Deathday

Hailing from Los Angeles, California, Deathday formed toward the end of 2007, solidifying around brothers Alex Guillén and Giovanni Guillén.

Constructed from the aggressive textures of early industrial music, the ambience of cold wave and shoegaze, and the carnal energy of post-punk, Deathday was originally devised to manifest ideas specifically designed for a live duo accompanied by vintage drum machine. As their sound progressed and became more focused, Joevanie Lopez was recruited to add drums and expand the outfit’s execution.

In 2009, the trio began to work on what would become their debut album amidst the summer heat, immersing themselves in isolation, dark iconography, occultism, and American violence. To capture the aesthetics of the subject matter musically, the band exercised heavy use of tape saturation and manipulation, recording on everything from reel-to-reels to boomboxes. Cascading through a plethora of tape mediums and analog devices intentionally gave the recordings a sense of urgency and decay. In October of 2010, these recordings emerged in the form of Ghost Pains, a self-released EP.

Upon its release, Ghost Pains captured the attention of French label, Desire, at which point, label head Jérôme Mestre requested the band expand the EP to a full-length. The band added one more song to the now self-titled album: “Charles Joseph Whitman,” a song recounting the 1966 shooting rampage of the Austin tower sniper, and the last song written for the album. Incidentally, the band entered the studio for that final day of recording on January 8, 2011, the same day as the 2011 Tucson shooting of Senator Gabrielle Giffords. The dread of these events lies like a fog over the album.

With the addition of new bass player Jeramy Graham , the band has already begun on a second full-length album, and is currently recording a number of tracks for planned split releases with The KVB (UK) and LA’s Bestial Mouths, and contributions to upcoming compilations on Sweating Tapes, Downwards and Italy’s Mannequin.