Rapidly approaching the release of their third full-length album, Royal Discordance, due out this Friday, February 27 via SharpTone Records, we caught up with The Gloom In The Corner frontman Mikey Arthur to get the lowdown on the making of the epic record!
1.
On the second day of recording Royal Discordance when we were in the States, the roof collapsed in the lounge room of our producer’s apartment. It was right around the time when the really bad hurricanes hit the East Coast over there in September.
We were recording in Nashville, and even though it’s a bit more central, our producer Jon [Jonathan Delese] told me that a lot of the time when these hurricanes hit the East Coast, they go inland for about three or four-ish hours and then they disperse. The runoff from the rain is usually pretty minimal in Nashville from those hurricanes. But these hurricanes went inland by about eight hours, they were a lot closer to Nashville than they have ever been historically.
Jon lives in this big apartment estate complex that was built 25–30 years ago, and he’s on the top floor. They built it so that when rain came off the roof and into the guttering, it would filter through the air conditioning units. And what was meant to be in place was a sealed funnel between the two — between the guttering and the air con evac pipe — but it was not. It was a funnel. It was just an open-ended funnel between the guttering and the air con piping.
When they got an excessive amount of rain, the thing overflowed. And because Jon’s apartment was right next to this funnel, his entire insulation just absorbed all of the rainwater that came through and sat there for about a week. And they could see the roof bowing.
His wife called in maintenance and they’re like, “Hey, we can see that there’s cracks and there’s bowing in the roof. Can you guys come check this out?” And they were like, “Oh yeah, no, it’s just the building settling. It’s been 20 years, these things just kind of happen. There’s no need to worry about it, yada yada yada.” And she’s like, “That’s bullshit, but okay.” Jon was staring at her going like, “Yeah, no, I think that’s bullshit too.”
And a week later, the whole roof came down. And that was just as we started recording. It’s typical — if things can go wrong, they will go wrong with Gloom, to be honest, just never to this extreme before.
We got the whole thing on Ring camera. When it first started happening with the roof, because it’s all plaster, it sounded like bags being ruffled. Jon has three cats, he thought one of the cats had gotten into the bag. So he walked out to suss what was going on just as the roof came down. We saw the whole thing just come down. It’s insane but also so funny — you just see Jon walk out going, “What the fuck?!”
It was weird, there wasn’t really that much water because it had all been absorbed by the insulation. Luckily we were recording in a different room, but it was definitely a memorable start to recording this album.
And to his building’s credit, they realised they had fucked up slightly. We got the Ring footage of the first panel coming down, and then when we called the maintenance guys, they realised that the second panel was going to come down too. So he called for backup, got up the ladder and started holding it. His mate took 20 minutes to rock up, but there’s Ring camera footage too of him being like, “Oh shit, I actually shouldn’t have gone up here, help, help, help!”
Then I come in and swap with him just as his mate rocks up. We swap out, and then we just let the thing drop.
We wanted to include it somehow on the album — we wanted to include the sample of Jon walking out and hearing the crashing. I’m not sure if it made it in though. I did tell him a place to put it, but I’m not sure.
2.
Another fact is that it’s definitely the longest time that we’ve taken to finish a record, and unfortunately it comes down to timing more than anything else.
I wrapped up my stuff in October and then we immediately went into the HANABIE. tour, and then we immediately went into the Cane Hill tour, and then everybody got busy over the Christmas period. When we did come back to try and finally finish everything, we realised there was stuff missing or stuff that hadn’t been properly changed and whatnot, which made Jesse’s [Jesse Abdurazak] life a little bit harder to get all the guitars done.
He works a 40–50 hour work week, so he really only had a specific amount of time to really get things done, which again dragged everything on. Which is fine — it is what it is, it happens.
Same thing with Paul [Musolino]. Paul’s an aircraft mechanic and he looks after a hanger now as a main manager, so his time’s super limited as well. And Clinch [Joshua Clinch] teaches, so his time’s always taken up by teaching.
So it definitely took a long time to get everything done, but it’s funny because it’s probably also the shortest writing period at the same time. I didn’t really start writing this thing until halfway through 2023 because that was really the only time that we had to do it.
3.
From memory, with the exception of a couple of songs that I had in the bank, the first proper song for this record that was written was probably Angel’s Wrath Whiskey, because that kind of set the precedent of what we wanted most of this album to fill around.
It took a long time to kind of get that down too, or at least get the sound down that we wanted to and build around that. And then the next two that came were You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now) and Painkiller Soliloquy. And then everything else around that just followed suit accordingly.
That’s Life (Carry Me Home) was the last song recorded, and it wasn’t actually done in the studio — it was done when we were back home.
4.
With regards to the artwork for Royal Discordance, our previous album Trinity obviously was this big, grandiose, hubris-inducing, kind of bastardized DnD campaign, as we like to say. And we wanted the artwork at that time to reflect that.
With the lyrics being a lot more personal and emotionally reflective of what the characters are going through in this record, we wanted to change that up because each song is kind of like a portrait of each character and what they’re going through. So that’s how the inspiration for the artwork came around.
There was originally a plan to do a big cinematic piece for the artwork, but I quickly realised when I was piecing everything together that it made more sense for the artwork to be more portrait- and personal-based. I’m very proud of that artwork.
5.
Off the back of the artwork too, I don’t want to say that we had a very limited budget, but we had a realistic budget to work with for these music videos. And, much like the artwork, I wanted each music video to be a reflection of what the character either feels or is going through at that time.
For Assassination Run, it’s just Sherlock [Bones] being evil and hunting people down. So we kind of wanted to make a bit of a joke about that. Where we actually shot the Assassination Run video is where we originally shot the Witch Hunt video back in the day. And I fucking hate that song (laughs). Anybody who knows me knows that I fucking hate that song.
And that’s why there’s that little tidbit at the end of Assassination Run of us shooting the body bag, which is the Witch Hunt body bag. I fucking hate that song, and that’s also why we shot it in that location too.
The same thing goes for Angel’s Wrath Whiskey. The character Rachel has gone through so much bullshit over the course of both arcs that Angel’s as a song is kind of her giving it back a little bit, especially to Jay. And we kind of wanted to reflect another music video that we had done at the time, because I realised halfway through writing the script for that that it’s very similar to Survivor’s Guilt.
So Angel’s was kind of our little nod back to that era as well. But it’s also meant to be a reflection of what Rachel’s feeling at the time, which is why I feel like the drinking game infused with the torture sequence is the best way to put it. Because it’s kind of what’s going on in the story, but not really — it’s more so what she’s motif-ly thinking.
With Nope, we just wanted to visualise it, just because we’re like, “We have to make something work and we need four singles.”
And then the last one to come out before the album releases is Clara’s focus video, You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now). The song is very much about coming into your own and feeling comfortable with yourself, everything like that.
What we’ve done is we get the main four characters together and we kind of take everybody through different iterations that they’ve been in the past. So we have costumes from all the way back to Flesh & Bones and the Trinity music videos and everything like that. We also touch on all of their influences — how they’ve been inspired or what has inspired them as characters.
For example, Jay goes through a Max Payne outfit and stuff like that. Clara goes through a Tomb Raider thing because Lara Croft was a big influence for Clara’s initial inception. We have a few other fun ones, and then we just have them doing dumb shenanigans together, almost like nothing else is going on in the story.
The main influence for all these videos isn’t actually story-related. It’s more so about what the characters are feeling emotively. And I feel like that fits better with what is going on with the rest of the record too.
ROYAL DISCORDANCE – OUT FEBRUARY 27
https://bfan.link/royal-
A record that could readily soundtrack an Anime epic, a Netflix smash series, or a sprawling open-world game, Royal Discordance is certainly not your average metalcore album. An action-packed opus hell-bent on sharp narratives and astonishing sonic dexterity, Royal Discordance journeys between an all-out onslaught (previous single Assassination Run) through to cinematic-yet-sinister brutality on Nope (Hollow Point Elysium), grinning chaotic frenzy on You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now), and a double closing sucker punch via the two-track suite Love 1: A Quaver Through the Pale and Love 2: A Walk Amongst The Poppy Fields.
Insatiably showcasing their relentless pursuit for sonic evolution, and recorded in 2024 with producer Jonathan Delese in Nashville, Tennessee, Royal Discordance also ushers in some of Gloom‘s most universal songs to date, all while remaining true to their chaotic core in the process. Whether channeling My Chemical Romance and positivity or penning pit-splitting breakdowns, The Gloom In The Corner balance their tumultuous creative DNA with an album primed for multiple revisits; and one that devoutly treads new ground.
Over the years, The Gloom In The Corner have engineered a space for total sensory immersion via a series of releases, spanning their 2016 debut album Fear Me, through to their Homecoming EP (2017), Flesh & Bones (2019), Ultima Pluvia EP (2020) and their 2022 third album Trinity, with the latter commanding a 5/5 star album review from New Noise Magazine, praising it as “a real stunner and a benchmark for metalcore going forward”. Translating their rich sonic universe into a live setting, The Gloom In The Corner have dazzled stages around the globe, spanning Australia, Europe and North America, along with aligning a horde of elite collaborators including Fit For A King‘s Ryan Kirby, Fit For An Autopsy‘s Joe Badolato, Cane Hill‘s Elijah Witt and many more.
Closing out 2025 in Europe supporting Swedish metalcore greats Aviana, The Gloom In The Corner will support American heavies King 810 nationally in Australia this March, and will also perform this October as part of the entirely sold out inaugural Hellbound Cruise alongside Parkway Drive, Polaris and more.
THE GLOOM IN THE CORNER
UPCOMING 2026 LIVE SHOWS
SUPPORTING KING810
WEDNESDAY 4 MARCH – JIVE BAR, ADELAIDE
THURSDAY 5 MARCH – MAX WATTS, MELBOURNE
FRIDAY 6 MARCH – CROWBAR, SYDNEY
SATURDAY 7 MARCH – KING STREET WAREHOUSE, NEWCASTLE
SUNDAY 8 MARCH – CROWBAR, BRISBANE
Tickets from https://www.
