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“It’s about my family and our history of dementia”: Listen to Lorna Shore’s heaviest song to date
Watch Lorna Shore’s epic video for their hellacious new track, Prison Of Flesh…
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Lorna Shore: “The band’s growing so fast that it’s hard to keep your hands on the wheel. Sometimes you’ve got to let it drag you around”
Since the recruitment of the demonic-voiced dynamo Will Ramos, Lorna Shore’s ascension to the top of the metal mountain has been rapid, with blistering festival sets and sell-out shows. As they prepare to unleash another dose of hellfire in I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, the fearless frontman takes us inside the personal trauma that feeds the record, and why they’re breaking free of expectation…
- Words:
- James Hickie
- Photography:
- Mike Elliott
Will Ramos’ eyes are widening with excitement. He lifts his index finger in the universal gesture for ‘one moment’ before pushing his wheely office chair back from his desk.
We're currently in the room that doubles as his studio and repository for his mementos, musical and otherwise. The purple wall behind him and the shelving unit flush to it are adorned with wooden swords and surfboards, LEGO sets, One Piece figurines and Hawaiian flower garlands. Some has been accrued on Will’s travels with his band Lorna Shore, while other bits have been given to him by fans.
“It might look like garbage but that’s because it’s not lit properly,” Will says of what appears to be a perfectly presentable display. “But all of these things are treasures.”
Ask him which of these items has the greatest significance and that’s when he sends his chair flying backwards, with him in it, to the other side of the room, before returning clutching a black book with the words The Rat Club on the front.
The Rat Club is the name of Will’s clothing label, though it started out as a community on Patreon, where the vocalist would share music markedly different from that created for his day job; he discusses the venture in the past tense today, despite the last post to the group, a cover of Emergence by Sleep Token, being uploaded as recently as August 18. Regardless of its current status, however, it proved extremely popular, resulting in Will conducting some meet and greets, though these had to be curtailed when things became too chaotic. But before that happened, somebody presented him with the book he’s now holding. He cried when he first received it.
“It’s the most fucking beautiful thing ever,” Will exclaims as he leafs through pages adorned with writing of various colours and numerous photographs. “Somebody started this and wrote a message for me, with a picture of when we met, then shipped it to the next person who did the same, then the next person, and so on. It must have taken months, at least, because these people come from all over the world, not just the U.S., but Europe and South America… this book has been in so many different people’s hands.”
It won’t be long until those same people, and many others, will be able to get their hands on Lorna Shore’s fifth studio album, which we’re here to discuss today. I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me sees the band’s characteristic brutality married to breathtaking scope and creative restlessness, rewriting the rules of what a deathcore record can be. It’s sure to invite the kind of adulation that Will’s black book suggests he’s no stranger to. It’s epic yet intimately personal.
Given that latter quality, it’s apt that we meet Will at his place in Middlesex County, pretty much slap-bang in the middle of New Jersey. This isn’t where he grew up, mind. Growing up, his time was split between Edgewater on the banks of the Hudson River – where residents are nicknamed The River Rats – and Leonia, both of which are 40-plus miles away from here. With his family scattered throughout the state, it stands it the emotional epicentre of a record that deals with serious issues close to home.
The album's ominous title comes from a lyric to the track Prison Of Flesh, about how dementia – a syndrome prevalent in Will’s family – cruelly steals the agency and identity of those we love. “I think it’s one of the saddest things you can watch happen to someone,” he sighs. “It’s a very, very slow death that you’re forced to watch happen over time, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop it from happening.”
Will’s paternal grandmother has been living with dementia for some time and is now “so far gone” that she doesn’t recognise her own family. “I used to see her in the street and there would be times when I wouldn’t say anything to her, just to see if she would recognise me while I’m walking past her,” admits Will. “It’s been so many times now, and she has no idea who I am.”
His aunt is also experiencing cognitive decline, though it’s less advanced. She still regularly calls and texts Will about road closures in her local area in North Jersey, though, mistakenly believing he still resides there, despite him moving away several years ago. “I’ll thank her but remind her that I don’t live there anymore, and am actually quite far away from there now. She’ll say, ‘Oh okay, yeah…’ then later on she’ll tell me again.”
Will’s sadness is manifested in lyrics that liken dementia to an evil spirit possessing its victim (‘Something has come for my mind, slowly it eats me inside’), leaving them as little more than a husk (‘A hollow body vacant of all but fear’), while he seemingly suggests he’s afraid the same fate awaits him (‘I can’t escape the dark within / These demons reside in me’).
This is likely because Will is much younger than the rest of his family and acutely aware of the fact. By his own admission, he was the “surprise child” when he turned up 31 years ago. His parents already had three daughters when he was born, the youngest of which is 15 years Will’s senior and has a son three years younger than him. “My family is old,” he says, matter of factly. “I’m looking at how old everyone is getting and I don’t want to have any regrets should somebody pass away.”
His mother and father were both born in Puerto Rico, a country in which up to 85 per cent of the population reportedly identify as Roman Catholic. Despite emigrating to the States, they remained resolutely pious, insisting their children went to mass every Sunday and even after school. If one of Will’s parents is more ardent than the other, it’s his mother, who envisaged him becoming what he characterises as her “Christian salsa son” – a well turned out young man respectful of faith and family traditions. Unfortunately for mum, but fortunately for fans of increasingly experimental deathcore, that wasn’t to be.
“I remember having a particularly massive fight with her. I had facial piercings everywhere,” he recalls, running his hand in front of the offending area that, these days, sports less adornments than it did but is still likely to cost Will a job in the hospitality industry. “[My mom] was telling me, ‘I don’t want you to hang out with those friends of yours. They’re not good. They have all these piercings and listen to heavy metal.’ She didn’t understand at the time that I was that too. That was who I was. She might have seen it as a phase, but in my mind that was me – I like having piercings and I like being able to be the person that I want.”
“I like having piercings and I like being able to be the person that I want”
In the age of emerging AI, when things are increasingly created algorithmically, you’d be hard pressed to recreate someone like Will Ramos, however many reference points you had to draw from.
Motormouthed to the point of breaking the sound barrier, his focus on the topic at hand is absolute, to the point that he ejects his meowing cat from the room during this interview, otherwise his ADD would leave him unable to concentrate on anything else.
His conversation is like a performance, unleashed in its execution but uncontrived in its content, with the low register of his voice surprising for someone so impish. He says exactly what he’s thinking, gesticulating wildly as he does, with his trademark fringe – curly, swept to the right and dyed a similar purple to the walls – flailing like his arms.
It’s Will’s conviction in who he is and what he does that’s helped Lorna Shore become who they are. They started out in 2009, formed by guitarist Jeff Moskovciak, who departed in 2011 – with none of the men in that original iteration in the band today. By the time Will joined in 2020, initially as a touring member, the group had three albums and four ex-vocalists to their name.
In the five years since, they've had an overhaul and experienced a significant upswing in their fortunes. The track Hellfire was released on June 11, 2021, the same day Will was announced as being an official member. In a turn of events that even the men at the heart of it still fail to comprehend, the six-minute track became a viral sensation, thanks to the #LornaShoreChallenge, which saw people on TikTok attempt to approximate Will’s ungodly vocals with varying degrees of success. To date, the track has had more than 73 million streams on Spotify – a feat they capitalised upon with 2022’s Pain Remains, and will continue to do so with I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me.
It’s an unprecedented advancement for a band with such an extreme sound and it shows no sign of slowing either. Anyone who caught the five-piece – completed by guitarists Adam De Micco and Andrew O’Connor, bassist Michael Yager, and drummer Austin Archey – at Download Festival in June knows that even a brief power cut couldn’t stop their set from being among the best of the weekend. Plus, their three-date tour in February alongside Whitechapel, Shadow Of Intent and Humanity’s Last Breath includes their first headline show at London’s 10,400-capacity Alexandra Palace. It’s not their first appearance there, though – that came in September 2022, as guests of Parkway Drive.
“I can’t see us being able to hold a candle to a band like that – we’re a shell of what that band is,” says Will of the impression left on him by the Byron Bay bruisers. “We’re going to be headlining a place that they’ve headlined, so my imposter syndrome makes me think, ‘This shit don’t make no fucking sense!’ But we’re doing it, so let’s just look forward to it, stay positive, and make the best of all these, ‘Oh shit!’ experiences that we never thought we’d get to do.”
Parkway’s influence permeated Lorna Shore’s ambitions on Unbreakable, their “arena song” according to Will and an assault of symphonic proportions that encompasses orchestral elements, blistering double kick and the kind of breakdowns that will undoubtedly elicit stank faces from Winston McCall and the boys, and a lot more people besides. That includes Will’s parents, who despite being in their 70s have reportedly grown to love their son’s music. “That’s because [the band is] doing good,” reasons Will, allowing a moment of cynicism. “If it wasn’t then they’d be like, ‘This sucks! What the fuck is this?!’”
About a year ago, his father attended his first heavy metal show. Before then, Mr. Ramos Snr. didn’t have much of an idea about what Will did, beyond the fact he was in a band. That changed the moment he had the Lorna Shore live experience – a sizeable venue, sold out crowd, pyrotechnics and all. “He was like, ‘He’s not in some shitty little band – and there’s literally fire onstage!’” laughs Will. “It took him a long time to get on board but he’s happy now.”
Will’s stoked that his band have helped him to build bridges with his father. His parents divorced when he was 12, so he’d alternate his time between both. This wasn’t a custody arrangement, though; when Will lived with his dad, tempers would often fray and he’d end up at his mum’s; when he was with his mum, she’d refuse to accept him being “a metal person” (her words) so he’d go back to dad – and so on. Thankfully, with his parents both living within the vicinity of Will’s high school, that provided him with some degree of continuity.
Somewhere along the line, Will and his father grew “very far apart” and stopped contact with one another. Will isn’t sure exactly how long for, other than that it was a period of years, during which the estrangement increasingly played on his mind. Eventually, his awareness of time’s irreversible march onwards motivated Will to take a trip to see his father. And when he did, he was struck by the change in his old man, who’d become just that, an old man, whose hair was no longer salt and pepper flecked as he remembered it, but snowy white.
“I wanted to get that fatherly feeling back, whatever it is,” reasons Will. “I had to make amends because I know he’s getting fucking old.” The exceptional track Glenwood, which comes complete with a histrionic guitar line coasting over a pummelling onslaught, is about that reunion, centring on the refrain ‘Can we go back to how we used to be?’ before a choral conclusion conveys the beauty of reconciliation.
“I wanted to get that fatherly feeling back... I had to make amends”
How do bands go about writing songs? Common sense dictates they come up with riffs that are built out into fuller arrangements, then paired with words that reflect and are deepened by the music. That’s not how Lorna Shore operate. It’s fair to say their creative workflow is a little more strange, and given that the making of I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is the longest time this iteration has ever spent in the studio, there was plenty of space for what some might consider rather hippy-dippy practices.
“We all sit down and ask, ‘What kind of vibe do we want?’” reveals Will. “Even if you have to describe it as a physical object or a verb, it doesn’t matter.”
How, in practice, did that lead them to a track like the incessantly aggressive War Machine?
“Someone would have said the vibe is ‘angry’,” explains Will of a process that essentially sounds like word association. “Someone might then say ‘gun’, then ‘boom’, then ‘explosion’, and eventually we’d get to War Machine. We’d write all these ideas down on a big moodboard on the wall with words and pictures to encapsulate each song idea, then we’d all go into our corners and fucking hash it out. Adam would have his guitar, as musically we’d have to start somewhere, and we’d present to ‘the class’ at the end of the day, and give notes on each other’s stuff.”
While this doesn’t sound like the most sophisticated way of doing things, and it’s unclear whether the chaos is down to methodology or Will’s excitable way of describing it, there’s no arguing that the end justifies the means. By having the members of Lorna Shore articulate what they want to convey with their music, with five individuals pitching in, it encourages a greater degree of nuance.
“It allows us to change things up, in the same way that, say, Gojira will have a fucking heavy song one moment and an ambient one the next,” continues Will. “I want that. I don’t think things have to be super-dark all the time. That’s not who we are as people. I think this is the most human version of anything we’ve ever put out. It’s all based on real stories and feelings that we’ve all experienced, individually or together, which we’ve never done before.”
As far as navigating this new chapter goes, that’s another question entirely. Will’s aforementioned imposter syndrome means he hasn’t really acclimatised to the breakneck pace of his band’s recent rise.
“I don’t know if it’s this generation or what,” he suggests. “But I remember talking to someone recently about this – when I do something that’s really good, rather than me feeling really good about it, I just move on to the next thing without giving myself a moment to process it. Lorna is growing so fast and there are so many things happening, that it’s hard to keep your hands on the wheel, so sometimes you’ve got to let the wheel just drag you around.”
That feeling that everything’s aligned, that mixture of contentment and satisfaction, is something Will rarely feels. It’s special for him when it does arrive, then, as it forces upon him the self-reflection he rarely entertains.
“I’ll be eating food somewhere, before heading back to the venue,” Will says of the kinds of scenarios when it strikes. “And those are the only things I need to think about at that point: eating and getting back to the venue.
“But I’ll suddenly think, ‘Everything in this moment right now feels immaculate.’”
I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is released September 12 via Century Media.
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