Providence screamers Dreamwell are about to release one of the heaviest – on every level – albums of the year: In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You. Here, Keziah ‘KZ’ Staska and Aki McCullough reveal everything that went into it…
Keziah ‘KZ’ Staska listened. Dreamwell’s vocalist had words in their pocket – coruscating words shot through with theatre and doubt and self-recrimination – that needed to find music of similar violence and complexity. So they bided their time as their bandmates worked, eager to snatch the right kind of noise from the air. “I waited to hear them start playing something that spoke to me,” they say.
Their patience was rewarded with the instrumental that became All Towers Drawn In The Equatorial Room, a gut-wrenching emotional ordeal that explodes close to the midpoint of the Providence band’s feverishly brilliant second LP In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You. ‘I would bash my skull against a brick wall if you told me happiness might leak out,’ KZ yells, surrounded by relentless, stabbing guitars.
This is a heavy piece of work. Heavy in the way things in these pages are usually heavy, sure, but also emotionally and intellectually taxing. Across 11 songs that surge and howl, moving between gnarly screamo, blackgaze bliss-outs, quick-witted melodies and pummelling noise, Dreamwell take us to the brink, employing studious pacing and a catch-and-release sort of chaos to create an immersive experience that’s never anything other than challenging and, often, unnerving.
That abrasive yet meticulous philosophy is part of the record’s DNA. In following up 2021’s Modern Grotesque, the band found that their writing strayed from the more scattergun approach that yielded their debut and, eventually, they leaned into a loose concept, navigating a series of horrifying not-quite-dream states that sprang from KZ’s pages. “The first few songs were us as a band just writing what we were thinking of and KZ writing lyrics along with it,” guitarist Aki McCullough recalls. “As we kept writing things got more intentional.”
After noticing a series of recurring themes KZ began employing a narrator, using the conceit as a way to prise the doors off a discussion of interpersonal relationships and Borderline Personality Disorder. “It was a way for me to get more out of the creative side of the writing process, to be able to string together visual elements and symbolism so I wasn’t just writing really bare bones, confessional lyrics,” they say. “It almost forced me to be more considerate of the fictitious elements.
“Just because I’m writing from my own experience doesn’t mean I want everybody to have to experience the same thing that I am,” they continue. “I was trying to take my specific experiences and boil them down to a feeling, which you can apply to a lot of things. The ability to explore and engage with it in your own way is important, particularly with the spiritual imagery that’s happening in the front half. All of the stuff I’m talking about with astrology and tarot is about interpretation – it’s about not having a literal answer.”
Last summer Dreamwell – completed by guitarist Ryan Couitt, bassist Justin Soares and drummer Anthony Montalbano – had six weeks to finish the final six songs, putting in 10-to-12-hour days in the rehearsal space every Sunday before leaving for a tour where the new material was road-tested as an addendum to pre-production. “We were sitting in the van reviewing the pre-pro every day, taking notes while we’re driving to the next city we were playing in,” Aki says.
“We wouldn’t have wanted to play those songs quite as much as we did on that tour, but it was like, ‘We straight-up need to practice this so we’re ready when we go on to the studio.’ Anyone who came to that tour got the chance to see us play a lot of songs we haven’t played live since then.”
The next stage in the journey took them to the Noise Floor in New Hampshire, where over a two-month period they worked with returning producer Ryan Stack to bring the mayhem to life in an appropriately visceral way. In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You is home to performances that are punishingly intense, from the blastbeats that break open its first song, Good Reasons To Freeze To Death, to the skin-peeling Botch-esque guitar carnage of Body Fountain. “It was extremely exhausting,” Aki recalls, noting that she only recovered from a sprained finger in time to record her parts because she got COVID and had to delay anyway.
“We were doing two or three days for each of the instruments, eight-to-10-hour days. I’m a recording engineer, but I’ve never really liked the stress of having to worry about playing my parts, writing my parts and also recording the entire band [in Dreamwell]. I think outside input is really valuable, but as an engineer, I’m very harsh on myself when recording.”
“For the record,” KZ counters. “I ate a box of doughnuts and then recorded all my tracks in three hours. So, the process was really easy for me.”
The record closes with a roving seven-minute monster called Rue De Noms (Could Have Been Better, Should Have Been More) – honestly, save them a seat in the screamo hall of fame for their song titles alone – that shows how deliberate Dreamwell became over time. “As concepts were developing it influenced things like how we’re starting songs, how we’re ending songs,” Aki observes. “When we were writing in the second half, we definitely had an idea of where in the album a song would be.”
“We wrote that to be the song that finishes the album,” KZ concurs. “By then, that meant we had understood everything we’d done musically up until that point. I’d understood everything I’d done lyrically up to that point. How do we relate it to everything that’s happened?”
By using a sense of musical familiarity – pulling in recurring melodic motifs, passages of calm and neck-snapping changes in direction, essentially retracing their steps – the band’s decision not to tie up its thematic loose ends is made all the more effective. Rue De Noms is a lurid, confrontational, widescreen spectacle. It’s a massive set-piece that would, in other hands, result in a feeling of catharsis or closure, but its shuddering noise just… stops.
The credits roll, but the wounds haven’t been sewn shut.
Dreamwell’s In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You is out on October 20 through Prosthetic Records
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