short little eras of the band that if somebody says ‘old stuff,’ they could just mean our last record, not even anything off our first record because we kind of established ourselves as a new band with [Patagonian Rats].”
And it’s hard not to agree with Latona on this front, as X’ed Out not only sounds completely different than Tera Melos’ other albums, the band has made significant personnel changes that have greatly affected them stylistically.
One thing I had to ask Latona about was why the band decided to name all of the songs on their self-titled album “Melody” 1-8, respectively, especially since one of the songs on X’ed Out is titled “Melody Nine.”
“When we wrote and were recording to put out our first record it was at a time when the trend for a lot of bands, and it seems like it still is even, it was long, funny song titles that have nothing to do with the song,” Latona said. “And that was our reaction to it, ‘Okay, we’re going to do the total opposite of this and make this like the most generic sounding song [titles] ever—Melodies 1-8.’ And we just thought it would be funny to continue with ‘Melody Nine.’”
Although X’ed Out is not necessarily the same as past Tera Melos albums, it offers songs with lots of potential for “replay-ability,” even for those who aren’t hardcore math-rock fans.
