Metalcore, ambition and OnlyFans: Who the hell are Vianova?

You may or may not have heard the name Vianova. What’s doubtless, however, is if you’ve listened to this Berlin-based band, you won’t have forgotten it in a hurry.

Formed in by brothers Felix [guitar] and Paul [drums] Vogelgesang, the addition of vocalist Alexander Kerski three years later fortified an outfit born from, but quick to subvert, Berlin’s metalcore scene (today they’re completed by bassist Raoul Zillani).

Vianova’s debut album, Hit It!, released last year, is awash with warped tunes like Whatever Alright and Uh Yaya that incorporate metalcore, djent, R&B, electronica, and a prog approach to time signatures. Hearing, it’s fair to say, is believing. Plus, the quartet’s creativity isn’t limited to their musical output, but the inventive ways they’ve brought those tunes to the attention of listeners.

As they prepare for their Download debut this weekend, we meet up with them to find out everything you need to know...

“When the band was conceived, the base formula was pretty much metalcore, inspired by August Burns Red, Parkway Drive, and some more modern stuff, like Northlane. There’s the online culture of metalcore, and if you draw from those influences, you are very likely to just sound the same. So I try to refocus on the music that I’ve listened to throughout my life that has not been like formed by algorithms, or online culture, but much rather my experience of the music my parents listened to that I liked when I was growing up, stuff that resonates with me from a natural point of view.”

“That’s the thing about working on music for a long time, you kind of lose touch with what the perception of your music is because you’re so desensitised to it yourself. The first track we shared from the album, Más Rápido, was one we thought was fairly standard compared to what we’ve done before, because of the way the song was structured. That’s why we picked it as the first single. When we actually dropped the track, there was a lot of confusion in some camps, with people asking, ‘Why does it sound like that?! I don’t get how this song works.’ That was very interesting, because we thought, ‘If people already think that is weird, then they’ll be in for a ride with the other songs!’”

“Doing the things we’ve done, whether that’s putting some of our music on OnlyFans for a week ahead of the release of our album, or our social media minisodes, gave people a real sense of our identity. Labels aren’t really gatekeepers anymore. The only thing they can do is pump money into ads. And because we make niche music, the money they can pump into those ads isn’t as great. So we have to leverage organic growth in order to gain an edge on the sea of new music that’s coming out. So we started dabbling with that, posting memes and stuff like that, even before the album.

“We generated some numbers doing that, and then with the album I wanted to one-up that. I didn’t want content that would feel cheap and removed. I wanted to make something where you would look at it and be like, ‘Okay, I guess it’s not like you have to sell your soul for social media – you can do it in a way where you actually have a sense of the creativity and personality of the band coming through everything’. Our video content tells a story, and the video for the song Squier Talk was the conclusion to a story we’d been telling for almost a year.”

“It wasn’t even just about bands, but artists, musicians in general, especially rappers. One of them is Tyler, The Creator, who I’m not even sure you can simply call a rapper anymore, because he’s also a producer, producing all his own stuff. I like the way he mixes classic and soulful influences into his production, which builds atmosphere but also makes the tracks sound like a place. That’s super interesting to me. A few years back, I’d have also said Kanye West too, but his fall from grace means we have to draw a line there.”

“The one band that’s on the list for me is Periphery, just because I used to listen to them so much when I was in my early twenties, so they would be on the list on behalf of my younger self. There are obviously also those bands we’d want to open an arena for, what every band dreams of, like Bring Me The Horizon or Sleep Token. I also like to imagine Vianova opening for Jamiroquai, a great and underrated band, which will never happen because we’re way too heavy for that and they have a very different audience. But that would be so much fun!”

Vianova play Download Festival this weekend.

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