Today, Pacific Northwest hard rockers Alive In Barcelona released the first single from their upcoming EP, Flatline, titled “Parasite.” The heavy track intertwines the depth of their lyrical mission with a soul-penetrating vocal performance and masterful melodic rock instrumentals. Alongside the song release is a hard-hitting music video to tell the story.
It is a song characterized by polarity — choosing between feeding your inner parasite, succumbing to societal pressures, and deciding who you are meant to be amidst questioning your fate.
Guitarist Jesse Barton gives us an exclusive behind-the-song look at “Parasite,” from conception to completion.
Let’s take a trip back in time. It’s possible the Mayans got it wrong about the world ending.
Maybe the apocalypse wasn’t 2012 after all, maybe it was 2020.
The year the world burned, family and friends turned on each other, and everything you loved became back burned while we re-learned how to be human again.
Out of this view of the world, “Parasite” was born.
Although it’s been some time since earth imploded, and most of us are back to some sense of normalcy, it goes without saying that we all remember how chaotic all of that was. I know for us in Alive In Barcelona,
there was so much uncertainty that we really didn’t know how to cope with it.
In 2019, we had just dropped our debut album and toured for most of the year. In 2020, we hardly left our homes. luckily for us, we did have music, and our platform to let these feelings out. When Matt and I originally started working on new material, we wanted to get some outside influence to give our sound a bit more grit and angst. I reached out to Landon Tewers of The Plot In You to see if he’d be interested in making a few songs together. One of those songs was “Parasite.”
Landon is such a sick writer and can literally write in any style. It’s kind of nuts honestly. I sent him a couple of the songs on our self-titled record and he was instantly down to work together. We started by sending simple demo ideas back and forth on how we thought the instrumentals should go. Honestly, Landon did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the structure of the actual instrumental of the song.
There was a conversation I remember having with him where he was worried we might be going too heavy with the direction. For Matt and I, it’s exactly what we envisioned this new pissed off material sounding like. We needed to purge all the negative energy that had been building inside of us through the whole pandemic. From there, It was full send.
“For me, I wanted to do some things on this song that haven’t ever shown their face in AIB music in the past.”
After we had the instruments hammered out in demo form, I imported the ideas into my DAW and got to work adding some little bells and whistles, cleaning up certain things, and re-recording all the guitar parts using our preferred tones, and sent everything back to Matt to start writing vocal melodies, harmonies and lyrics for. The way Matt and I usually work best (being that he’s out of state from me) is that he gets his parts to where he best sees them, and then he flies in to meet me and we will hammer everything out together to turn the rough draft into something we both truly love. For parasite, I had the studio time booked before we had even got together. We were able to solidify our ideas with just days to spare and hit the studio and do the damn thing for real.
We had our long-time friend Jimmy Hill at Amplified Wax Recording Studio in Spokane, WA run the dials for this one while we re-amped all the guitars and basses. We tracked real drums at his studio, and did 100% of the vocals there as well. Jimmy is a wizard. He would hear a harmony on the spot, sing it once for Matt to hear, and then Matt would literally just nail the part after that. For me, I wanted to do some things on this song that haven’t ever shown their face in AIB music in the past.
The breakdown for this one, we had cursing in our music for the first time in our career, and I really dug deep to get that raw emotion and energy into the vocal sound. I hope that shines through in the mix. When we showed some of our team the rough tracking they said they could hear the Plot influence in my vocal parts. The funny thing was, that was all me. Landon didn’t give me any ideas for how the screaming parts should go. I just dug deep and tried to lay it out there.
The five-piece has been to hell and back, suffering losses both personal and public. Persevering through the death of Jesse’s Father, a mentor and confidant for the band, AIB has set out to seek the lost, the broken, and the hurting. The group refocused their efforts in order to pursue a message of hope after losing many friends to depression, substance abuse, and consequently, suicide. These trials paved the way for AIB to develop their mission statement: “to inspire hope in those that have none.” The band uses their own stories of personal hardship, struggle, and loss, to relate to their fans, in order to achieve this.
“We really want to help hurting people… too many people are depressed and don’t know where to turn. We want our listeners to know that they aren’t alone, and that they can always come to us in times of need,” says vocalist Matt Hoos.
If you dig the new track, keep up with Alive in Barcelona on Instagram and Facebook.
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