A recording revolution is coming

A look at why the current landscape is about to have a huge impact on the way bands record and produce music  

Music, like fashion and sports, operates in cycles. Today, pop queens Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are dominating the charts, while Manchester City and the Kansas City Chiefs are the crème de la crème in their respective fields.

10-15 years earlier, the story was very different. 10-15 years from now, the story will be different again. Things move in circles. Things fall in and out of fashion.

Modern metal, then, is not averse to these changes, and I think we're now at the precipice of a big change that's going to turn the music industry on its head and change the way listeners engage with new music.

For years, perhaps first kick-started by the djent movement established by trailblazing bands like Monuments, Tesseract, and Periphery, and exacerbated further by its uglier younger brother, thall, modern metal has gotten more and more precise in its execution. It’s been gradual, but inevitable, and tightness and clarity have long since held the throne. Productions are pristine and tighter than a duck's asshole.

By his own admission, Buster Odeholm, one of modern metal’s leading producers, says he wants the music that he has a hand in, be that bands he plays in or records, to sound like robots. He wants everything to be so surgically, anally on the grid that it's downright ridiculous. He doesn't want his music to sound human. He wants it to sound cold, robotic, and otherworldly. It works, but there's a catch.

As this change has been reshaping the metal landscape, it's been happening in tandem with the rise of AI, which, as we all know, feeds off existing art, made by real people. It chews it into a generative algorithm and spits it back out as something new, something unique. And we also know that AI has many haters.  

The thing is, AI doesn’t know what it means to be human. Sure, an AI ‘vocalist’ can sing of troubles like any real musician might, and they might sing with a sense of emotion and fragility, but it’s all false. As a species, we’ve found ourselves in a cold, uber-digital world. Hell, Will.i.am reckons we’ll be rolling out the red carpet for robots before 2030.

AI is amongst us, and it isn't going away. But music, I predict, will soon retaliate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

Generative AI platform Suno Music, as Adam Neely so eloquently – but terrifyingly – points out in his latest vlog (see above), wants to game-ify music. It wants to empower everyone to become songwriters, regardless of talent and know-how, and make a quick, shameless buck in the process.     

It arrives in a world already painfully awash with bands – real bands – trying to cut through the noise and make something of ourselves, in a time when musicians are expected to not only be great songwriters, but content creators,  businessmen, and marketers too. Soon, the scene is going to be even more awash with music – with competition. Real bands already have enough problems to contend with; we don't need any more.

Vitally, with modern music and AI music both going for an incredibly polished sound, I see a rebellion on the horizon that will vastly change how real bands approach production. 

What happens next?

As things work in cycles, I think we're about to see the flip turn of a near-20-year trip. Bands are going to turn their backs on surgically precise recordings, moving towards live ‘in the room’ records, many mistakes and blemishes left in, as well as voice cracks, screeches of feedback that shouldn’t be there, and so much more.

It will be the punk movement from a new generation. Productions will be rawer, bands will vie to make it immediately apparent that what you’re listening to was written and performed by real people. It will be purposefully imperfect – more Nirvana’s In Utero, less Tesseract’s War of Being. And that’s not a slight on Tesseract, it’s a great album. But times, as Bob Dylan once said, are a-changing.

What this means for bedroom producers, I don’t know. Maybe MIDI instruments will be humanized within an inch of their life, purposefully swaying around the beat, rather than banging on it. Maybe a new era of live-like recordings will make the job of bedroom producers much easier, as suddenly the bar has been lowered in a positive way. Maybe it will be great news for studios, who will be winning back clients they'd lost to in-the-box, at-home productions.

Either way, I think modern music is about to put the humanity back into the recording process, and I don’t think it is a bad thing in the slightest.