ABOUT I SEE STARS
Somehow, it’s been nearly a decade since the last I See Stars album. There have, however, been a few hints and glimpses of it over the past couple of years. In 2023, the electronicore pioneers released four songs: “Anomaly”, “Drift”, “are we 3ven” and “D4MAGE DONE”, while in 2024 they put out “SPLIT”. While all five songs do appear on this record, they only revealed a fraction of what the band—these days comprised of Brent Allen (guitar), Andrew Oliver (keyboards/programming), Devin Oliver (clean and unclean vocals) and Jeff Valentine (bass)—had in store. Because THE WHEEL, the band’s sixth full-length, is an album in the truest sense of the word, one designed to be listened to in full from beginning to end, and which truly immerses you in its world when you do. It’s the product of a lot of patience, a lot of care, a lot of time, some of which was by design, some of which was out of the band’s control.
After releasing Treehouse in 2016 and then touring on it, I See Stars did actually start working on a new album, but when Covid hit, they scrapped pretty much all of it to instead sharpen their focus. There was, after all, nothing but time, so the band decided to spend it making a record that lived up to their own expectations and which fully matched their artistic vision.
“It gave us the opportunity to take a step back and really dive into what we wanted to actually dig in and write,” says Jeff. “Not that what was done before was bad, but this gave the four of us an opportunity to sit in a room with each other and just write.”
As such, THE WHEEL is a fully-formed living memory of both of those eras, and one that places the listener right there with the band. “It's really kind of a special piece,” continues Devin, “and you feel that in the journey when you're listening to the album front to back. You feel us swimming in the mystery of what life was doing and where it was taking us.”
Produced by David Bendeth, and mostly mixed by Zakk Cervini—though Tom Norris also worked on a couple of tracks—THE WHEEL took on a life of its own when the band started making it. The album begins with “Spin It”, which is simply the sound of a wheel being spun. It’s not just for aesthetic purposes, though. In the studio each day, the band would spin a web-based digital wheel to determine which song they would work on, but it was also a way to add some levity to the creative process.
“We would throw all the songs onto this website wheel,” remembers Andrew, “as well as some dumb, totally not creative thing in there that would like sidetrack us—but purposefully. It was this comedic approach that we were taking every day, where whatever the wheel told us to do, we’d do. It had these zany sound effects, but also created this weird vibe where we were like ‘We've just got to trust fate here.’ We're all obsessed with fate and letting things happen as they might, so the sound effect was an obvious thing for us to include—and then it took shape into a much larger concept.”
“What I really loved about the wheel concept,” adds Devin, “was it wasn't our choice. It was our choice to leave it to chance, yes, but we trusted the universe to point us in the right direction by spinning the wheel. It started off as a joke, but turned into this thing that became really important for us.”
Beyond the idea of fate and purpose, there are some other complex and deeply personal themes on this record. The yearning, tragedy-laced “carry on for you”—undoubtedly one of the saddest, most beautiful songs on the record—was written after Devin and Andrew lost their uncle to pancreatic cancer, while a number of the other songs detail Devin’s struggle with a condition called intracranial hypertension that’s caused as a result of too much fluid in the brain.
“It made me very familiar with the hospital,” says Devin. “I was hospitalized for months on end and that lasted for about two years of my life. So a lot of this record is about that. I don't deal with the chronic pain that I had from that anymore, and some would say the condition is in remission, but it's really hard for me to listen to some of these songs—truly—because there were a lot of moments writing this record where I didn't want to be alive. That's really hard for me to admit, because I'm not that person who talks about this stuff openly. I talk about it through our music—my traumas come out through my artistic expression. So listening to the record really gets emotional for me, because I'm not in the same place I once was. I'm super grateful to not be in all that pain.”
It all combines to make a record that’s as cerebral as it is visceral, as vulnerable as it is powerful, and as pure as anything I See Stars have made in their almost two-decade long career. After a long time in stasis, it’s clear to hear just how rejuvenated and refreshed they are, even as final track “Curtain Call” speeds off into the distance. That song is, as Devin calls it, “a wheel of emotion”, and ends with a question (well, two) repeated over and over again: ‘Will you ever love? Will you ever love me?’ “'Curtain Call' is tapping on every fucking thing we talked about on the whole record in one song,” says Devin. “It's almost like the wheel spinning in song form—it keeps turning round and is just racing through time and emotions. And the question we ask at the end of the song has a lot to do with the band. Will I ever be enough as an artist? Will the fans ever see us for everything we've put into this, which essentially at this point is our entire lives?”
Even just one listen to this record and it’s pretty clear that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes.
