Hoooo boy, this is the big one.

It’s finally out! We agonized over this song since late 2019, around the time of our first show at The Hive. It started out as a really barebones idea for a prog rock thingy, and kept morphing over time to ultimately become something very different. David came to practice one day with an idea for a longer prog rock song based on a chord progression he had written the night before at his dorm. Coincidentally, the people below him filed a noise complaint about his guitar being too loud while he was writing it. Sorry guys.

This was the first time we ever really “jammed” to write a song. Most of the jams we did in those original sessions were pretty bad and didn’t make it into the final song, but it was a really formative moment that helped us figure out where the song needed to go. It was originally a lot more upbeat (and less pretentious) than it ended up. You can check out that original version in the Demos section.

The original title of the song was “Minesweeper,” kind of as a joke. The other idea for a title was “Colossus.” We had a long argument about whether we should call the song “Groundsweeper” or “Oceansweeper” when it came time to finalize the lyrics, but when we came up with that Icarus line the decision was made.

The only surviving part of the original song is the chorus, really. That’s the original chord progression. Most everything else was totally changed. We especially had a tough time with the chugging part in the intro – it took us forever to figure out what to put there. That part also has some weird time signature things that were unintentional. The song ended up about 8 and a half minutes long, by far our longest track. We don’t think we’re going to turn into a prog rock band and do more longer songs, but every once in a while it’s fun to write something like this.

We recorded this with Jack Ball at Back Wall Records. What an amazing studio space and what an amazing guy. We can’t thank him enough for bringing our vision for this song to life. We’re so happy with how it turned out. It took three sessions total – one recording session, one overdub session, and one final mix session. Jack was a trooped even though we were pretty meticulous about everything.

Some extra recording tidbits:

• You might notice another strange sound over the crash cymbals at the beginning of the song. That’s David slapping his guitar cable against his hand on each hit of the crash, with a ton of spring reverb and delay on.
• There’s three guitar tracks going on in the chorus – David, Ashleigh, and David playing power chords on Jack’s Stratocaster to beef it up some more.
• The “flute break” part in the middle of the song is Jack’s organ and David’s Yamaha keyboard. David and Keegan also did some ambient tambourine and cymbal stuff on a whim.
• The backing guitars in the opening chugging section were cobbled together from lots of recordings of David doing some improv on the pedals. Lots of Rainbow Machine (the same thing we used at the beginning of Help Me Doctor!!), Boss SY-1, and TC Electronic Flashback II.

Recorded and mixed by Jack Ball, mastered by Zack House.

This is Keegan’s favorite.