Cover Your Tracks

Making mistakes in life is incredibly important because knowing what not to do is an essential part of working out what to do, and so often you don’t do things right unless you’ve got them wrong first. That’s something Atlanta metal band Cover Your Tracks know all too well. The four-piece – vocalist Paul Rose, guitarist Omar Magana, bassist Cory Ferris and drummer Brent Guistwite – formed in 2014 from the ashes of previous bands which included Woe, Is Me, Decoder and Cursed Sails. Magana, Ferris and Guistwite were all members of the latter and were working on songs for a new album when it all collapsed. Yet instead of dwelling on the setbacks and the negatives, they moved forward, with Rose in toe, to create something positive out of the experience. “We did some cool stuff with Cursed Sails,” says Magana, “but it was never fully there and things ultimately fell through. I started writing again for what I expected to be the next Cursed Sails record but after writing a few songs, our original vocalist quit.”

“That’s when Brent got ahold of me,” chimes in Rose. “I was quick and ready to hang it up because I was almost done from all my failures, but I said ‘Okay – I’ll give it one last go’ and we went out there and started recording and it became quickly apparent that all the chemistry was great – we all boosted each other to do better and all the components were just right.” “And now the individual want from everyone to do it well and do it right this time around is very strong,” says Magana. “This time we know what to avoid. When we started this band I just remembered everything that went wrong before.”

“Failures are much more valuable than successes,” adds Rose. “You don’t learn anything from a success, but when you fail you understand what you did wrong.”

The result of all that trial and error is Fever Dream, the band’s debut record. A brutal assault of metal, its ten songs are infused both with heavy industrial leanings (just check out opening track “Spin The Bottle” or the pummeling intensity of “Bellow”) as well as catchy choruses and ambitious, soaring melodies (listen to the epic and ambitious soaring choruses of “Are We Innocent?” and “The Surge”). Whichever side of the spectrum these songs fall – and it’s often both, as on the vicious and sinister “Lights Out” or the fierce fire of “Never Again” – they all combine together to create a debut album that’s as full of confidence as it is uncertainty, and which is full of nihilistic despair and determined defiance against it.

“All of life is a rollercoaster,” says Rose, who – somewhat surprisingly – used to work in entertainment at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. “It’s up and down and back and forth and we wanted to take from to create these pushes and pulls. It is aggressive, because of the current state of everything, but then there are these moments of happiness that tie everything together and suggest that everything might be okay. You have to be optimistic. I’ve always wanted music to be true to our everyday and provide a reflection that sometimes things aren’t so good, and sometimes they are, and that it’ll go back and forth but always keep moving forward.”

To that extent, although Magana had begun writing material before Cover Your Tracks had properly formed, it’s not a continuation of what went before. Rather, it’s the start of something new, albeit something created with the knowledge and hindsight of the past in the mind, as well as the freedom and individuality that comes from starting a new project from scratch, all of which appealed to Epitaph and led to the label signing the band.
“This is completely new,” states Magana. “And because we all come from different music backgrounds and so we all have really good input when it comes to sitting down and writing a song. This album is exactly what we wanted it to be, with no restrictions, so to get this far and then have Epitaph on board means the world to us. We’ve been working at this for quite some while, so to finally break through and have some success is amazing. We hope people will appreciate this record as much as we enjoyed writing it.”

“Music has helped me in so many different ways,” adds Rose. “It was there for me when I was upset and it was there for me when I was excited, and that meant so much to me, so now I want to be able to do that for everyone else and give something back.”