The voices that open “Blurry Creatures” belong to drummer Zack Kelly’s children. They were recorded after the rest of the song had already been demoed and shelved, multiple group takes layered together to mimic a guitar line Kelly couldn’t get out of his head. For a band that has spent two decades operating as a strictly instrumental outfit, that chant is the first vocal sound ever to appear on an If These Trees Could Talk record. It also helps anchor “The Hidden Hand“, the Ohio band’s first full-length in a decade, out 10th July on Metal Blade Records.
Co-founded in 2005 by Kelly and his brother Cody, If These Trees Could Talk released their last album in 2016. A 2024 single, “Trail Of Whispering Giants“, broke an eight-year silence and brought enough demand back from listeners to push the rest of the work over the line. “The Hidden Hand” runs nine tracks, written and recorded across a stretch Kelly says took longer than the band anticipated. “This release means a lot to me not only spiritually but emotionally,” he says.
“There were a lot of up-and-downs during the making of this album and the journey took longer than anticipated, but the end goal is to make music that holds an emotional imprint, and I hope we have succeeded.”
“Blurry Creatures” is the lead single, and Kelly’s account of how it came together is closer to a slow build than a moment of inspiration.
“The song blurry creatures started from one simple short looped riff that you hear at the beginning of the song. Everything else was built around making that guitar part the main focus. The chanting came way later after we had completed the demo and it was pretty much put on the shelf.” A repetitive guitar phrase near the end of the track kept catching in his ear during mixdown.
“Eventually, I decided it might sound cool for a sporting event style battle chant to mimic the guitar line. My kids and I tracked multiple group chants and it ended up fitting perfectly at the beginning and end.”
For most bands, adding a few group vocals would be a footnote. For If These Trees Could Talk, it required actively rewriting the band’s own constitution. They have turned down opportunities to bring in a singer more than once.
“We felt that keeping everything instrumental was our truest form,” Kelly says. “I felt that being an instrumental band was essential to our survival especially with the time and place of our conception. There were not many instrumental bands, and we fell into a tight scene that felt like home. Abandoning the post was never an option.”
The chant, he points out, isn’t technically a vocal. It functions closer to a sample, a percussive group voice tied to a guitar phrase. “It also brought something new to the table as far as a sound we have never explored before and offered a new edge.”
The decision to use his own children rather than a wider group of voices was a quieter one. Both of Kelly’s kids sing in their school choir, and he has been to enough of their concerts to think initially about recruiting other students too. He pulled back. “I settled on just my kids. It built more of a tight knit / tribal, feel like a family going into battle together. There was something touching about having them on the track to help signal the begin of a new trees chapter.”
He has also been clear that the chant is built to extend past the recording: “I can’t wait to get a crowd of people singing, along with us live.”
Wyลwietl ten post na Instagramie
The title carries its own thread, and the live-singalong line ties straight into it. “As a fan of crypto zoology, and the fact that we live in a Bigfoot country Ohio, it seemed to fit the situation perfectly,” Kelly explains.
“Referencing creatures that are rarely caught on camera and when they are, it’s always a blurry picture. Us as a band also fit that category, we disappear for years at a time and there are very few documented sightings (in public and on the stage).” The battle chant, read that way, becomes “a call to action to bring out all the blurry creatures that have followed us down the path through the trees and have been fans for years.”
That self-mythology has been baked into the project for two decades. “Elusiveness has always been one of the bands selling points,” Kelly says. “The lack of clear focused group photos is baked in by design. Along with album covers that lack logos or even a legible band names or album titles. Only within the last decade since signing with Metal blade have we started incorporating more of those missing elements. It was our way of hiding the mystery behind the curtain.”
The mechanics of the music remain anchored to a setup the band has used since the start. With three guitars in the room alongside bass and drums, Kelly thinks about the arrangement like an orchestra section breakdown.
Wyลwietl ten post na Instagramie
“It’s almost the same way an orchestra would be set up with the bass guitar covering cello, the rhythm guitars holding down the woodwind section and the lead guitarist covering the strings section. No matter who comes up with a riff or where it starts, the end product must always have these three components present especially when transitioning from clean to heavy tones.”
That layered architecture is what “Blurry Creatures” works against. A single short loop sits at the front of the track, and the rest of the song expands outward from it, the three guitars stacking into Kelly’s orchestra positions before bookending the whole thing with the chant. He describes the result as “unrelenting riffs with epic highs and lows, ambient syncopated delays and a battle chant that stimulates the senses.”
On the album more broadly, Kelly hears a shift in tone from where the band has previously sat. “‘The Hidden Hand’ offers the same range of dark and ambient landscapes as the band’s previous offerings but also brings a feeling of resolution. As we all get older and our musical tastes evolve, it’s more of a challenge to keep the sound of the band in a specific lane and not venture too far away from where we originally started.”
He has described the band’s overall mode as “a slow, wordless conversation between the inner and outer world best consumed like the score to a cinematic picture or a space for meditation, healing, and clarity.”
The lineup on “The Hidden Hand” is Cody Kelly on guitar, Zack Kelly on drums, Tom Fihe on bass, Jeff Kalal on guitar, and Mike Socrates on guitar. The tracklist runs “Archons”, “Moon Machine”, “Sea Of Glass”, “Blurry Creatures”, “Silence Between Mountains, Pt. 1”, “Silence Between Mountains, Pt. 2”, “Metanoia”, “Flim”, “Endlessly Connected”.
The album is available on CD and digital, and on vinyl across six variants: Lava Red Marble, Solar Flare Marble, and Purple Galaxy Marble in the US, with 180g Black (limited to 1000), Tropical Sunset Marble in orange/purple/white (limited to 500), and Orange Oxblood Merged (limited to 250) for Europe. Preorders are open at metalblade.com/ifthesetreescouldtalk.
๐ IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal ๐๐ SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter ยท Instagram ยท Facebook ยท X (Twitter) ยท Threads ยท Bluesky ยท Messenger ยท WhatsApp.
