Progressive Metal band DGM are releasing their brand new album "nThe Passage" this Friday (August 26th) and to celebrate we asked guitarist Simone Mularoni to tell us about the song "Animal". Here is the story:
With this one I wanted to go really back to all the bands we love and try to combine their influences with our more "modern" progressive metal sound. I'm talking basically about all the great hard rock bands from the eighties, Van Halen, Journey, Whitesnake, Toto. We always had this background in every song in the past, even in the faster ones, and you can surely tell this listening to all the melodies and the catchy chorus we always composed!
It all started from the chorus, chords and main melody, this is the really "trademark" of this song and it sticks in your mind right after the first run. We love when people at the shows sing and shout out loud our melodies and this was perfectly create for this purpose. It has this Journey-sque vibe but of course with a modern approach and sound. I created a lot of layers with different instruments in the main refrain, so other that the main guitars/drums/bass you'll get tons of keyboards and even a clean guitar doin' a clean arpeggio, so it will be subtle, but it will really remind to the classics Journey's tunes like Be Good to Yourself, Don't Stop Believin', etc etc.
Usually our songs starts either by a chorus idea or from the main guitar riff, and this time the riff came out right after the refrain: we took from our previous album idea of the song "Trust", where we combined a typical Whitesnake-sounding riff with a more metal-ish pattern, and we developed the riff in the same approach. But this time I chose to pay debt to Van Halen, also using his typical EVH Flanger in every riff, to give this riff an even more similar sound!! Verses and pre-choruses are typical DGM stuff, but the interesting thing about the verses is that you'll have a firs half in major key and the second half in the same key but minor. This give to the listener a sort of "tension" and in my opinion prepares very well to the big opening that happens in the chorus.
Speaking about the instrumental part, here it's basically Toto taking over! I would say Toto with metal influences of course ehehhe... Lukather and Paich are mainly known for the classics songs like Africa or Rosanna, but they're all faboulus musicians and composers and they wrote really challenging stuff, from fusion influenced to more soundtrack-ish stuff... Here I tried to do this exact thing but adding some heavy touches in the guitar work, I love the "epic" interlude before the guitar solo, really reminds me of Blade Runner kinda thing...
Lyrically speaking we were really inspired by the inner animal side we all have that many times comes up in different forms, from rage to fear and so on... this led to the little story in the music video of the song, where an "ordinary" guy run away throughout the whole song duration from what it seems a predator... but only in the end he realizes that he was running away from the "evil" side of himself!
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album right here!
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