Album Descriptions: Chorosia - Stray Dogs (2023)

Anto: It’s finally here! This one has been done fairly quickly, as the whole writing and recording process took only a year. That’s not a lot of time, especially for Chorosia (overthinking overanalyzing much?).

After the 2022 New Year’s celebration, we made a goal to write an EP in 2022. I shit you not, by July of the same year we had the whole thing demoed. Well, not the whole thing, Vortices took some time, but nevertheless, this EP felt like a breeze in every way.

We did something different this time too: we entered this EP cycle with zero “completed ideas” before the writing process. Usually, I’ll have 3-4 songs pretty much done or nearly done and will present them to the rest of the boys, we’ll work on those and during that time I’ll come up with 3-4 more ideas, some of the other guys will present their song or two, we polish all of that and boom – we have an album. This time, however, things were slightly different. I decided not to take so much time at home recording and polishing my song ideas but rather just enter the rehearsal space with riffs only. Play a ton of riffs, move things around, and make this EP that way in that stinky basement. The reason is that, for a moment, Chorosia started to look to me like Anto and the band sorta thing and I didn’t want that. Yeah, these are still almost all my riffs on the EP (except for one, not gonna tell you which one) because it just happens that I shit and piss riffs apparently. However, the structuring and the arrangement process was definitely a group effort in this one. And that’s something I’m really proud of on this record.

“Stray Dogs” is a title that came to me after a visit to my hometown. I’ve had it for quite some time. After that bus drive from my hometown back to Vienna, I crashed on my couch feeling a bit down, as usual after a visit home. You know, back to the grind I guess. For some reason, I kept thinking about the stray dogs on the streets of my hometown. That might’ve been around the same time when I heard the news that the local hunting club decided to solve the issue of stray dogs on our streets. Yeah. What do you think how did they solve that? I’ll give you a hint: we don’t have a dog shelter, or anything like that, in our area. It just bugged me so much. Poor dogs didn’t choose to live, or die, that way. As I kept thinking about it, I kinda connected to stray dogs as well. You know, never really being home, switching back and forth, traveling, busses, departures, leaving loved ones both here and there. Now, I’m not complaining at all, I chose to live this way and I’m really happy with my choice, but those 11-hour bus drives tend to get a man thinking that way. Well, that’s good, ‘cos guess what – Stray Dogs were born out of that. So yeah, right there on the couch I picked up my acoustic and noodled around and the main riff for Stray Dogs came out.

The rest of the song took quite some time, not gonna lie. We kinda wanted it to go Yob direction, but it just didn’t work. So one day, we scratched it all, added some dissonance and aggression and once that was established the rest came pretty easily.

The rest of the songs were done pretty quickly too. Fire Assault is just a banger that literally took only a few rehearsals to have it pinned down (although the drum beat did change a bit over time). For Reflections, the part that took most of the time was just getting to feel the song and play it with feeling. It’s a relatively easy one to play (at least on the guitar) but to really let yourself get sucked in without fighting back, that was the real deal. Plus the clean vocals, obviously. That’s something I never really did before. Again, something I’m really proud of on this EP. Definitely not the best vocal performance ever, but I’m really glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and tried and made it work. Eventually, the song turns into a nasty fucked-up, bloodshot eye monster with a beautiful dual solo and that’s really freaking cool too! Love it.

Finally, Vortices took some time to finish mostly because we almost didn’t really care that much about it (and yet it turned out to be one of our all-time favorites in the end, ha!). I didn’t even have the lyrics down until the night before cutting the vocals. Yeah, I had the chorus and that distorted vocal part, but verses and the rest came pretty much the night before hitting the record button in Reaper in our rehearsal space.

This EP, like our previous albums, was recorded in our rehearsal room. You can probably hear it too! There’s just something I and I believe we as a collective too, love about the DIY approach. Not saying that we’re going to keep doing it this way forever, but I do love the fact that there is literally zero studio bullshit on this record. No amp sims, no triggers, no middlemen, no fancy stuff – you come to our gig and you’ll hear this sound. Because that’s us, right there. What you hear is what you get.

So yeah, to conclude this thing that already turned out way longer than initially intended, freaking STRAY DOGS ARE HERE! We are stray dogs, the whole civilization is stray dogs, the mankind is stray dogs. And we should respect stray dogs in their constant fight to find food, to live, not even knowing about giving up, and yet finding time to be enjoying their lives and have such good hearts for everyone with good intentions. Who knows, maybe we could even learn from them?