We all process death in different ways, and for Boundaries' Matthew McDougal, he channelled his grief for two friends into Yearning: the unbeautiful after. A conduit for those also rocked by the loss, he explains the new album isn't just about his personal feelings, it belongs to the world...
Matthew McDougal, hasn’t listened to Boundaries new album all that much up until recently.
“I just re-listened to it really for the first time in months, because we've been on tour.” He pauses for a moment, as if to think about when was the last time he gave his own record a spin. “But I re-listened to it a couple of days ago, and I probably feel the best about it that I have of any of our work, as far as feeling like what we made is something that feels complete.”
Yearning: the unbeautiful after is a heavy album, both musically and lyrically. With crushing breakdowns and positively furious vocals sharing the thoughts and feelings one has after dealing with death, how could it not be? Having been written in the wake of the deaths of two friends, agent Dave Shapiro and Daniel Williams, formerly of The Devil Wears Prada, there’s a lot of grief. Sadly, this is not unusual for Boundaries, but this time it was different.
“It's weird because usually when I write about stuff like this, it's just me, in the sense that it's always a personal anecdote, it's about somebody that I knew. It's my loved one, it's my relative, it's my person. I didn't have to share that with anybody that I didn't want to,” he says.
“But when things happen as publicly as that happened, it wasn't up to me to share that it had happened or share the feelings that I had, because the whole world was allowed to react to it. I had people hitting me up the day of saying, ‘Hey, if you need to talk,’ and it was just such a bizarre feeling. I feel like my feelings about how it had happened, when it happened, none of that was just mine. It was also everyone else's. It was the world's.”
Given the circumstances surrounding the writing of the record, Matthew is as candid as ever, even with the weight of emotion in his voice, about how that event amongst others acted as a catalyst for its creation.
“I knew that there would be some amount of it in there,” he says. “I was prepared for it to take up as much space as it needed to. If it was going to be the theme of everything, then so be it. But if I wrote two or three, and I felt like I had touched on everything I wanted to, then that's also fine. I just knew that there were at least a few serious things that had happened in my life recently that needed to find their way onto the album.”
It’s a gritty, potent piece of work, but, in Matthew’s eyes, this kind of heaviness is becoming rarer as “heavy music continues to lose its teeth”. To some, this may seem a bold claim, but the now-energised and impassioned growler is gradually whipping himself into a frenzy as he gets angrier and louder about how he sees his community shrinking and changing.
“It feels like such a commodified version of what it's supposed to be, at least to myself, which is expression, that’s something that is necessary to the human spirit. And now it seems to be based on, ‘How do I make a viral moment in 10 seconds or less?’ It's so commodified. It's so capitalistic. The most reward for the least amount of effort.”
He takes a breath, and we have a brief moment of silence before diving back in again.
“That's not specific to heavy music. That's not specific to music at all. It spans commercial art in general. But heavy music is supposed to be the exception. It's supposed to be the thing that isn’t as approachable. It's supposed to be for this community. And it's getting further and further away from that. I'm not making an argument for gatekeeping, but it's supposed to be for a certain type of person and that type of person is losing it. It's being taken from them.”
The argument of metal getting less heavy has existed for almost as long as metal has, and while it will likely always be there, there are plenty of ways to try and remedy it. Maybe if more bands followed in the footsteps of the Connecticut metalcore crew and handpicked every act on every single headline tour, he might feel differently. But as of right now, breathing slightly deeper than five minutes ago, his love for aggressively heavy music and desire to see it live forever is anxiously written through his every action and word.
“It came out of us completely organically, completely authentic,” says Matthew. “It is impossible to question our intent behind the record.”
If he had it his way, there’d be more people at those small shows, joining bands to go and have fun, writing music in a manner that’s never quite been done before.
“There's always going to be the underground, the younger bands, the next generation of music that's pushing those limits.” And maybe that’s what it’s all about really.
Yearning: the unbeautiful after is out now via Sumerian Records.
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