Lorna Shore’s ‘To the Hellfire’: A study in heaviness

Jan-peter Herbst, Mark Mynett
(Tandai: 67; Catatan: 6)

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▪ Technology
is required to extend extremity beyond human capabilities. (Teknologi hanya sebagai alat bantu untuk mencapai tujuan)

▪ Schroeder emphasized, because the music was
‘inhumanly difficult’ and needed to sound hyperreal, and even though drum-
mer Austin Archey was one of the most virtuosic extreme metal drummers,
performance improvement was still required (Berarti, di balik produser yang jago, ada anggota band yang akan kesusahan wkwkwk, karena harus setidaknya bisa ngimbangi mixing)

▪ psychoacoustic listening - processes (Psychoacoustics combines the physiology of sound — how our bodies receive sound — with the psychology of sound, or how our brains interpret sound.— Source)

▪ The guitars and bass
are farther in the background, which, although less common in contemporary
metal (Mynett 2019a: 311), facilitates a greater clarity to the drums and vocal
virtuosity and extremity, ultimately benefitting the sense of heaviness. (Sebegitu besar peran produser/komposer musik dalam merancang struktur untuk membangun suasana yang harus ditonjolkan untuk tujuan tertentu.)

▪ It is likely that both slow and fast tempos can evoke heaviness, but each in a different sense. (seperti breakdown-nya Defocus - Crooked Mind & Lorna Shore. Masing-masing memiliki maksud sama dalam hal ‘heavy’ namun memberikan nuansa yang berbeda)

▪ Judging by the reactions, this vision was realized: ‘It somehow just keeps getting heavier. It reaches a point where you think, “Right, it surely can’t get any heavier than this”, and then Ramos gets possessed by a demon and channels it into a cataclysmic closing breakdown’ (Stewart 2021: n.pag.). (Tujuan dari pencipta terbilang sukses, karena breakdown pada menit terakhir meninju wajah semua pendengarnya. Suara kematian/sakaratul maut disuguhkan dengan epik oleh sang vokalis ‘Will Ramos’, sehingga dapat memantik para pendengar untuk mengingat kematian. Mengingat kematian menjadi pahala bagi orang muslim (cek dalilnya))

▪ As the media and metal producer discourse has suggested, heaviness is closely related to associations like brutality, aggression, intensity, energy, darkness and horror. A musicological analysis cannot determine whether these associations belong to heaviness, or are related to, but distinct from it.

▪ While compositional and performative elements are primarily concerned, technological development and the creative misuse of production technology will be central in raising heaviness to new dimensions in the future (see Wallmark 2018: 76–77).

▪ Schroeder demonstrates that a powerful drum sound can be achieved in a dense arrangement without many samples with a strong engineering strategy.

▪ In Schroeder’s case, the artistry is his unusual cinematic approach aimed at creating notions of horror, which he combines with the application of science in the form of psychoacoustic principles.

▪ effective than an identical repetition throughout the song.

▪ These contrasts likely make the extremity of each expression more

▪ A central artistic technique used in ‘To the Hellfire’ is building contrasts
on different levels: reverberated guitars and dry drums; acoustic and electric/
distorted elements; deep grunts and high screams; tempo changes, accelera-
tion and deceleration, and metric modulation; fast and slow ensemble perfor-
mances

▪ Alongside hyper-
real guitar textures and drum performances, vocals are staged almost beyond
recognition by processing and overlaying different styles that, according to
gestalt theory, are more effective than the sum of their parts

▪ (Berger and Fales 2005; Herbst 2018; Mynett 2017), distortion has proven
crucial in the analysed song, not only as a texture but as a means to intensify
the listener’s emotional response.

▪ Several findings concur with
relevant research but also add nuances to them, especially Mynett’s (2017:
14–21) factors of heaviness – weight, size, proximity, density, loudness, power,
aggression, energy, emotion and intensity conveyed through harmonic distor-
tion.

▪ DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

▪ Distortion is central to metal’s vocal sound (Mynett 2017: 325–29).

▪ alternating between black metal-like screams and deep death metal grunts can be considered more effective than using one style only. Moreover, many song sections blend both styles, increasing the vocal’s extremity.

▪ Vocals

▪ Aesthetic vision aside, it is common practice to blend different bass sounds
that serve different purposes,

▪ To the Hellfire’
clearly follows the second philosophy, with Schroeder explaining:
[B]ass is a big part of the tone but for something like this, not so much.
It’s just really carrying the low-end. It’s not that it’s not important. But
it’s not a showpiece the way it would be in a different band.

▪ the snare is tuned higher, although this may sound less big and thus reduce its contribution to heaviness (Herbst and Mynett 2021a: 639). The advantage is a better rebound that makes it easier to play fast, takes up less space in the mix and is more distinguishable from the kick and toms.

▪ However, the track was duplicated to create a
dirtier version by removing the low and middle frequencies and distort-
ing the highs with a guitar overdrive pedal. Low and high frequencies were
added to the full-bandwidth original for deepness and more defined articu-
lation.

▪ Schroeder primarily associates distortion with violence, it also correlates with heaviness, according to Mark Mynett:
The human hearing system starts to distort when exposed to extreme sound levels, and as the capabilities of our vocal cords are exceeded, normally through high levels of emotion […] audible vocal distortion is produced.

▪ One of the most important tools to avoid a too-clear impression was saturation, i.e. overdrive and distortion, because it made music sound more ‘violent’: Why does saturation sound more violent? Because you grew up your entire life

▪ Concerning engineering, Schroeder’s philosophy was not to stick to tradi-
tional best practices but to deliberately create distortion, explaining:
You can’t make something sound insane by making it sound clean […]
it needs to have extreme people, extreme writing, extreme mixing. […] It
needs to be over the top. […] It’s heavy music; it’s not supposed to sound
entirely pleasant. That is an oxymoron a lot of people give themselves
over to that, ‘I want the sound to be super heavy’, and then what are
you doing with your engineering decisions, making this thing as clean
and sterile as possible? Then, why doesn’t it sound heavy anymore? It
just tames it, and it feels like it’s just clean. There are some benefits to
making this nasty sounding.

▪ Schroeder’s reflec-
tions supported this theory of contrast and size:
All it’s doing is pushing and pulling different things in different elements
in a way that guides you through the song and highlights the good ideas
and the dynamics so it doesn’t sound stale. It keeps things interesting
so that when a blast comes in, it is loud. So, there’s a lot of these things
going on that are automated.

▪ To achieve constant development, contrast and disruption through engi-
neering, automated processing is required. Schroeder emphasized the impor-
tance of automation, not only as a technical necessity but as an artistic tool.

▪ Another concept related to disrupting expectation is deliberately employ-
ing contrast on various levels, spanning acoustic and electric guitar tones,
death and black metal aesthetics, blast beat riffs and ultra-slow breakdowns.

▪ breakdowns are directly related to this aesthetic intention

▪ The unconventionally placed

▪ Rather than following the conventions of metal music production (see Thomas and King 2019), a producer needed to understand the song’s message in order to visualize the outcome

▪ heaviness is not merely built on musical and production parameters but is likely linked to connotations evoked by certain combinations of musical characteristics (Herbst and Mynett 2022a)

▪ Other attributes noted are
brutal, terrifying, intense, powerful, energetic, raw, crushing, dark, sick, wild,
disgusting and mayhem. These descriptors may be part of a general concept
of heaviness or individual conceptualizations (see Herbst and Mynett 2022a

▪ The song’s heaviness is highlighted, with some claiming
that it ‘probably is the heaviest song ever made’

▪ Interestingly, several discussions suggest associations with horror movies and
related emotions like anxiousness and fear.

▪ Community discussions

▪ PRODUCTION

▪ Another factor contributing to heaviness is performance complexity.

▪ Sonic weight is a primary component of heaviness (Mynett 2017: 14–16; Thomas and King 2019: 512), especially when greater inter-onset intervals are accompanied by a dense wall of sound featuring down-tuned timbres (Williams 2015: 53), as is the case in ‘To the Hellfire

▪ slows down the perception of tempo, feeling even slower than the regular breakdown. This deceleration adds to the ‘overall impression of weight and heaviness’ (Smialek 2015: 171), with the focus shifting from performance towards sonic weight (Pieslak 2008: 46)

▪ Empirical listening studies indeed support the notion that high speed is perceived as heavy (Czedik-Eysenberg et al. 2017), as is slow doom and sludge metal, according to discursive research (Herbst and Mynett 2022b: 642–43; Kennedy 2017: 88–94; Smialek 2015: 96).

▪ There is no consensus on how tempo and heaviness relate. Berger states that the ‘1980s experimentations with extremes of tempo was part of the quest for heaviness, and both slow dirges and frantic grindcore numbers can be heavy if performed well’ (1999: 59), suggesting that both fast and slow parts can be perceived as heavy

▪ Most sections are not repeated identically, but the instrument parts are recombined in different ways, giving the impression of chaos when the arrangement de facto follows a through-composed system.

▪ From a similar perspective, Zachary Wallmark (2018: 66, 78) argues that while extreme metal seems chaotic, a crucial component of the desired effect is, in fact, ‘order’

▪ Furthermore, as Berger (1999: 63) suggests, a higher number of sections can contribute to heaviness by making the music more difficult to comprehend, a principle in line with arguments made by Calder Hannan (2018) and Eric Smialek (2015: 164–94).

▪ Several compositional and performative features may contribute to the song’s perceived heaviness. It strikes a balance between predictability (i.e. the repeated pre-chorus, chorus and post-chorus/refrain that provides a degree of ‘catchiness’), and unpredictability, which has been claimed to increase heaviness because it disrupts the listener’s expectations (Berger 1999: 229; Hannan 2018)

▪ Discussion

▪ By drawing on conventions of song form but intentionally
breaking with them with unconventionally placed breakdowns, Lorna Shore
increase heaviness

▪ It begins with a ‘build-
up intro’ in which a riff is introduced by a single guitar. The remainder of the
band gradually joins in, building slowly to the arrival of a full backbeat and/
or blast beat near the start of the verse, which creates a feeling of ‘building up’
or increasing heaviness – a strategy common in metal songs (Hudson 2021).

▪ Structure

▪ The five-string bass guitar is down-tuned to
G0 (24.5 Hz), close to the lower limit of human hearing. This level of down-
tuning provides sonic weight important for heaviness (Mynett 2017: 50–54)

▪ further dissonance. How dissonance relates to heaviness is still poorly under-
stood, but a correlation is expected (see Berger 1999: 58–63).

▪ Riffs based on Phrygian and Locrian modality, augmented chords and chromaticism add

▪ to enhance width and density through slight differences in performance and tone, conducive to heaviness (Mynett 2017: 136).

▪ The rhythm guitars are double-tracked, i.e. the same riff but with a different performance for the left and right sides in the stereo field

▪ These tracks create an eerie atmosphere reminiscent of symphonic black metal and an overall cinematic feel.
The vocals mainly combine black metal screams and death metal grunts.

▪ ‘To the Hellfire’ falls within the deathcore genre but contains features reminiscent of black and symphonic metal

▪ Instrumentation

▪ COMPOSITION

▪ The analysis is twofold: first, the musical composition is examined, then the production, with performance relevant to both

▪ METHOD AND DATA

▪ Defying expectations
and avoiding an over-produced and slick aesthetic (despite the orchestral
elements) was key, focusing on aggression rather than clarity, especially
through harmonic distortion

▪ The intended
aesthetic for this song included cinematic elements, such as orchestral instru-
ments and samples, excessive layering of instruments and vocals and signifi-
cant levels of distortion, to create an aesthetic of horro

▪ The songwriting provides the basis for a ‘heavy’
arrangement, while the performances lay the groundwork for effective
production. The producer’s expertise in mixing then ensures that the recorded
performances of the song arrangement are translated into heaviness as effec-
tively as possible

▪ All the primary elements of contrast, disruption, development and hyper-
reality are maximized through the close integration of composition, perfor-
mance and production

▪ Contrast is achieved on different levels in the song’s compo-
sition, performance and production, including acoustic and distorted tones,
reverberated guitars and dry drums, deep grunts and high screams and hard
tempo shifts and fast-changing beats.

▪ ‘heaviness’ of ‘To the Hellfire’ is shaped by contrast, disruption, development
and hyperreality

▪ where it reached number one on the iTunes metal chart and landed at number four on Spotify’s Viral 50 chart

▪ on 13 August 2021:
deathcore band Lorna Shore released their third EP, …And I Return to
Nothingness (Lorna Shore 2021). The EP’s opening track, ‘To the Hellfire

▪ This article provides unprecedented access, evidence and insight into the production process, representing the most extensive close study to date of the production of a single hit track in metal music research. Additionally, it is among the first publications to provide a detailed musicological analysis of the deathcore style

▪ that ‘heaviness’ is an elusive concept because it depends on individual perceptions linked to biographical, cultural and historical contexts. Of the research theorizing which musical elements contribute to heaviness, the electric guitar has been noted for its signature distorted sound