After having released a bunch of singles, EPs, split records and two full lengths and spending long weeks on tour and playing shows alongside acts like Bane, Trial, Rise Against, Ignite, Endzweck, The Bronx, While She Sleeps or Comeback Kid, Budapest melodic power pack SATELLES are back with their third album “3AM Confessions“, premiering for the first listen right here in our track by track rundown below!
SATELLES sat down with us to go through each and every track from the energy and action packed record, proving their ever-evolving balance of personal and political issues, making the new offering an engaging, socially and politically conscious body of work.
3AM Confessions traverses the full range of negative emotions around generational questions without any particular feeling of hope. The communal needs through these songs are resonating on a quite diverse palette, expanding Satelles’ melodic hardcore vision with post-hardcore, blues and folklore elements. At the end of the record there’s no easy way-out, although a search for a wished destination organises the album into a journey for salvation through rhetorical questions about our society.
Animations by Gergő Rivasz. Satelles is Zoltán Tarján, Kristóf Hornyák, Balázs Bokis, Tamás Kubik and Dávid Bali.
Produced, Engineered, Mastered by Alan Douches / Mixed by Markus Matzinger at Deer in the Headlights, Weißkichen an der Traun/ Recorded by Máté Gál at RH Studio, Budapest / Artwork and design by aplacefortom.
The Unsung Victim:
This was one of the latest additions to this release. Our guitarist TZ brought down the track in a more-or-less ready format to our rehearsal room, while Balázs imagined the lyrics in a fictional frameset when you must defend your opinion these days as a soldier behind enemy lines. The final lyrics are quite close to a Hungarian poem by György Petri (‘Metaforák helyzetünkre’), but Balázs also refers to our previous album with the line of “To be awake is to be alive”, so basically we continue where we left off three years ago.
Skeleton Dance:
Believe it or not, it was the first track we wrote back in 2019 when we returned from our Eastern-European tour. It started out as an experiment on avoiding the regular melodies and rhythms and it ended up as the foundation of everything yet to come. We switched our tuning and received inspiration from these demos during the writing process. It’s indeed a milestone in our lives with honest and metaphoric lyrics by Balázs.
Sleeping With Ghosts:
Later on we found out the homonymy with the belonging Placebo title, but it wasn’t on purpose, we mean it. Sleeping With Ghosts is the song of remembrance on personal and social level too, while the musical aspect also grew by an experiment we did with the melodies and the breaks you can hear in the song. When it comes to the structure, it’s one of our biggest achievements on this release, especially with the chorus, where Balázs shows what he’s capable of.
Pale Grey Weight:
Pale Grey Weight sets a new standard for us when it comes to the lyrics, and by its atmosphere it’s quite close to the lonely balance we tried to reach on our first full-length, The Wolf You Feed. The ending quotation – “Time measures nothing but itself” – comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the dissonant closure was also a must on our end to end this track with violence. The song also got featured on the recent charity sampler of Just an Insight Podcast with the likes of Hidden Mothers or Coma Regalia.
Copper and Rust:
This one was inspired by the parallel actions of the Belarus and Hungarian governments in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic. As you may recall, the totalitarian illiberal regimes used their power in the first months of COVID to stabilize their control instead of protecting their nations with proactive and balanced care, and that’s why Copper and Rust is the angriest and most bittersweet track we’ve ever recorded.
Although 3AM Confessions is not a COVID-related album, this one reflects on the same motives how Eastern-European regimes try to define fake enemies from time to time, while they polarize their societies and let our beloved ones leave abroad. It’s a marching song we dedicated to our friends in Belarus after their government came to a conclusion that they won the elections. And the worst is yet to come next year when we’ll have our elections in Hungary.
The Dividing Line:
Although the opening might sound unusual for the first time with the grim guitars, the structure of this song recalls our mad love with upbeat, crust-punk inspired drum fills and downward chords. The lyrics keep up with the temper of Copper and Rust, while the ending transmission was one of the best challenges we faced during the writing process. We’ll also play this one live with History Prevails as we recorded both tracks as one.
History Prevails:
This one can’t live without The Dividing Line, and not only by the transmission, but also by the lyrics: this particular track focuses on faking history by political motivations. The Hungarian government is mesmerized by building statues that alter facts, uses culture as a weapon while it hurts family heritage, and we felt an urgent need to speak up against these actions, while the track is one of the smoothest ones on the album.
The Fall of Common Sense:
When it comes to the writing process, the hardest part is to make sure that we use all the previously prepared melodies we gathered during the demo phases, and this one was one of the latest additions to the release as we needed to find its best form. Literally worked on this for weeks. While the drum patterns are reflecting on the 00s melodic hardcore heritage, the chorus provides a groove we didn’t write since Grace Under Pressure, and the ending also has a reflection on the bittersweet, upset atmosphere of the whole album.
Our Father, Premonition:
The most distracted, most cruel track on the album has to be the final one, and we wrote the foundations of this one in the earliest phase of the demo sessions. We tried to find a way to build up a song with a hypnotizing, threatening vibe through the transitions, while the lyrics were written in the hardest period of this album cycle. This track declares that no ruling government can take away our heritage from us, that’s why we wrote a folklore inspired melody at the end of the track as some sort of a Vágtázó Halottkémek (Galloping Coroners) reminiscence, so we could use our own and common cultural code against the oppressing political situation we live in.
Az adás megszakad:
As you can hear, this one is the Hungarian version for Skeleton Dance, although we handle this as a separate song. Our friend, László Sallai (known for acts as Platon Karataev, The Somersault Boy or locally by Felső Tízezer) provided us a top notch Hungarian lyrics for this occasion, and we also wanted to let it get featured on the album, especially that we’ve never had any Hungarian songs previously. So we’ll play this one on our hometown shows, and bring Skeleton Dance wherever we can abroad once touring returns to our lives.
