The unique blend of two emotional niches, post rock and emo, has birthed some of the most captivating listens in the underground music scene over the course of last decades, and it’s always a great pleasure to discover another underrated artist that could be easily a solid contender in the league of such greats as American Football, Jeniferever, or late Pianos Become The Teeth. Our today’s guest, Henning Runolf, also known for his great accomplishments with Swedish screamo band SUIS LA LUNE (now active in Sore Eyelids), has joined us to present his new project LEFT-IN-BETWEEN, which just dropped its debut album of the same name. The 10-tracked comes as a quality, melancholic and affecting body of work reintroduces Henning as great songwriter and firmly plants its flag down in this lovely musical niche. Don’t miss out on this pearl!
“This band is not a band in a traditional sense.” – says Henning. “I usually start a new band or project when I make enough music in a style that is very different from all the other bands and projects I already have going. A lot of the music that I make sound very different from eachother and cover vastly different styles and genres. I suppose it reflects the different styles of music that I love and listen to a lot.”
“So this is another band that I started myself after I wrote some clean guitar picking based songs which eventually evolved into this album.”
He had two of the songs on the album laying around as rough ideas since 2007, and he never did anything with it, so along with writing a lot of new songs he also rearranged and changed those two to fit a bit better on this album.
“For this band I wanted to make songs that are really navel-gazing in terms of going full out guitar polyphony and a mess of melodies on top of each other.” – he continues. “And also in a lyrical sense of really zoning in on thought patterns, mental spiraling, self-blame, self sabotaging and the struggle in trying to break all those bad habits and coping mechanisms.”
“For the overall feeling of the album as a whole I wanted to go full out melancholy. Which I personally feel translates best in certain chords and chord progressions together with overlapping melodies. I spent a lot of time finding tunings, chords and chord progressions that I felt resonated with that feeling.”
“I don’t know if any other person in the world feel that same way about that or if that actually transcends in any similar way to anyone else but me. But since this is a very navel-gazing album anyways I really wanted to just go for that feeling it gives me.”
The songs were recorded in his practice space between 2019-2020 before he moved from Sweden and he’s been mixing and mastering them on and off when he’s had the time since the move to Belgium in late 2020.
“I recorded so many guitars and melodies on top of eachother for this album.” – explains Henning. “In some places there are five or six different guitars all playing melodies or chords on top of eachother. Even so, I hardly used any effect pedals and no distortion. I only cranked up my Music Man amp to get some good crunch and that was plenty I felt.”
“I could go on about the recording and technical stuff. But all in all I recorded all the instruments here and there over a few months in 2019. Then I took a bit longer to write the lyrics and finally recorded the vocals several months later, in 2020.”
Asked about some of the inspirations behind this mesmerizing project, Henning continues: “A lot of the inspiration for these songs and this album has been feelings and a lot of stuff I’ve been going through these past couple of years. Musically a lot of 90’s and early 00’s emo bands had a special place for me, the more melodic the better.”
After putting Suis La Lune to rest in 2018, Henning been putting out music with a bunch of different bands and projects.
“I released a noise album in 2019 under the name Guilt Casket. A new album with Sore Eyelids also came out in 2019 and I put out an album with my one-person black metal band Regnmoln in early 2020. Then I also made an album with 19 covers of bands and songs I really like under my ambient/drone/noise/lo-fi/loop project Years Passing.”
Lastly, we touched on the return of live shows and Henning hasn’t been so excited about playing live shows for quite some time “.Which is ironic now when bands haven’t been able to play any live shows due to the ongoing pandemic.” – he admits.
“But in 2019 I was already too unexcited about it that I actually pulled the brakes on a release show and some stuff we had planned for Sore Eyelids. I felt that I rather wanted to focus on writing and recording than playing a show or two. I’m a bit excited to see that the pandemic has forced out some creative solutions to live shows with live streams and online concerts that people can access in the comfort of their own home. I think maybe that’s a better way forward in general, in some cases, since venues and bookers have proved time and time again to be pretty terrible in making shows and venues accessible, comfortable and a safe space for everybody. I hope that going forward that is maybe something that bands and promoters will consider more.”
