The Raging River

Editors’ Notes “One thing that motivates me is constantly keeping momentum,” Cult of Luna vocalist and guitarist Johannes Persson tells Apple Music. “It doesn’t have to be forward, we just need to move all the time. As long as we’re intending to keep it fresh and do something new, I’ll keep doing it.” The Swedish metal band’s 2019 album, A Dawn to Fear, was a career high point: The band had assembled at a small studio off the Norwegian coast to record their eighth album, an 80-minute, eight-song triumph. But the writing process itself spawned what Persson describes as “some kind of creative explosion” that remained with the band long after the album was done. “Sometimes you feel like songs haven't lived up to their full potential just yet,” he says of the music left on the cutting room floor. “When you start to see an album form, it comes down to dynamics, and some of the songs might not fit. But they had potential.” The five songs on The Raging River were written during and after the album recording sessions, but the EP would have likely never happened had the pandemic not halted their 2020 plans. “We were able to go back and rework the songs with the extra time we had,” Persson says. “We weren’t ready to start writing an album, and we had no idea what was going to happen through the fall or the winter. So we just got some studio time and got on with it.” Below, Persson speaks more about each track on the band's enrapturing EP.

Three Bridges
“It was written really, really fast. We felt like we needed something a little heavier, a little faster maybe. I went home, spent a couple of days writing the skeleton of the song. I think we spent two or three practice sessions on it, and then we went to the studio. You never know what's going to come out in the studio, if the songs are going to work or not. On this recording, we didn't have an option. With every record we put out, it often feels like we're taking a chance when you write for your own sake. To be honest, if you've gotten used to people liking your stuff, you don't want to disappoint. But on this EP, there isn’t as much at stake as an album, so we can take chances, try out new stuff.”

What I Leave Behind
“That was a really hard song to put together. The version we recorded in Norway during the A Dawn to Fear session, it was just too massive. It's a very sludgy, brutal song, and I don't mind that at all, but it wasn't really dynamic enough. It’s thick and heavy, but if you're not careful, it can become boring and uninteresting. We kind of reworked it with some new ideas, some very small adjustments that made a lot of difference when it came to how the song turned out in the end. Sometimes I think that a song should just be what it is, but the living hypocrite that I am also thinks that you shouldn't release something you're not completely happy with. I'm glad we identified the aspects that didn't really work, and that we took our time and actually talked a lot about what had to change. It opened up the song up a lot. This version is way better.”

Inside of a Dream (feat. Mark Lanegan)
“We were 20ish-year-olds when we wrote ‘And With Her Came the Birds’ in 2005. We called it ‘The Lanegan Song’ during the writing process because we pictured him singing it. Fast-forward 15 years. In Norway, I had wanted it to sound like an old jazz song from the ’40s or ’50s. I recorded the guitar in one take with no pick, just my hands strumming the guitar. Then, when we started to discuss these new songs, it just popped up: Maybe this is the time we ask Mark Lanegan. I was half joking when I texted our manager, and he replied that he knew Mark’s manager really well. So we just asked him if he wanted to do it. Things worked pretty fast after that. Mark emailed me, we sent him the song. Then he sent me an email and I took my time to answer. I had too much to do at the time and I didn't want to just write an email without putting some thought into it. After a week, I wrote and told him that he's totally free to do whatever he wants, and asked if he wanted to write the lyrics or if I should. An hour later, he answered that he had recorded it the same day he got the song. ‘I can't do any retakes because I tore down the studio and moved from the house. I don't have internet here, but my friend is going to send you the song later tonight.’ I got it, and he didn't need to do any retakes. That's for sure. With that kind of a voice, I don't think you can do anything wrong. I definitely think he should be up there with Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen when it comes to this defining voice that he has.”

I Remember
“I wrote the lyrics about a pretty rough life-changing experience I’d had. Sometimes I struggle with lyrics, but they come more intuitively when you know exactly what you’re writing about. In one sense that actually makes it harder, but in another sense it’s easy, because you know where to direct your energy and your narrative. It doesn't come as naturally to me as writing music. Music is way more abstract, more of a gut feeling. When I write lyrics, I basically sit down and write the first sentence that comes up in my head. Then I write a second line, I try to find a rhythm just within the text, and I write and write and write until I’ve kind of found the rhythm. Then I take a step back, and usually I try to match what I've written lyric-wise with the song musically. It's not about the melody, it's more of a rhythm. If the rhythms mismatch, I have to rewrite so it matches.”

Wave After Wave
“I had this idea of making a song out of noise. There's tons of guitars there, just doing different things. I don't think you can hear everything, but there is a structure to it even though the background just sounds like noise. I wanted to contrast it with pretty simple chord changes. The actual chord progression is very easy, and it’s the glue that holds all the chaos together. We wrote it in Norway, and it’s pretty close to that version, it just didn't have a place on the album. When you write an album, you have limitations like time—say about 80 minutes. If you go over that, it becomes something different; it’s pushing the listener’s attention span.”