Black Map Talks Third Album Before Oriental Theater Show

San Francisco trio Black Map continues to see its sound evolve after three albums and two EPs. Its most recent offering, Melodoria, offers catchy tunes with enough pop sensibility for radio play but with the technical prowess one would expect from a post-hardcore band. Lead vocalist/bassist Ben Flanagan describes it as “a headphone record with some ear candy."

Black map plays the Oriental Theater on Tuesday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m. It is opening for Knoxville, Tennessee, metal outfit 10 Years. New York post-hardcore band VRSTY is also on the bill.

Melodoria shows a band whose sound has evolved quite a lot from its debut album …And We Explode, released nearly eight years ago.

“I think when we started this band, the three of us had just got in a room,” Flanagan recalls. “We wanted to do something different than we’d done in our previous bands. The first record is a little more straightforward.”

He adds that the first record was fun, and although it was not as experimental as the band’s follow-up recordings, Black Map never wanted to make straight knuckle-dragging rock and roll. Rather, it set out to make nuanced music from the jump. Melodoria takes the band a step or two closer to that end. As in life and relationships, a little experimentation is a good thing.

“It was a healthy thing for us to not have any boundaries and not to say, ‘We have to be heavy all the time,’” Flanagan says. “At the beginning, that was our little battle cry: 'It’s just going to be in your face and heavy constantly.' Now there's some of that in every song, but we aren’t afraid of nuance.”

Flanagan also plays with the Trophy Fire, another San Francisco band, while Black Map guitarist Mark Engles plays in dredg, and drummer Chris Robyn was a member of Far. Black Map has toured with Illinois trio Chevelle, with whom it shares some sonic sensibilities.

Black Map came together when the Trophy Fire and dredg were in various states of dormancy. Flanagan says he also sometimes played with dredg as a sort of fifth member, so he and Engles were already playing within the same musical frequency. Later, they recruited Robyn, and the three started trying to come up with something heavy and fun.



“We got lucky, because we recorded a couple of songs and Chevelle heard it,” Flanagan says. “The other guys knew them from touring, and they took us out on a European tour. I think it was somewhere in the middle of Bavaria where we were like, ‘Oh, this is a thing we're really doing.’”

As for Melodoria, Flanagan made the word up. He says it's inspired by his idea of how art manifests into being: At one point, something beautiful doesn’t exist, and the artist picks up a paint brush, a pen or a guitar, and ten minutes or a few days later, a painting, a poem or a song comes into being.

“I didn’t know of a word for it, so I made one up,” he says. “It was something that was on my mind.”

He says the title track and “Nothing Over Me” tackle the idea of creation and its inherent beauty and catharsis. Those songs represent the positive elements in the record, while somewhat dark concepts run through its lyrics.

Flanagan wrote all the lyrics to the songs, which he says contain ominous dystopian themes. Songs like “Madness,” “Capture the Flag” and “Chasms” were written prior to the pandemic, and seem like they could be about it, even if they aren’t.

“A lot of it is about the idea of human separation,” he explains. “We have trouble being good to each other when it should be innate. A lot of it is about that and frustration and seeing it in the world.”

Flanagan says he is grateful that he was able to write and record during the height of the pandemic; the band started recording in February of 2020 and had to pause and change studios because of the lockdowns. That afforded the bandmembers the opportunity to listen to what they had recorded so far and make little tweaks here and there. They ended up with a better album because of that, Flanagan says, so the uncertainty during those “wild, wild times” wasn’t all bad. He adds that he's not sure what shape his mental health would be in now if he hadn't had a record to obsess over during that time period.

“Being able to make this record was a beautiful thing for me and helped me a lot,” he says. “Maybe a lot of people didn’t have that outlet, and I’m grateful that I did.”

Returning to the stage after the near-total death of live music in 2020 — even if he remembered how to play the notes and how to sing — carried a strange and distant quality at first. As of April 11, the band was more than 20 shows into its 36-show tour, and he’s grateful to be playing in front of a crowd again.

“Whatever the clichés are, when you’re taken away from something you love and you get it back and get to do it again, it’s really great,” he says.

Black Map plays the Oriental Theater, 4335 West 44th Avenue, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, with 10 Years and VRSTY. Tickets start at $10. Melodoria is available now to stream on all platforms. Visit blackmapmusic.com for more information.