Interview

Schemata Theory Spreads "Unity In Time"

As soon as a band releases their first album, fans and critics alike can't wait to see, or more appropriately hear, what their next full length will be like. For a lot of groups, this comes pretty quickly, but the logistics and internal goings on can create more than a few issues when it comes to releasing an album. In 2012, British outfit Schemata Theory unleashed their debut, "Dry Lung Rhetoric," with an EP, "Words Not Seen, Read Or Seen" following two years later. However, only in the past few weeks has the Reading band been able to share their sophomore full length, "Unity In Time" and fans all seem to agree, it's been worth the wait!

With this new album, Schemata Theory display the massive changes that have gone on behind the scenes, channeled them all into some truly sublime music and expressed it in a fascinating way, with an album as rich and varied as any group could hope for. To find out more about "Unity In Time," Metal Underground caught up with guitarist Huw Roch and co-vocalist Luke Wright, who unveiled many of the inner workings when it comes to the album, as well as the themes, direction changes and much more. You can watch the interview in full below.

Diamond Oz: The new album, "Unity In Time" is now upon us. What was different about recording your second album compared to recording your debut?

Huw Roch: When we did the first album, the band was in a very different place. We had a slightly different lineup and we sort of had one guy, who's no longer with the band who wrote everything. It was very much a case of; come in, do what was written and then it wasn't until a year later that we did the vocals. That wasn't the intention, just sort of how it played out.

This time, it was much more collaborative in the sense that we went into the studio with room to improve the songs and collaborate with Justin Hill, who's a fantastic producer, as opposed to it being a bit more robust with what we were doing. The music itself lends itself to that too. The first album is much more technical than the newer album so the songs were sort of constructed in a way that we could craft them after they'd been written, as opposed to just, "This is the way they are." That's the only way we could have done it. The vocals were a bit more interesting.

Luke Wright: They were a bit. From my perspective... When I joined the band, it was during that year period between the music and the vocals being recorded and it was quite a challenge. The previous vocalist had stepped away and the guys were looking for someone to fill that space. Miles, who's currently the other vocalist, had recorded the drums for the album. I've known these guys since school so we had conversations and they asked if I was interested. I think they'd seen me at a late night karaoke, that classic audition technique that metal bands use! So I came into it and was told, "This is the entire album. We've written everything, we just need you to put vocals on top of it." I'd never written vocals before or recorded a full album in the studio before and essentially we had maybe a couple of months to write and record everything so that it would line up with the original release schedule that we'd planned at the time.

So, going from that to now, Huw mentioned working with Justin, I think that's a massive change since a different producer was used on the original album and Justin sits very much in that metal space, he'd recorded clean vocals of his own and it was a lot more collaborative. I was thinking about the album this afternoon, around the song "Mirrors," which is a seven minute track... The "Mirrors" that we walked into the studio with, is not the one that we walked out with! Obviously, we could go through the writing process more, but essentially, me, Huw and Miles would sit in his garage and go through vocals, workshop that together and then take those demos into the studio and trust Justin to put his flavour on it and give it his guidance, certainly around the vocals because that's an area that he really excels in. The two processes were night and day.

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