Arcane Roots: "We still love our riffs!"

2016 was a chequered year for Arcane Roots; although it brought several opportunities to grace new stages and embrace new crowds through opening sold-out shows for the likes of Enter Shikari and Jimmy Eat World, it also tested the patience and proficiency of the London three-piece as they strived to compose a long-awaited second album. Thankfully, as they approach their tenth anniversary as a band, the most dapper gents in tech-metal have bounced back to reveal that their next full-length will soon be conquering your ears and minds. "In hindsight, it's been fortunate for us in a way," admits singer/guitarist Andrew Groves, still putting finishing touches on the record. ‘For all the setbacks and problems along the way that you come up against when you're making a record, putting out the first track and reviewing the response has been quite uplifting and positive." That first cut, ‘Curtains', is a track of two dramatically contrasting halves; although its mighty climax takes everything we love about the band and builds upon it with an interstellar intensity, its opening segment throws elegant swathes of downtempo electronica into the frame. Quite literally, it draws the drapes on Arcane Roots' mindset of old. "You can't help but naturally compare yourself to other [bands], and you have your aspirations of the band and the musicians that you want to be, but I didn't want to think in those terms anymore," Andrew declares. "This album is very much about turning a lot of that off and concentrating on just pushing forward and making it the most satisfying thing it can be. "When we put ‘Curtains' out, we still had nine other songs to record, so it was great to be able to put that out to kind of dip your toe into the water and then realising that that was fine. ‘Curtains' is a nice crossfade, and maybe a good introduction to the record, but I wouldn't give any assurances of familiar ground for any of our fans." The more chorus-driven contents of 2015 EP 'Heaven & Earth' marked a daring departure from the unrelenting mathematic mindfuckery of their 2013 debut album 'Blood & Chemistry'. That said, the new one, in Andrew's own words, is the soundtrack to "getting rid of my rock sensibilities" and venturing even further into the synthetic rabbit hole. "We [already] felt like we could do rock music, and the last record we put out was the shiniest, most polished record we'd made," Andrew sighs. "With the general evolution of the band, we're not spring chickens anymore. We've been doing this for ten years, and we were all kind of aware that we were getting older and maturing, and that any album could be our last. "For whatever reason, we became very enthusiastic about life – I mean, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow! As you get older things change, people move on and die, and I just felt like I didn't want to waste time."