Sleep paralysis, ambience, the strangeness of trees: Post-metallers REZN explain the altered states of their new album

“On our first record, we just wanted to make heavy, spacey music that sounded crazy and cool,” remembers REZN vocalist/guitarist Rob McWilliams.

In the near-decade since the release of that album, 2017’s Let It Burn, it’s become clear to all who’ve crossed their path that the Chicago band have far exceeded such modest ambitions. While they physically remain rooted in the vibrant community of their hometown, where multi-instrumentalist Spencer Oullette still works in a local venue as a sound engineer, their own music is gloriously untethered, roaming uncharted astral planes and blowing minds.

REZN grew organically from a project Rob started with bassist Phil Cangelosi. Both Spencer and drummer Patrick Dunn came into their orbit via a club where they worked alongside the frontman. Initially recruited merely as an auxiliary live guitarist, Spencer turned out to be key to the band’s sonic development, contributing synths, sax and more to enhance their ever-increasing possibilities.

“Spencer’s music taste inspired me for sure,” says Rob. “He was into some crazy ambient stuff, just pure sonic textures. The fact that we have someone that’s able to explore new territories through more than your basic rock band set-up or instrumentation, I feel that really frees us. Yes, we wanted to make heavy music, but it was intentionally different, where we do something heavy but there’s no screaming, there’s ethereal vocals on top, and then there’s also modular synth and saxophone. Spencer helps take everything further than we could have possibly managed as a three-piece.”

As if to illustrate the quartet’s refusal to sit on their laurels, when it came to making new album Cycles In The Infinite Dream, the sax that had become a familiar part of the band’s arsenal was largely eschewed in favour of a new element. Instead, Spencer pushed the frontiers further out with some cosmic-sounding lap steel guitar.

“When we were recording (2023/2024 twin albums) Burden and Solace, our friend Matty (Russell) who engineered those records had a lap steel guitar lying around tuned to Open D or something, and it just sounded good immediately when you put a slide on it,” Spencer recalls. “So we sprinkled it in on one or two places, and immediately after making those records, I bought one for myself and modified it a little bit.

“The whole reason why I stopped playing guitar in the band in the early days was because I had my hands full, and this was undoing that,” he chuckles. “But it was worth it: it sounded so cool that when we started writing the music for this new record, I was sitting down, playing lap steel to see what we could bake in right away.”

As already mentioned, Rob’s vocals provide another point of difference from the doom scene that first launched their psychedelic trip. Citing early influence from the likes of Windhand, Electric Wizard and Uncle Acid, a sense of melody has always been important.

“We just wanted to be a little more haunting rather than aggressive” he explains. “It’s more that lean back heaviness, rather than the lean forward, driving, in-your-face stuff. We always took that slower approach, and I think the vocals being more ethereal and atmospheric make you feel a little more spaced out.”

In accordance with such vibey intentions, Rob’s words tend towards the exploratory, with the new album’s title hinting at its lyrical aesthetic.

“Life cycles, emotional cycles, time, nature, all of these things gave me a nice blank canvas to work on,” he recalls. “I was really obsessed with trees during this record, and just everything about them: how they look, what they do, the strangeness of them. They’re almost as strange and mysterious as the deep sea.

“Cloudfall is about sleep paralysis. And when you wake up from a dream and you’re still in the dream, I love that!”

Spencer used to take such things even further, experimenting with the technique of lucid dreaming.

“I stopped because my body was telling me, ‘Bro, you just need to go to sleep!’” he chuckles. I’d wake up exhausted thinking ‘Oh no, I gotta write this in the dream journal!’”

Slipping between different states of consciousness feels entirely on-brand for an outfit so dedicated to collapsing the boundaries between doom, prog, ambient and psychedelia. The transcendent opulence of REZN’s infinite dreams can’t be denied.

Cycles In The Infinite Dream is out now via Sargent House.

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