Anima Delivers A Heavy and Emotional Album

An absolutely massive new album from Anima has just been released, and it pulls together an intense range and scope of metal and orchestrated approaches, where you have a fierce heaviness, haunting edge, those dark underbellies, and an unreal vastness lurking just beneath the surface at all times.

The Entity album is something most would call gothic. It certainly does have a bit of a gothic tonality to it, but there are a lot more layers going on and a bigger theme than just feeling gothic.

This is a record that has a very unique approach in terms of becoming something heavy and cinematic simultaneously.

You can tell there was a lot of attention to detail with the arrangements of these tracks, but they still never lose the sort of personality that they have. Each track has that haunt to it, and it's something that makes you have to listen to the entire record from start to finish.

This is an important aspect. This album, when listened to all the way through, is a massive escape. It pulls you away from anything that you're doing at the moment and puts you in this completely different dark world for a chunk of time, which is a brilliant thing because I feel like music like this was made to be sort of fantastical.

I found it awesome how these songs could drive so much sonic presence, heaviness, thrashing riffs and guitar tones, brutal drums with rolling double kicks, and still have that cinematic and almost graceful undertone that it does. These are the aspects that make the record special for me.

This is an orchestral sort of speed, thrash, death, and blackened metal project that gives you immense layers of textures and has a way of pulling you into its own atmosphere.

Once you're in this atmosphere, you don't want to leave because it's great. You're surrounded by these moods and sets of eerie soundscapes.

The record opens up with the track called "Dawn", which showcases a lot of the record's best staples right off the bat. This is an excellent track to introduce the record with, because of that, but also because it starts delivering you that thick atmosphere that the whole album gives off.

Songs like the records title track, "Entity", also breed that wonderful atmosphere but thrash is out a little more, gives different kinds of riffs and approaches, you also have vocals that sort of follow the guitars and feel distant because the way the record is mixed, doesn't bury the vocals exactly, but blends them in.

A lot of times, when you have a rock or metal record, the vocals are sitting way up top. Sometimes the vocals are even too loud in the mix, but that's a whole other story.

With this record, the vocals are used almost like instruments themselves and follow along the path of the melodic structure that the guitars are already doing a lot of the time.

This sort of embeds those melodies in your head deeper and works wonderfully in terms of helping create that almost deepening and again, slightly darker aesthetic.

Some of these songs deliver different kinds of emotion. A song like "Grief", for example, actually has melodies on the guitars that are amazingly performed, harmonizing, and just feel sort of beautiful, but they also have a more selling set of melodies and riffs.

It was around this song that I started to realize this record may actually have a deeper meaning than I realized.

Perhaps the album itself is something that its creator needed to make for personal reasons.

Perhaps each song on this record is actually like a chapter in the artist's life.

The record is composed and written by  Geoffrey Doucette, with whom we were lucky enough to sit down and talk about the record.

After listening to the full record, the idea that this came from someplace authentically emotional kept creeping up on me.

Being able to talk to its creator helped clarify a lot about where this release actually came from, and it turns out, I wasn't wrong.

Of course, it's not always black and white as I make it seem.

Check out our interview with Geoffrey below so you can dig deep into the creation of the record, inspirations, and happenings, but also listen to this album.

A lot is going on, and he has managed to actually create this gigantic atmosphere that really has a unique way of wrapping itself around you.

Check out the interview below.

RAG: Let's talk about Entity! This record boasted some heaviness but was also vast in its undertone and blended approaches insanely well!  Where did this album come from? 

Thank you very much for the kind words. This album is kind of a few things to me. It's an album that I've wanted to make since I was 15 (started the project in 2018 when I was 26), it's the culmination of 7 years of practice, trials and learning as a hobbyist audio engineer and instrumentalist, and it's also, in my own view, a place that I've had to put a lot of negative feelings and experiences into. My best friend passed away, and then my Mom and for a lot of it, Anima and Entity was where I had to put those feelings because they could go nowhere else. I'm very thankful for this project for a lot of reasons.

RAG: I'm hearing a few different styles to this record! Who are some of your biggest musical influences?

I have quite a few musical influences, and I've always drawn the most from bands that can make me feel sadness. I think it's so rare that writers are able to convey sadness in a way that it is felt rather than heard. I tried to draw on the greats for this and Katatonia and Alcest are the 2 bands that come immediately to mind if I had to choose. The majority of music I listen to is sad Swedish metal. The Swedish convey melancholy like no one else can.

RAG: What are you performing on this record?

On Entity and for Anima in general, I perform every instrument; vocals, guitar, bass, piano, synth and I programmed the drums completely by hand. In addition to performing all the instruments, I was also the writer, producer, audio engineer and I also mixed and mastered this album completely by myself. Was quite the project.

RAG: How did this all start for you as an artist and songwriter?

Well I fell in love with metal when I was a kid and started playing guitar at 14. I had some ideas to write and record my own stuff when I was a teenager, and actually did some simple stuff back in the early days of digital music in the mid-2000s. Nothing crazy. Through my 20s I was in 3 technical metal bands, and as my 20s wrapped up, so did the bands and I decided well, I still want to do music, why don't I continue what I started when I was young and really put myself into a new project, all-in this time. It takes a very long time to get the practice and experience required to make something listenable but that was my ultimate goal. I have written songs before this, but only really considered myself a songwriter when I started writing Anima songs in 2018.

RAG: Are you performing live right now? Any touring in support of the release?

So since Anima is just me, there are no plans to do anything live with it. It would be an astonishing amount of work to bring a project like this to the stage and have it be faithful to the record in an organic way. Stuff like needing 3 guitarists, a live piano player, synth player, teaching everybody material, programming for the stage, ect. A lot of preparation I'm currently not looking to pursue. I did bands for so long, I prefer the level of control I have in this project. I will say though, I do miss playing live. Nothing quite matches the feeling.

RAG: Now that this is out, what's next for you?

What's next for the Anima project, and the great thing about being solo, is that I have an enormous amount of ideas stacked up since writing wrapped on Entity in March and I can straight-up dive into the next Anima song. The plan, now that there is an LP out, is I'm going to be writing, recording and releasing singles at likely a much higher rate. The project was in such a weird spot for so many years. A very rough early demo and a 2-song EP. It was hard to get people into the project on so little material. I'm hoping that the LP will hold anyone over and I can start doing a single every 3-4 months, and maybe 2-3 years from now, gear up for another LP.

RAG: Who's in your headphones right now?

I've been listening to In Mourning (The Weight of Oceans), Mors Principium Est (The Unborn - one of the greatest albums ever written), and Sludge (Esoteric Malacology - oh my God if you haven't heard this record...). I prefer powerful and sad stuff mostly, and I love progressive stuff and of course, anything Swedish.

RAG: What would you tell people they can expect on this release?

I'd tell them to expect a deep and heavy sadness. A style of sadness rooted in frustration and anger. My whole hope is that someone who has gone through similar experiences as me can listen to this, feel it too, and maybe find relief in it. We all deal with death differently, and Entity was my way.

RAG: Before we go, what would you like to express to fans of the music? 

I would just like to thank anyone who gives it a chance. Even if they don't like it, and it's not an album for everyone so I'd get that, and that's totally OK. It'd be lame if we all liked everything. Just that it means a lot to me that you might give it a try, it's all I'd ask for. Give it a go, hopefully your cup of tea, if not, eh, it's cool. I continue.

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