Silent Planet 'Superbloom' Track By Track Deep Dive!

California metal band SILENT PLANET have just released their new album SUPERBLOOM via Solid State Records.

The record is already being hailed by many as their top pick of the year and arrived on the anniversary of their horrific van accident which happened while trekking through a Wyoming snowstorm in November 2023.
The band luckily survived but left vocalist Garrett Russell hospitalized with a fractured back and head wound requiring stitches and seeing the album recorded over the course of two years.

The result is as our reviewer Benjamin Coe called it ‘an absolute triumph of an album’ and one that has set the bar incredibly high for its genre.

Everblack were lucky enough to receive a track-by-track deep dive into Superbloom by members Garrett Russell, Mitchell Stark and Nick Pocock, which gives a never-before-seen exclusive insight into the influences and lyrics behind the record.

Lights off the Lost Coast

Mitchell Stark: Lights off the Lost Coast is sort of like the antechamber to the album, musically. It’s kind of background music to the story, to what’s actually happening conceptually. The title of the song speaks a lot for what the sounds are. And there’s a very small lyrical bit at the end
Garrett Russell: That you did!
Mitch: Yeah, that has a callback to later in the album. This one is setting the scene for everything that’s about to happen.

Offworlder

Garrett: Offworlder is about waking up inside of a body that’s not yours in a place that you’ve never been – and immediately the entire environment’s trying to kill you and destroy you. It’s part of the concept album, and for the video for this one we decided to write an action sequence. We then got together with our awesome film team and they made kind of a visual video representation of survival, a fight for your life sort of thing. It was a fun one to write to. Mitch wrote a very uptempo thing that made me pretty excited to just talk about it, like a John Wick action sequence.
Nick Pocock: It’s almost got a club vibe too. It starts out and you can feel the pulse of it.
Mitch: Yeah, and Hesitation Marks, Nine Inch Nails inspo on that one for sure, as well as Northlane and Meshuggah. A club vibe for sure.

Collider

Mitch: Musically, Collider came a long way. It used to not sound anything like it does now.
Garrett: And I listened to that version of it like a thousand times before Mitch was like: “why are you listening to the outdated version?”. And I realised he’d updated it and I had missed the email.
Mitch: While we were in the studio, our final studio session, Garrett’s listening to the wrong version (laughs). This one was really a lot of fun, production-wise. There’s a lot of synth and sound design. Dan Braunstein, our producer, myself and Alex [Camarena] really had a field day with that done. There’s so many layers, and I am excited for people to hear the instrumental versions of the album maybe one day, just because those parts are so dense and they required a lot of TLC. And it’s probably pretty unique for us in that it’s verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. That’s a more relative thing that we’ve been messing with. It’s one of my favourites for sure.
Garrett: I think it’s rare that we’ve ever liked a chorus enough to want to do it more than twice, and so I think the fact that it’s in there three times is because we liked how it wove in and out of the rest of the song. And, like Mitch said, it came a really long way structurally, it went from having all of this different riffage and crazy stuff, and found its identity and really pressed into it.
Nick: And Garry’s doing a new vocal style in the chorus too, which is really exciting, it’s this big belting, huge voice and…man, I love the way it turned out.

Euphoria

Garrett: I think Euphoria was the first song that felt “done”.
Mitch: Yeah for this song we came up with the initial skeleton around the same time that :Signal: and Anunnaki were written, which was the first writing session. So this one’s been around for a while.
Garrett: Over two years.
Mitch: Yeah, and now that it’s out, we can talk about it! Our friend Alejandro Aranda features on the chorus. You may know him formerly as Scarypoolparty, or the dude who should’ve won American Idol a few seasons back. I honestly don’t know who won that season, so no disrespect to them, but I mean, come on, this guy! He’s one of our good friends now, and he came to the studio one day, we’d been talking back and forth about collabing. And he sat down and we wrote that chorus together, but he pretty much just about one-took the whole entire thing, and then sat and played a synth part which still blows my mind. It was a very, very cool moment for us because we don’t often get the chance to collab with other artists. We used to do that a lot more, but not so much in recent years. So, having not only a collaboration on the record, but with Alejandro Aranda, who is just out of this world, a talented virtuoso at several things…
Garrett: There were definitely a lot of moments in the studio with him being like: wow, this is the most talented person I’ve ever been in the studio with!
Mitch: It’s kind of scary. Scarypoolparty was a good name, honestly, because he is scary good.

Dreamwalker

Garrett: I spent more time on this song than any of the other songs for sure. And I feel like it was probably the most challenging song, I feel like it required the most effort. And it also felt like a bit of an older Silent Planet song, it kind of reminded me of When the End Began where there’s a lot going on, and the song has layers and it brings you deeper and deeper. Trying to follow that lyrically was really fun. It really got my imagination sparked and made the rest of the album kind of feel like I had just been gathering material from that song so much. But it’s a big sounding one, and I think that’s why I spent so much time working on it. And it was the first song that we were pretty much done with in the studio. After that, I think everything came a little bit easier.
Mitch: This song took a really long time musically too, I should say too this song and Euphoria took so long to finish. With those two songs, it’s only fitting that they go right into each other on the album. Both of these songs were very hard to complete. We’re very proud with how they turned out, but it was a real labour of love with those two on the musical front.
Garrett: I think Dreamwalker is the classic “middle of the album” song. And lyrically, it’s about Stargate Project, or Project Sun Streak, and some of the really bizarre paranormal reports that came out of this CIA psychic program. Which is a real thing, it’s one of those conspiracy theories, and then you read about it and you’re like: oh, the CIA was just like, let’s spend millions of dollars on psychic research. It’s about one particular interview situation, and that inspires the concept of this record.

Antimatter

Mitch: Well, this is the one, right? This is the one that seemed to make the most noise when we put it out, which is really cool for us. And also, it was a bit nerve-racking deciding to put that out as a single only because it’s very, very different for us. But the response has been amazing. I’ll say that on the musical front, and probably the lyrical front too, this one came together very quickly, it happened in a few hours. We pretty much had all the parts of the song finished musically, and then we were just sort of arranging. And I want to say, also, that it was one of the first times that Garrett was doing it on the mic in the room with us first. Basically he just went in and said: hit record. And the exact words and melody and everything that he said are what we used. Normally it’ll be like: I’m going to go on there and blah, blah, blah, and just show you the melody idea or something. But it was really an automatic writing, stream of consciousness, freestyle type of thing. And we used it, and I think that’s part of the reason that it’s so compelling, it’s because it was very natural.
Garrett: Dan, our producer, he had a nicer microphone that was in the other room. He has a whole different tracking room, but he had a cheaper mic. It was a little small battery powered one, and we would just pass it around the room if we ever had ideas. And so I tracked the Antimatter on that thing, I was reading off of my phone and I was not really trying to sound a certain way. I just kind of was more trying to read the lyrics. We ended up just using that as the main take because when we went back later to try to track it and make it better, we were like: no, it just doesn’t have the magic. The first take when I wasn’t trying at all and I was just reading the words and thinking about the meaning of them – it kind of was the thing that fit.

:Signal:

Mitch: This was the first song that we wrote, recorded and released. And it kind of set the bar, I would say. We decided it was time to start working on new music in the summer of 2021. We started hanging out at Dan Braunstein’s, and I think the first session we came out with the beginnings of :Signal:, which used to be called Arrival, as well as the beginnings of Anunnaki, which used to be called Escape Pod, and the beginnings of Euphoria, which used to be called Moscovia. Look that up if you want to go down a rabbit hole! But :Signal: might be my favourite song on the album, only because it kind of completes that more linear song structure from older, more progressive metal Silent Planet. And I just think that the way that we managed to blend the weird time signature stuff and all of the little production moments together in that song – I’m really proud of it. I think that it pretty accurately does the whole extraterrestrial scary sci-fi thing that we set out to do. And it’s crazy to think that that was the first song that we wrote, and then we ended up doing stuff like SUPERBLOOM or Antimatter on the same record. We clearly were going for a much more aggressive pummeling sort of sound at first, and then I think the other stuff came later.

Anunnaki

Garrett: I grew up in the top of California, and obviously when a lot of people think of California, they think of beaches and movie stars. But Mitchell, Alex and I all grew up in California, and it wasn’t movie stars or beaches, it was more inland in various parts of southern and central. And then I was in the north around Mount Shasta all the way out to Humboldt County, it’s just a very dense forest region. There’s Pine Forest, there’s the huge Sequoias down where Mitchell grew up, Alex was in the desert area, and I was up between the Redwoods and the Pine. Out by the Redwood Forest, that’s where they shoot a lot of stuff like Jurassic Park and anything like that. A lot of movies, you’ll see this incredible coastal beauty, but this is another part of California. And in those areas there’s a lot of legends and a lot of stories, a lot of mythology. The sightings supposedly of Bigfoot, Sasquatch or giant beings in the hills have come from there, and there’s also just a lot of native mythology that got wiped out when the natives were victims of a genocide during the California Gold Rush around 1849. And so with them went a lot of legends, but a lot of them are also still passed down and still exist. There’s different stories of the volcano being Gods throwing fire. And there’s just a lot of imagination in a song like Anunnaki, thinking about what it might be like to be one of the thousands of people who’ve gone missing in those forests and the stories that you hear growing up.

The Overgrowth

Mitch: The Overgrowth is honestly the most “all over the place” song, it’s not even like A to B to C, it’s like one mood and then: what’s happening? Oh, another mood! And then: woah, where am I?1 And then another mood. It’s very disparate and doesn’t ebb and flow in the way that even a progressive song does. It’s very much just three different scenes, if you will, or settings, and very much a piece of music that’s kind of just there for the sake of the story, and for Garrett to talk about certain things lyrically and get a more narrative-driven sort of spoken word type thing in. Obviously, we used to do that probably a lot more, and on this album the vocals are a bit more focused on performing more like a regular rock or metal vocalist instead of a barefooted poet type. This song also took a long time to come together, and it was a lot of fun production wise. And that one’s been around for a while too, it used to be called Disappear.
Garrett: I love that one. I like the simplicity of that song musically.
Mitch: Yeah it feels to me, especially at the beginning of the song, like you are in Sequoia National Park.
Garrett: Yes!
Mitch: Near where I grew up in the Redwood trees, and it’s like the sun’s just set, it’s starting to get dark. The sky’s blue and I can smell the trees. I feel like I’m there when I listen to that song.
Nick: That song also gives old Silent Planet vibes probably more than most of the other ones, if not all of them.

Nexus

Mitch: This was the last one to be written, musically. I want to say I was just trying to chain together the most ridiculous stuff that I could think of while still making a “normally” structured song. I feel like it came together so quickly. I’m struggling to even remember what it was like working on it because once I brought it to Dan, it was just boom, boom, boom, let’s do this, let’s do that, let’s do this, do that – song’s done! I think the real thing to mention about that song is that lyrically, it’s a very clever combination of callbacks to older things. The man himself can talk about that.
Garrett: There’s a lot of everything with the sound of Nexus. This story of SUPERBLOOM has weird little ley line connections to Everything Was Sound for me. And it kind of makes sense because Everything Was Sound was a record that I think I was so happy about, how it finished off creatively. And as we were finishing SUPERBLOOM, I was like: oh, this is the same, or similar. There’s a gut feeling I had leaving the studio with SUPERBLOOM that I was very familiar with from leaving the studio back in 2016. And it was fun to work in some of that album with Nexus. I thought that the part was calling back to it, I thought musically it was intentional. But I don’t think it was! I think you kind of hear what I’m talking about, though.
Mitch: Yeah, I totally hear it. But if that is the same thing – it was a total accident. It’s just us ripping ourselves off, I guess!

Reentry

Mitch: Reentry was Dan Braunstein and I, a piano and like 30 minutes, it was really quick. In the past, it’s been a thing for us to have two interludes, ambient pieces of music on the records. And so kind of in keeping with that same theme, the album starts with Lights off the Lost Coast, and then Reentry is the second interlude track. I just knew that we needed to get from the end of Nexus to the beginning of SUPERBLOOM, so Dan and I sat there and just nerded out on some music theory stuff and figured out a way that we could get from this really dissonant ugly low, low B into G flat. So yeah, nerd stuff.

SUPERBLOOM

Garrett: What was it called originally?
Mitch: SUPERBLOOM was originally called Encounter. We called it the alien love song.
Nick: I thought it was Tears For Fears?
Mitch: Tears For Fears was a different one.
Garrett: Tears For Fears died.
Mitch: Yeah, we didn’t end up using that one. SUPERBLOOM, though, went through a lot of changes. The song definitely did not always start with guitar. First it was just electronics, and I want to say it was a lot of Garrett’s original vocal ideas. It was another one of those gut reaction-type things where I don’t think you were really saying words, you might’ve just been singing something?
Garrett: “They follow me” was.
Mitch: Yeah, that happened the first time. But the first verse and everything was you basically singing the melody with no words. And that’s kind of what we ended up doing. That had been around for a long time, this one also came from the initial writing session with Dan.
Garrett: Yeah, man, this is my favourite song that we’ve ever recorded for sure. I’m really curious, though, when it comes out, because there’s at least gotta be 20% of those dudes that are just “mosh guys”…
Mitch: They’re just going to roll their eyes.
Garrett: They’ll just be like: dude, this sucks! Because at the end of the day, it gets the full band and there’s kind of yelling at the end – but it’s never heavy, it’s not fighting music. So it is funny to think that there’s going to be someone who’s like: why did they do that?!
Mitch: It’s definitely our lightest in mood ever. Iridescent is so dark at the end, and Depths III, all the Depths have a similar tone. So ending on this sort of more…I don’t want to say happy, but maybe…
Nick: Endearing?
Mitch: Yeah, and I feel wonder at the end of it. That’s the stuff I get. Not so much: this is bleak, more like: this has a positive spin. I feel hopeful.