Dead Label revisits...PURE CHAOS
So you guys voted and “Pure Chaos” came out on top, BY A COUNTRY MILE!!!
To this day I don’t know what it is about this song that resonates so much with people but it is so exciting to see the love people have for this track both in Spotify streams and when we play it live.
The first interesting fact about “Pure Chaos” is that the idea for the song, before there was even a riff, was to write a song that thrived in the live setting.
We had played a festival in the summer of 2015 and while all the headliners played absolute blinders, Rob Zombie left them all for dead and I remember saying to Danny after his set that it was the simplicity of some of the riffs that John 5 was blasting out that made me realise how clearly I was hearing them compared to some of the other bands that weekend that were playing more technically proficient songs that were just getting lost in the open air setting. That’s where the seed for “Pure Chaos” was planted.
That seed then started to grow that winter when we went out on the road with Fear Factory. Night after Night we noticed that it was songs like “Edgecrusher” and “Soul Hacker” that got the crowd moving the most. The crowds loved everything but it was these two songs in particular that the crowd absolutely lost their minds to and it was consistent across every show. We noticed it in our own set as well. Songs like “Are You Ready To Kill?” or “Ominous” were making people go crazy. Was it the open riffs resonating or was it the groove that people wanted? Or was it both? And BOOM “Pure Chaos” was born.
Once we got off the road with Fear Factory we got stuck in writing the follow up to our 2nd album “Thrones of Bones” (which we are still working on by the way) and Danny came in with pretty much all the riffs for what would become “Pure Chaos” already written and between the 3 of us we managed to put this very simply track together. We were under no illusions about how simple this song was but that was the mission statement. Write something that has hooks and grooves that if you were sitting in your tent in some campsite at some festival and you heard this simple heavy slamming groove coming from the stage, it would make you get up off your ass and go check that shit out.
Lyrically when it came to the song I followed the exact same mission statement as the music. When the chorus riff came in, even from day one, I could just hear this repeating hook over and over again. I wrote other lyrics to the chorus but as the theme of the song started to evolve I just wanted to drive the point of the lyrics home in the chorus with the words “Pure Chaos”. The lyrics steamed from our time on the road with Fear Factory. Before the tour started we were actually on our way to Lisbon, Portugal in our van when those awful attacks happened in Paris at the Bataclan but we had actually no idea any of that was going on as we had no WiFi and the last place we had checked in with family and friends was some place in the middle of France. So all our phones start blowing up with phone calls and texts trying to reach us and the 3 of us were like “What are they all worrying about?” And then we saw the news. The crazy thing was that the Fear Factory tour actually played in Paris a week later and there was a massive turn out for the show. People just need to rage and scream and mosh and sing. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. So with these awful terrorist attacks causing wide spread fear and panic, mix that with all the other fucked up shit that goes on in the world that’s where the lyrics came from.
Something that I have to mention is that “Pure Chaos” was actually never meant to be a single. As I said we were writing for the 3rd album and we just went into the studio one day to demo it and the 3 of us after we were done tracking this “demo” just looked at each other and said “We have to release this now we can’t sit on it”. So we got our producer from the TOB album Chris Rakestraw to mix it and once we got that back we were like let’s do this right and make a video for it.
The video came out amazing and once we had all that we released “Pure Chaos” on the world and it fucking exploded. We had no idea it would get the attention it got and still gets to this day!
Tell us your thoughts about “Pure Chaos” What were you doing when you first heard it? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog and remember to vote for the next “Dead Label Revisits...” and check back next week to see what track