Track By Tracks: Binary Order - The Future Belongs To The Mad (2023)

1. Consternation:

I wanted a big opening song and once I had that verse riff it was really about building the song around that. Consternation is a sort of statement for the album that follows, so it’s very heavy, and intense but with a big melodic clean chorus, one of my favorites on the album actually. The intro actually came much later, and once it did it really tied the song together along with the breakdown in the bridge I think it’s a very good indication if you’re going to like the majority of the album.

Lyrically I wanted to delve into some of the anxiety I had been feeling both in my own personal life and from what I’ve seen in the larger world. We seem to be heading into a society drenched in fear, and I certainly feel that way myself.

2. Cells Within Cells:

Cells is a personal favorite of mine, with this album I wanted to write some big riffs, and Cells I feel really delivers. It’s also where some of the more electronic elements that are prevalent on the album really come into play.

In terms of the lyrics it’s about online hate groups that I had been seeing popping up all over the place and how they feed into each other. This overwhelming feedback loop of hate just echoes itself. I had joined some on Facebook thinking they were meme groups and some of the stuff out there is just crazy.

3. Perfect World

Perfect World is essentially the end of the opening trilogy of heavy songs, and I wanted to go huge with the chorus. The riff was difficult to get right because the pad underneath it is very simple and the song relies on the main riff hitting right to carry it and along with the final choir chorus, it took a while to come together.

The song is a comment on how discourse is being silenced, you see it online everywhere, people can’t hear opinions that don’t match exactly their own and as a result, their beliefs are not being challenged.

4. Hope Is a Mistake:

This song was actually a bit of a turning point for me with this album. Initially, I was aiming for ten tracks and this song was the outro of Perfect World, but it bloated that track. So I decided to take the restrictions I was placing on myself and this short outro developed into a full three-minute ambient (Terminator inspired) piece. After writing this I went straight into writing the other instrumental on the album – which I’ll get to later. Also if anyone gets where the song title is from I’ll be impressed

5. Feel Again:

Feel Again for me is one of the more important tracks on the album. Especially at this point in the album, the opening tracks, they’re essentially the Binary Order sound that I’ve established in my career so far but when Feel Again starts the album begins to turn. It was inspired by a lot of artists I’ve been listening to lately, like Drab Majesty, Ritual Howls, Soft Moon, etc and I really wanted to try my hand at that sound. It’s very different from what I’ve done before and I’m super happy with how it came out. It’s probably my favorite song on the album.

It’s also the only song on the album to feature lead guitar because one of the things I wanted to do with Future was put all the lead onto synth.

6. Skin:

If Feel Again is Binary Order starting to experiment with new sounds then Skin is the result of that experimentation. I knew I wanted to write a song that was 100% IDM, I absolutely love that genre and want to have that sound as part of what my output is known for and Skin is my declaration of that.

It was a huge amount of fun to make and I felt like the reigns were completely off in terms of writing, as it’s a new sound there was no concern about repeating myself, but more just creating music that I found compelling.

7. Left Behind:

Left Behind is a low tempo, down turned trap, IDM track but unlike Skin it builds to a “full band” sound. I wanted to try mix my existing sound with what I was experimenting with on the album and I think it really came together once I had the vocal melody that worked both in the upper and lower octave.

Lyrically it’s about where I am in terms of human connection. Maybe it’s the state of the world but there’s a great sense of isolation and separation. Which has grown to feel like abandonment in a greater sense.

8. Face Beneath The Waves:

So Face has a sound I wanted to write for years, I love that fast breakbeat, DnB style drums and this was my first experiment of taking that sound and working with it. The track is also the album going back to a heavy sound so I wanted it to bridge the experimentation of the middle section with the sound of the opening.

It actually started as a completely different song, the chorus is the only thing that remained (as well as the vocals) but it was just a boring, standard metal song. So I ripped it apart, and essentially remixed it as what you hear on the album.

9. Displaced:

Displaced was a surprisingly hard song to get right. For ages, I didn’t like it and it took me a long time and countless rewrites to get to a place I was happy with. I wanted to write a track that didn’t have cleans on it, mainly because I wanted to see if I could but I always get the “Binary Order would be great if he only screamed” feedback from the more traditional metal guys and this song was me experimenting if I could do that with my sound…. Which might be why I didn’t like it for so long.

Lyrically it continues the theme and really is the accumulation of the feeling of being other and an outsider that is so prevalent across the whole album.

10. Slow Blade:

So Slow Blade is the poster child of the whole album. Once I got this right the rest of the album came together. It was very important to have a huge glitched, electronic breakdown bridge that worked with the rest of the song. I wanted it to kick in and really take the listener by surprise, which it has done.

Still, every step of writing this was difficult. It was difficult to write the cleans that would then work as a screamed chorus, it was hard to write a vocal melody for the verse that would lead the intro, it was difficult to make the song gel. At one point I felt like I was trying to cram five different songs together.

There are movie references all over this song, from the title track to some of the lyrics and I love doing that because the stuff I’m referencing has such a profound effect on me. Ultimately song is about how I feel we are just watching our decline by our own hands. I know every generation feels things are getting worse, but something just seems very wrong with society now, and this song is my reaction to that.

11. The Future Belongs to The Mad:

So this song was written during the same time I was writing Hope and originally sounded completely different. The first version was eventually scrapped and I wrote this out of it, the only thing that remained from the original is the arpeggiated melody that runs through the track.

I wanted this song to sound like this huge, old, almost alien industrial machine. I was very inspired by the artwork and the kinds of images that I generated for the art via AI. I’m a huge fan of artists like Lorn, Keudo, Plaid, Oneohtrix, etc and they all had a huge influence on this track.

12. Atone:

So Atone was a song that almost wrote itself. I find myself always writing the soft track for the last song and I wanted to avoid that, but it felt like the album needed it. I wanted to create something that felt hopeless and foreboding like there’s a horrible event coming that we’re aware of but are unable to stop. And this track was about really building that into an atmosphere that penetrates the whole track.

Lyrically it continues that theme because it’s about my own struggles with suicide and how I have to stop myself from giving into that.