Hold onto your pants, Midas Fall are back, sounding bigger and heavier than ever. The making of Cold Waves Divide Us is a tale of stalking Buddhist monks online, something called a Bottom Master, frightening audience members, and, um, misery prog. Colour us intrigued! We caught up with the trio to find out more.
“I don’t think we went into it planning to make a heavier album,” says vocalist, producer, and multiinstrumentalist Elizabeth Heaton about Cold Waves Divide Us, the fifth album from Midas Fall. Since 2018’s Evaporate, the Scottish proggy post-rockers have expanded into a trio, with touring bassist Michael Hamilton joining Heaton and guitarist Rowan Burns. The sound may be heavier and more expansive than ever, but the writing process that produced their current record stretches back to Evaporate.
“There wasn’t really a gap in the writing. We carried on, it’s just taken a long time,” says Heaton. “I don’t write because I need to make an album. I write because it’s an emotional outlet. That’s been the case since album number one, and I think that will always be the case. That’s always how I’ve dealt with any issues in life: just put it into the music, then I can walk away from that and be happy. Just channel it all into the music.”
Despite the melancholic and introspective character of Midas Fall’s music, there’s joy and healing behind the creativity.
“I don’t think anything quite beats the therapy that music offers me,” says Heaton. “Both writing and performing live give a very similar feeling. That moment when you’re writing and you think, ‘Ah, this is something good’ and it’s causing an emotional response in me, that’s when I know I’ve written something that I want to put out.”
He may be the new guy, but Michael Hamilton more than pulls his weight.
“He writes a lot of electronic music himself so he’s a jack of all trades,” says Heaton. “When it comes to helping with the songwriting, you can send him a track and he’ll put in synth lines and electronic drums or put in the bass or an extra guitar part. And because he gets the music, it has really added in a positive way, having an extra set of ears.”
Hamilton’s participation is just one factor feeding into the mightier sound of their new record. A shopping spree helped, too.
“We bought a lot of new baritone guitars,” says Heaton, “Michael moved to playing a five-string, so we were naturally playing bigger, chunkier, heavier chords. I was playing around a lot with different drum sounds, and I think for the first time, we’ve been able to produce an album that’s as big as we are live.��
