Track By Tracks: Heryos - The Magician (2023)

1. A Word:

A Word starts off the album with a pretty heavy atmosphere both musically and lyrically. It’s a song about dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts but mainly about trying to overcome those emotions. It’s about relapsing and trying again.

The first verse says “I have a word in my mind, a word that can make me deaf and blind” that “word” is suicide or more broadly death. It can make you deaf and blind (meaning being dead).

However, it’s also about attempting to overcome those extreme emotions. The chorus goes “Can I turn this emptiness Into love and fear?” which is symbolically the attempt of going back to feeling emotions and trying to escape the void of apathy.

“A broken heart needs time. A broken soul needs a rope or a rhyme”

That’s another typical feeling during those times: feeling like you have a problem that can’t be fixed.

A broken heart is the occasional heartbreak or sadness that’s normal. But when you’re really down you feel like your soul is broken somehow and there’s nothing that can alleviate that other than a rope around your neck. But there’s hope in a rhyme nonetheless, something that suddenly makes sense to you and it saves you from that mental pit. Like a song or a painting or an amazing landscape. So if you’re dealing with this hang in there, you are not alone. It’s an ongoing battle and relapsing and going back to feeling shitty after briefly feeling better is part of the process of getting better. Keep on going and you WILL get better.

2. The Magician:

After the gloomy A Word we have a more cheerful song. The Magician changed so much from the first demo version that it became 2 different songs and, well, the title track. It’s about magic. Not the tricks kind of magic and not even Ceremonial Magick. It’s about that special thing (or things) in your life that makes it special. For us, it’s music, for other people it might be art or their family or their hobbies or anything really.

When you invest yourself in whatever your magic is, YOU become the magician. And this song is an invitation to do exactly that: to prioritize what’s truly important to you and to immerse yourself in it.

3. Open Heart:

Open Heart is the first song I wrote for our debut album and it remained pretty unchanged. It’s about improvement, about trying to be a better person, and about living with an open mind and an open heart.

4. Twisted Tongue:

Twisted tongue is the only acoustic song we have and the only one to feature clean vocals only and it’s about being in a toxic relationship, about not realizing it or realizing it and not being able to leave. Slightly inspired by direct experiences but mainly inspired by my close ones’ experiences.

5. The Magician II:

The Magician II is an extension of The Magician and it’s the song where the other guys contributed to the songwriting process the most. It’s one of our favorites!

6. The Key:

It’s definitely our magnum opus. So far at least. Not necessarily because it’s the longest song we ever wrote but mostly because it’s the one where we let ourselves experiment with sounds that were pretty far from what we envisioned our sound was “supposed” to be and we actually ended up with a song that not only felt 100% Heryos, but with a piece that we felt really proud of and it made us realize that not being too much “in the mold” feels really liberating.