INTERVIEW: Marianna on Project Renegade’s new album, ‘Ultra Terra’
Photo: Project Renegade’s new album is called Ultra Terra. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Pavement Music with permission.
Project Renegade, the metal band from Greece, is back with a second album of pounding songs and groovy rhthms. Released in July, Ultra Terra features head-bangers such as “Critical Mutations,” “Apex,” “Civil Unrest” and “Bloodwitch.”
The band consists of Marianna on vocals, Ody on drums, Philipp on guitar and Jay on bass (they are often referred to by their first names only). One of the ways they are getting the word out on Ultra Terra is the release of a catchy new single — “Token,” which comes with a new, Athens-filmed music video.
There are many adjectives that were used in the press notes to describe Project Renegade’s sound. They are heavy, but also groovy. They are alternative, yet modern. They are electronic, but still metal. Fans may know them from their opening gigs with such genre luminaries as Slipknot, Evanescence and Within Temptation.
Ultimately, Ultra Terra, which is a a Pavement Music release, came to the fans because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was because of COVID,” Marianna said in a recent Zoom interview. “There were no live shows. We didn’t have anything else to do, so we had all that time on our hands. We wanted to do something. We wanted to be creative. We wanted to dive back into the music and the creativity and recording and writing stuff, so during all the time that we had in quarantine, we managed to write the whole album.”
Marianna called the writing period intense because there was nothing else to do professionally but be in the studio; they didn’t have tours and gigs getting in the way of their recording. “It was an experience that was really different than our first album, Order of the Minus,” she said. “Musically and skill-wise we are better players right now. We are better musicians, for sure. We can write more complicated things and support them also in the live show, which is really important for us. … We wanted to write with no filters, just pure expression, pure emotion, not only 100 percent, but 1,000 percent. It was a survival instinct that kicked in, and we wanted that to be in our sound also. The sound progressed. The sound matured. It was a step up from our previous album.”
“Token,” the new single, was actually the last song they wrote. During the recording of the album, the band underwent a lineup change, and Philipp came knocking with the first idea of the song that would become “Token,” and because of that sonic gift he brought, he landed the job.
“We liked it very much, so that was one of the reasons we told him to join the band,” Marianna said. “We worked on it a little bit different than the other songs. … It was really fun. We experimented a lot with that song. We shot a really cool video for it. It was like the whole package was right there, so we said why not.”
One of the goals of Project Renegade is to tour these songs around the world, including the United States and North America. Marianna counts herself a big fan of many American bands, so branching out makes sense to her and the other band members. “Having a collaboration with a label like Pavement Entertainment has opened so many doors, not only in the U.S. but also here in Europe, in the U.K.,” she said. “It’s a step up. It’s the next level for us, and we really hope that we will be able to turn more eyes and ears to our music.”
When fans eventually catch Project Renegade on tour, they will notice a few novelties. For starters, Ody, the drummer, wears a mask, but this is not Slipknot or Kiss, where the musicians play characters. Marianna said the reason for the theatrics runs a little deeper.
“I don’t think that we’re playing characters,” Marianna said. “We like cool stuff for sure. Ody wears his mask not only because it’s cool, but it’s something that he believes in. He has his whole ideology behind the mask of why he wears it, but of course having something that is visually attractive or interesting or something that can catch the eye, it’s really something that is needed, especially today when there’s an abundance of bands. Just wearing your T-shirt and going outside is probably not enough nowadays. That’s not to say that some bands that do that are worse or better than the others. We want to create not characters, but a world that kind of resonates with our songs and how we are envisioning music and ourselves in our music.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Project Renegade’s second album is called Ultra Terra. Click here for more information.
