Australian metal outfit Relapse recently unleashed a video for their new song “Sabotage.” We caught up with the group to list five things they learned about recording new music during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This question is actually kind of odd for us, because where we live in South Australia, we have barely seen any lockdowns or heavy restrictions throughout the pandemic. Initially when it did hit in 2020, everyone did stay indoors, keep distanced from each other and all of that, of course. In South Australia though, the rules were not as strict compared to the other states. Our only hard ‘lockdown’ we really had to do only went for 3 days, and that was only because a guy in a pizza shop lied to our contact tracers – so we didn’t even need to do that one!  

 As a group collectively, we were able to use this time to experiment with our music. With our latest release “Sabotage” we were able to play around with a lot of new things, most importantly having clean vocals on a track for the first time. Ethan especially was learning to properly sing and pitch pretty much from scratch. We’ve all been truly stunned by his work rate and willingness to improve. With our song-writing, moving into having riffs in such a low register and balancing them with higher register clean vocals was a huge challenge. We have all added and learned so many new skills in a musical sense during this time and they will only get better with each new release we make.

I learned that you could order beer online and have it delivered to your door. That was awesome – it made studying much more enjoyable. I also learned that I weirdly enjoyed locking down for a while. It really renewed my focus and drive towards studying and playing music for sure. – Brad

We didn’t get affected with lockdowns here all that much – but still found it incredibly easy to work on pre-pros at home and share it with the guys via Dropbox and chatting over various social media platforms. – Andy

I learned that being with someone 24/7 is not healthy at all and creates toxicity. Alone time is needed, especially in lockdown. – Ethan

I learned that I should’ve bought Zoom stocks before COVID – I could be a lot richer now. – Jacob