Studio Diary: As Daylight Fades - Love//Loss

Hailing from Glasgow, As Daylight Fades’ bluntly titled Love // Loss, is as bleak a musical proposition as such a thematic suggests. Boasting four metalcore tracks audibly soaked through with frustration, thundering riffs and breakdowns provide a furious backdrop for Clarke’s desperate vocal tirades: “The lyrics cover the idea of facing the world alone, and the challenges you’ll face whilst doing so,” relays the singer, “Everything comes to an end.” ‘Love//Loss’ is out 27th May, here is how they created it…

We chose to record Love//Loss with Mike Bennett at Foxhound Recording Studios. This was quite an easy decision for us since we'd heard about Foxhound from the large number of bands that have recorded there. After some research and a few conversations, we knew that Mike would make sure we left with an EP we could be proud of.

The weeks prior to heading into the studio was a hectic time for us. We scrapped every demo we had to make way for a whole new sound that we wanted to explore, which was ultimately due to our member changes. In turn, it meant that we had to spend almost 12 hours a day for 2 weeks finishing and refining demos so we were prepared and ready to go as soon as we entered the studio. Some days we would just continue the session over 2 days and sleep on the 3rd day. The final demo was finished literally 2 hours before we were due to leave! It may seem like we were tight for time, however, we knew from the start of the writing process how much time we had and we were able to recycle riffs and sections from previous demos and combine them to form 4 great tracks, rather than a few mediocre ones. We knew it was a tight deadline, but we worked as hard as we could and we wouldn't let ourselves enter the studio unprepared.

Day 1 // Drums: We chose to midi the drums, so we basically just opened the midi files in the studio and the drums were good to go. We then spent some time discussing possible changes with Mike and got his opinion on some sections/transitions etc as we did have some extra material. So, after that discussion we tweaked the drums to suit and decided to start guitars the next day with fresh ears.

Day 2 & 3 // Guitars: For us tracking guitars was a long process. Both ourselves and Mike wanted each section to be spot on so this meant that takes would range from 1 note to a few seconds, depending on which section we were recording. By the time we actually began recording guitars I think we were all sick of the sight of our instruments, but the drive we had to make the EP perfect overruled that feeling and we powered through.