Interview: Oryx
This mini profile originally ran in September 2024 edition of Stereogum’s The Black Market.
Oryx knew it had something on “Oblivion,” the massive 15-minute closer to the Denver sludge band’s 2021 album, Lamenting A Dead World. “Creating ‘Oblivion’ was a defining moment for our band,” drummer Abigail Davis explains in an email. “Writing that song pushed us to new creative heights, allowing us to craft a truly cathartic and fulfilling musical experience for our listeners and ourselves. Our music is a reflection of our emotions and mental state, so the length of our songs often mirrors the depth of our exploration. We embraced this process with ‘Oblivion’ and carried that same approach into Primordial Sky. The longer songs on our new album weren’t planned to be a specific length; the riffs and layers naturally unfolded, and we continued to explore and add to them until they reached their organic conclusion.”
That conclusion is everything but an end: Primordial Sky, the trio’s fifth album and first with bassist Josh Kauffman, is the next phase in its evolution. Oryx still slays speakers with ear-incinerating riffs and head-pulping drums, but its emotive resonance runs far deeper than the average Does It Doomer. Case in point, “Myopic,” Primordial Sky’s lead stream, hits the right balance of Oryx’s newly defined intentions: Its feelings and riffs echo within you equally.
“Emotion is a fundamental element of our music, serving as the driving force behind our songwriting and performances,” Davis writes. “This is perhaps most evident in Primordial Sky, which delves into complex emotional landscapes and invites listeners to connect with the music on a personal level. The writing on our previous release, Lamenting A Dead World, was influenced by the pervasive sense of uncertainty that came with living in the year 2020, and with our new album, there was more of a feeling of clarity and grounding in our songwriting. We spent countless hours crafting these new songs, refining them through a process of mass writing and critical editing.”
Those countless hours paid off. Primordial Sky is one of those albums where you can tell it was labored over because it so effortlessly sweeps a listener along. And yet, there are always transfixing points of interest when Oryx drives the tour guide bus through its journey. Guitarist Thomas Davis’s chrome-chord riffs and flashes-from-the-heavens leads on the 13-minute title track never fail to put your attention span in a submission hold. It’s a curious effect: You know intuitively where “Primordial Sky” is headed, and there’s a sense of satisfaction to that payoff, but you never want the ride to end. Oryx is so adept at patiently slow-playing its hand, wringing the maximum drama out of each section, that you just appreciate the passing scenery. In an age when bands need to wham and bam as quickly as possible for Spotify streams, Oryx lets these songs tell their own stories at their own pace.
“We’ve always been captivated by the power of restraint in all genres of music,” Abigail Davies writes. “Heaviness, to us, is not defined by volume or the number of amps or cabs that a band has on stage. From our viewpoint, the pursuit of heaviness is better defined by dark emotionality and is achieved through dynamics. Heaviness is also subjective, where atmosphere and contrast create a weight on your chest. This has been our motivation as a band, not just to write long and loud songs, but to really captivate the listener with a dark atmospheric journey that contains multitudes and extreme dynamics. Some of our strongest influences have been soundtrack composers and instrumental music, where the defining heavy darkness of the songs has nothing to do with the tonality of a vocalist, but the cadence and ambiance of the song itself. For us, the ability to show real restraint was the product of years of writing and refinement, allowing songs to build organically in the direction that feels right for the song, not foremost concerned with how we think it will be received.”
Follow the direction that “Myopic” takes. Despite the title, Oryx is playing the long game. Opening with a pacing that could be described as the powerful deliberateness of a colossal hurricane, the band then smoothly switches to a minimally melancholic mode. It’s big-big and then small-small and back again. But even the small sounds big. This is Mahlerian stuff, titanic, like comparing the size of planets.
But here’s the thing: Similar to how Oryx excels at the above-stated dynamics, finding the heaviness in the big-big and small-small, the little things within those sections do the heaviest lifting. A nifty rhythm here, an extra expressive guitar flourish there. And there’s an ineffable energy pulsing below those moments, too. Thomas Davis’s riffs and vocals feel rich with experience. Abigail Davis and Joshua Kauffman have this uncanny ability to make rhythms pop, the most essential component in any slower metal music. And if you dig into those little moments, you’ll find even more.
“For Primordial Sky, I recorded on an acrylic drum kit, which allowed me to achieve a massive drum sound,” Abigail Davis notes. “Josh, being a drummer himself, led to us collaborating on the creation of new drum tones in the studio that I hadn’t captured yet in previous recordings. I also got a new bell brass snare that sounds like a cannon on each hit and has subsequently become my prized possession. Every aspect of this recording has been meticulously crafted to capture the intensity of our live performances. Playing our songs live is always a transcendental and physically demanding experience. I give it my all on stage every performance, leaving nothing behind.”
And that’s kind of it: Oryx doesn’t leave anything behind. It’s all out there, ready to be heard, ready to be felt. It knows exactly what it has, and it’s ready to show you everything Primordial Sky has to offer.