A drummer straight from the heart of Japan, a guitar player from a war zone and a lead singer from the capital of Ukraine are the pulse of Sleep Keepers, alternative rock/electronic band living in Ukraine.
Sleep Keepers are currently working on 2 new albums and preparing to head out on lengthy Ukrainian tour this fall.
Why did you select this song as your current single?
Let’s just face it: nobody can skip a song called “ROAR!” 😉 It’s a heavy dynamic track with elements of dubstep, female harsh screaming vocals and ciphers in the lyrics.
It freaked us out at first how different this single was from everything we’d done before, we literally mixed all our favorites here.
How does this single relate to the rest of the Album, EP or Mix-tape?
Oh, “ROAR!” is a lead single from our new EP which is due in September. Our mythical first album was finished a year ago but we kept putting off the release date due to the negotiations with a few foreign labels and some technical issues.
What was the writing process for the song?
A week after we’d approved electronic part of “ROAR!”, Tala (the frontwoman) went straight to the studio without having sung the song once 🙂 Vocal melodies were a pure improvisation, the choruses got recorded during the very 1st session. Everything seemed to be going smoothly but then… the original instrumental got lost somehow. We had to begin from scratch. All the copies had just vanished, still no idea how…
What does this song’s lyric mean to you?
Who cares about the lyrics nowadays, it’s all about sick riffs! Joking 🙂 We’ve always paid close attention to lyrical part of our songs. On hearing the instrumental Tala gave it a code name “City of the dead”. However, it seemed the lyric was writing itself and it soon took on a brand new meaning. This one isn’t about death anymore, it’s a tale of a man with a tiger heart, a king of the city of stones: “Hear, hear… What I fear most of all is fear!”
What would it be like to see you in person performing this song?
Actually, we performed it about a month before the release. Tala was wearing a cop outfit, Ilya was dripping wet after a run in the rain to the venue, Toshi looked like a multihanded drum machine and fans were dancing on stage 🙂
Could your fans summarize who you are as an artist by this song?
Nah, not at all. All our songs are way too diverse and we love too many genres to go on making tracks just like this one. “ROAR!” was inspired by Celldweller, Battle Tapes, Linkin Park, BMTH, Papa Roach but now we crave something “heavier”. There’d been a lot of pressure to try to top everything we’ve ever done before and then to wait for that one damn year to be able to share it with the world. We feel a weight lift off our shoulders.
Is there a video planned and or completed and if so, what was the idea behind the video?
The vid is on its way so let’s keep it a secret for a little while 🙂
One last question, what is your motivation behind your music?
Ilya: Our emotions while composing and our fans’ emotions while listening and the interchange of those at our gigs.
Toshi: Music cannot exist without us and without listeners; I believe that music is here even before the first note is played. My motivation is to materialize the beauty of the world into music for the listeners.
Tala: Once it used to be fun, now it’s a path. I’ve never chosen music but it did choose me and I’ve been loyal ever since.
Social Media:
www.sleepkeepersband.com
http://www.reverbnation.com/sleepkeepers
http://instagram.com/sleepkeepers/#
https://www.facebook.com/SleepKeepers
http://vk.com/sleepkeepers
http://www.youtube.com/user/SleepKeepers
https://soundcloud.com/sleep_keepers