BOOTLEG: EXCLUSIVE ARKAEA TRACK, “BLACKENED SKY”

In our never-ending quest to give you the best music available, we present the Revolver Bootleg series. Throughout each month, we’ll post cool, new, and often-exclusive tracks right here for you to hear before anyone else.

This installment is “Blackened Sky,” the bonus track on international versions of Years in the Darkness (E1), the debut album from supergroup Arkaea, which features members of Fear Factory and Threat Signal. Drummer Raymond Herrera fills us in on the song below.

REVOLVER What’s this song about?
RAYMOND HERRERA It’s essentially about betrayal—and not being knocked down by it—only to see the a new light that you create for yourself and move on.

Which part of it did you come up with first?
I was on tour when we—Fear Factory—did Gigantour in the U.S., and I wrote the first minute or so of the song on the back of the tour bus, on my drum machine after a show we had done on the tour. It was a pattern that came to me during our show that day.

Was this an easy song to write?
Yeah, the song was very easy to write, since we already had a starting section that set the tempo, so to speak. I had continued to write the song on my drum machine, so by the time we sat down in the studio to finish it, it came together quickly. The recording of it was pretty easy aside from the fact that it is fast b.p.m.-wise, and it was pretty tiring. We had done a lot of preproduction so I was prepared, as was everybody else in the band.

Why did this song not make the U.S. album?
I’m not really sure why that one was singled out, but it seemed to be the one that everybody liked the least. And that is grading by a large curve, since we felt that all the songs were strong. Ultimately, we knew that having an extra song to be used internationally [would fit] the larger scope.

Arkaea: "Blackened Sky"