HELLO, new music from Reside! The Melbourne quartet of Liam Guinane (vocals), Sale Brown (bass), Ariel Johnson (guitar), and Dylan Houston (drums) have today released a song that Reside fans may already be familiar with.
“Replace Me”‘s memorable chant of “Give up, life moves on!” has already reverberated around us in band rooms around Melbourne, and streamed from our lips as we joined in, with the band’s encouragement. What a pleasure for it to officially land!
What’s also officially landing is the announcement of the band’s EP on the way. The Light That You Saw is planned for release in just over a month, on 29th March.
Solidly yet tenderly, “Replace Me” sonically leads us downward into emotional honesty. Rough edges of someone who was in a tough place are shared, telling us how they were not able to see anything brighter than where they were. Sharing hope lyrically and musically, Reside inspire understanding that there’s not permanence in the darkness; that it’s survivable to have hard times and there’s light to be found, even if grey clouds seem like part of who you are.
“It rained for so long that I could not bear to be replaced”
On the subject of changing, and tying “Replace Me”‘s darkness into the aftermath of loss, vocalist/frontman Liam spoke about acceptance being the hardest part of any kind of loss, regardless of the kind: “The letting go and moving on is the scariest part; leaving behind what was familiar and walking a path into total unknown.”
“Replace Me” draws us into a dark place, where not much matters, and where death seems like a better choice than the pain one is enduring. As the song becomes more tensely entangled it feels like a fight within. I personally struggled with the blending of the “Give up, life moves on” lyric with the sense of hope, assuming that giving up implied surrender or defeat in a negative way. It felt more like laying down on a road instead of getting up and climbing a mountain. So I asked the man himself for some help!
“It’s actually both,” Liam shared with me, adding that he was going back and forth between being negative and trying to be positive while writing the EP, which seemed to give his writing dual meaning. Elaborating on the lyric, Liam says “I wrote a lot of lines on the EP to be simple in a literal sense but then almost double entendres in meaning. So “Give up, life moves on” in one sense is defeat. At times you feel like you can’t bare to exist and it feels easier to just give up. In the other sense it’s an acceptance that no matter what, life is gonna keep going so you should probably get on with it.”
Sounds like The Light That You Saw may be an interesting journey! Listen to “Replace Me” below. You might also get to catch it live when the band play it in Albury or Wagga Wagga. Details on that are HERE.
