20th January 2025
It has been almost three weeks since genre-blending black metal act Am I In Trouble? released their excellent debut album Spectrum (review here). Hotel Hobbies spent some time with the man behind the project, Steve Wiener. We discussed the writing, structure and lyrics of the album among other topics such as his influences and his plans for the future.
Hotel Hobbies: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about the new album. It seems there has been a very positive response to Spectrum so far.
Steve Wiener: Yeah, it's been a lot better than I expected. I went into it independently initially. I handled all the PR myself and just the fact that so many people responded and covered it and were into it has been great. Listeners have been tagging the band really enthusiastically. Honestly, I've only seen one person so far come out and say they weren't a fan.
Hotel Hobbies: Not a bad return at all!
Steve Wiener: Yes! I know that album's not typical in a lot of ways, so I thought more people would be turned off or think certain parts of it were silly. On the album, I was influenced by music from twenty or more years ago, realistically. I mean, there was a really distinct wave of bands in like the late nineties and early 2000s, particularly from Scandinavia. But you know, other places too. They were doing this kind of genre fusing. For some reason, it kind of died down a little bit after the mid 2000s. A lot of the bands from that time stopped being active, or continued to be active but became a touring band. Arcturus haven't released a new album in like 10 years. My entry into getting into the metal was peculiar because it was kind of in the heyday of file sharing, so I didn't come into it via the typical route like getting into bigger bands like Metallica or Pantera. I entered metal because a friend of mine played me The Sham Mirrors by Arcturus, and Under the Sign of Hell by Gorgoroth. Those were my first two metal albums.
Hotel Hobbies: Some interesting ones to start with! Can you talk a little bit about the evolution and the development of the album, the decision to name the songs after the colours for example.
Steve Wiener: Sure! It's funny because a lot of the stuff I do starts off kind of like a little joke to myself. Then the joke kind of evolves into something that's a little more substantive and meaningful. Initially, the colour titles largely stem from the fact that I'm just very bad at remembering song titles. I could be the biggest fan in the world of a band and not know the names of any songs. It's terrible. So part of it was me viewing the music like an outside version of myself, thinking what can I do with these titles that will actually allow me to remember them.
However, it started to feel like a meaningful concept. Part of it again was influenced by the bands that influenced the sound of the album. If you open the vinyl copy of Neonism by Solefald, it has a graphic design similar in terms of bold clean colours and line. I wanted to continue that trend. Dødheimsgard did it a little bit with their last album: a very stark image with a subtle overplay of rainbow colours. I thought that was beautiful. I have heard a few people mention they have synaesthesia. I like the fact that correlating the colours to music was meaningful to them. There are subtle little nods to the colour in the lyrics of each song. Some of them are not so subtle. I like when an album has an overarching concept, whether it's a bigger story concept like an Ayreon album or something more conceptual like this.
Hotel Hobbies: The opening song Yellow was a little bit of a surprise the first time I heard the album due to your description in the press notes that the album was “a sort of love letter to the eclecticism and experimentation displayed in early 2000s avant-garde black metal." It has a bucolic pastoral feel.
Steve Wiener: My thought behind that song was that many black and extreme metal albums start with short instrumental tracks. Sometimes menacing death marches or a big symphonic thing. And I wondered what it would be like to do that but make it happy!
Hotel Hobbies: It certainly is an album that surprises you from the beginning. It seems you set yourself no boundaries when considering the crossing of genres. There are stark black metal moments contrasting with the tranquil, acoustic segments. It seems like you said, I can do whatever I want on this album.
Steve Wiener: Yeah. I would occasionally check myself, think did I do enough of X, Y or Z? Is it still adhering to like my personal goals and check boxes? The clean vocals in Pink, for example. Clean vocals are important to me so I want to find a way to incorporate that. I wanted the album to go like a hump in terms of intensity. So it starts calm and the middle is the most intense.
Hotel Hobbies: It is a very interesting journey to take. You play almost every instrument yourself. How difficult is it to work in that way, layering instruments over what you have already played?
Steve Wiener: It's kind of fun. It's not as challenging, as I have kind of got used to it. Often a song will start with the guitar work and once I have a clear sense of the sections of the song, I map it out on guitar. Then I'll programme drums - initially to get a feel of the general energy. Then, I'll play around with the bass. From there, I feel like vocal ideas will start to brew in my head. I'll start just like throwing in random demos of vocal lines and then a lot of it is exporting different versions of the demos and listening to it constantly. In the car or shower, I'll be listening to it. If I happen to be somewhere where I can quickly go and record the idea, I'll do it. If I'm not, I'll sing the idea into my phone's voice recorder and save it for later. It would probably be different if I were under a deadline; then it might be more challenging. The fact I'm doing this in my own space and I don't have any outside factors saying I have to be done by a certain date is kind of relaxing.
Hotel Hobbies: Did you find you had the lyrical ideas for songs that lent themselves to certain bits of music you were writing or were you writing music with those colours in mind before the lyrics?
Steve Wiener: It was dependent on the song. If I remember correctly, with White, I think I wrote the lyrics first because they were a pretty literal reflection of something going on in my life at the time. Something pretty significant was ending. There were a lot of people who wanted to show that they were concerned or supportive, but none of them really understood what was actually going on. It started off as a poem, Whereas Black, I had all the music down first and the lyrics came out of that – the same with Red. My wife wrote the lyrics to Pink, which was her first song. I was amazed by how it came out.
Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned Black was one where you had the music first. Lyrically, it's one of the most haunting on the album, which might be expected based on the colour.
Steve Wiener: It is largely about when someone is experiencing trauma and they treat it. Trauma can lead you to blocking out memories that are associated with that trauma. Eventually, those memories decay and are no longer even a part of you or accessible anymore. It was largely this idea of deciding to explore the past but having waited too long and kind of digging into your own internal memories and thinking you're going to still find them there. But there's nothing left.
Hotel Hobbies: It is definitely one of my favourites on the album.
Steve Wiener: It was a hard one to write, especially the second verse. In particular, it really talks a lot about relationships that you lose along the way. Not just like romantic relationships, even just friendships or any sort of relationship you might have, and how if you close yourself off and keep yourself kind of hidden away, it's so much easier to lose those. When people are offering help to you, if you turn away from it, eventually you just wind up in nothing. It's a dark song.
Hotel Hobbies: Can you describe what you feel like Chris Barber (the drummer) and Ember Belladonna (flutes) brought to the album?
Steve Wiener: Gladly! Chris is a godsend. He's amazing. I've been working on the album for many years, kind of on and off. When I finally kicked back into gear, I was like, alright, this is it, I'm going to finish it. I had a lot of it pretty solidly formed and done. It was all going to be programmed drums and for a long time, I convinced myself I was going to be okay with that because there are a lot of bands I really respect who do use programme drums and they sound fantastic. On the flip side, the more I listened to those bands, the more I wondered if I was ever going have the bandwidth to get my drums as good as theirs. So finally I thought where would I find a drummer? What would it cost? And I just found Chris by searching online and we got to talking and he's just an incredibly nice guy. He's super easy to work with. He has his own professional studio. He is an excellent engineer and he can play seemingly anything. We did White first, back in late 2022 or maybe early 2023, just to see you know if it was the right fit and he completely exceeded my expectations. He does all this fantastic hi-hat work and that was the thing that clinched it for me. I wound up sending him all the songs, all the drum programming I had done. He brilliantly followed pretty much what I programmed. There were a few moments – like the bridge of Red – where he came back to me and said no person can do this, you would need three feet in order to play this part! I can't recommend him enough as a drummer. But it's funny because – and it is a sign of the modern era – he lives in the UK and I have never even heard his voice. We do everything in writing. He is an integral part of the album and I have already talked to him about the next album.
It was similar with Ember. I really like flutes and the further I got with the album, I wanted them. I had all these programmed parts with flutes that I played on keyboard. It went back to bands that were big influences like Borknagar and the albums where Lars Nedland plays flute. I wondered if I could get a flute player, if I could afford it and were my programmes even in keys that a real flute can play? I discovered Ember through Angry Metal Guy because she has a solo album called The Grove that they had done a review of that was very positive. It is a really cool album. I don't know any other album like it, where it's a folk metal album, but the flute is like the centrepiece. There are loads of instrumental tracks that are all flutes or flute centred. There are tracks with vocals, but the flute is still the prominent focus. So I just reached out to her and she was on board. I also really want to continue working with her. Finding these partners is going to keep helping me shape the sound. I feel like I lucked out in terms of timing with when the album came out now, because flutes and metal are being talked about because of Opeth. I couldn't have predicted that but I'm glad it happened.
Hotel Hobbies: It's good timing indeed. You mentioned another album and I remember seeing on your socials someone putting forward the case for orange or purple! Is that the plan – to continue with the colours or something completely different?
Steve Wiener: Sort of. I don't want to give anything away yet. I have a release plan; I can say that much. It's definitely going to take less time. This album took so many years to finish for so many various life reasons but in the last two years, I've finally been able to get like a consistent, focused approach to music making.
Hotel Hobbies: Spectrum is just over thirty minutes long. Was that always the plan – to have a tight running time?
Steve Wiener: Yeah, it was. It's is a symptom of the way many people listen to music. It's so hard to cut through - with the Internet and the fact that anyone can release music that's available everywhere. There are just thousands of bands and many of them are really good. Even really good ones get missed because there's just so much competition. Also, it's a tall order for a lot of people to get a debut album from an unknown band and be expected to listen the whole thing. People say to me I do not have the time to listen to as much music as I want. Maybe, sometimes it is just a ten minute drive and a few songs. I wondered if I could make an album that still felt like a full album but was not going to task people. I think singles are important but I still wanted an album that felt like a cohesive piece if you listen to it from start to end.
Hotel Hobbies: You obviously, deliberately chose not to have a typical black metal album cover.
Steve Wiener: My friend, Eva Darron, who's an artist is amazing. She did all the artwork, the band logo and the design for the cassette and vinyl release. She just floored me. Like you said, it was very deliberate. Part of my goal was to have something that stood out for someone who could be searching for new black metal release and they would see the cover in a vertical scroll and wonder what the heck it was!
Hotel Hobbies: To round off, you have mentioned bands from previous years that have influenced you; what are you enjoying in more recent times?
Steve Wiener: I spent a lot of time over the last year or so listening to Black Medium Current by Dødheimsgard. It is wonderful and immediately became one of my favourites. Fall by Borknagar would be another. I am obsessed with anything Lars Nedland sings on. He also guested on the single The Distance by Amiensus, with whom I was not familiar. They released a double album as two standalones and I got both of those because they are fantastic. I also liked the new project by Vicotnik from Dødheimsgard.
Hotel Hobbies: Yes that is a very interesting album. I enjoyed writing about that one. You have to be in the right mood for it but if you are, it is excellent. (Note: this is the album by Doedsmaghird - review here).
Steve Wiener: It makes sense why it's not a Dødheimsgard release. It's right on the periphery of where I understand why this is a different band, but it's still familiar. It blew me away. It came out of nowhere for me. I wasn't expecting it because Dødheimsgard normally have so long between albums.
Hotel Hobbies: Thank you so much for your time and also thank you for the support you have given to my website! It's been nice to put a face to the name after communicating here and there. I look forward to seeing where Am I In Trouble? takes you next.
Steve Wiener: Thank you! This was really fun. It was nice to meet face to face after reading your words for a long time. Take care!
Am I In Trouble? online
LINKTREE: https://linktr.ee/amiintrouble
AMPWALL: https://amiintrouble.ampwall.com/
BANDCAMP: https://amiintrouble.bandcamp.com/
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