Courtesy Of Mice & Men
Audio By Carbonatix
While the well laid plans of mice and men often falter, as author John Steinbeck wrote in his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men, the metalcore band of the same name never imagined that the group would last long or reach the stardom that it has over the past fifteen years.
“There are bands that have full careers because of this music. We’re grateful to be one of them and to have amazing peers,” says Of Mice & Men cofounding drummer Valentino Arteaga.
“I probably never would have believed if someone said that Of Mice would have gold records,” he continues, referencing chart-topping albums The Flood (2011) and Restoring Force (2014).
Arteaga recognizes how lucky he and his bandmates are to still be one of the subgenre’s top acts, and they definitely don’t take it for granted. “It’s really cool to have grown with this genre and to still be here,” he says, adding that it’s “faithfulness at its finest,” a reference to Of Mice & Men’s popular song “O.G. Loko.”
“We love this music. We need it. It’s our release. It’s kind of a therapy. I don’t know what I would do in my life if I didn’t have music, this band, our albums or a creative outlet like this.”
The quartet of Arteaga, Phil Manansala (guitar), Alan Ashby (guitar) and Aaron Pauley (bass/vocals) has also continued to grow in the studio by self-producing the last two albums, Echo (2021) and Tether, which was released on October 6.
“With [Tether], we wanted to take what we learned producing our last album Echo and expand on it and create an album that was 100 percent done ourselves, from the recording to the artwork,” Arteaga explains, adding that Of Mice & Men were looking to say, “Hey, this is us. This is what our band is today” on its eighth record.
“We feel like the album Tether as a whole is more of a hopeful and empowering album than Echo was,” he continues. “Echo was very visceral and had a lot of dark moments on it because we were going through a lot of crazy, crappy shit” – aka, it was the band’s pandemic record.
But Tether, with its alternative- and hard-rock elements, is “full of bangers that we wanted to go play live” instead, Arteaga adds.
And that’s exactly what the band is busy doing this fall. Of Mice & Men will be in Denver at the Mission Ballroom on Thursday, October 26, with Bullet for My Valentine and Vended.
While making Echo served as a crash course in how to handle a record from start to finish, the Tether process was more refined and deliberate, especially after the band’s label, SharpTone Records, heard the demos.
“We showed the label some demos and they were like, ‘Cool, should we print this?’ We were like, ‘No, these are just the demos.’ Then they were like, ‘Well, they sound really good,'” Arteaga recalls. “We got some encouragement from the label that we could do this ourselves. We thought, ‘Why not?'”
Arteaga sees self-producing records as an extension of demoing songs, which Of mice & Men have always done. It also helps that the four musicians have matured as songwriters over the years, he continues, admitting that “on our first two albums, we didn’t really know how to write songs. We were just stringing parts together.”
Creating Tether “really felt like a natural progression for a band like ours that has been around for over a decade now and we’re on our eighth album,” as Arteaga sees it.
“It was kind of a refreshing reset to how we do things. It gave us some new challenges, but nothing with meaning is easy. We kind of felt like we were on the right track,” he adds. “Who better to man the boards than ourselves who really know how to write an Of Mice & Men album?”
With such songs as “Castaway” and “Warpaint” previously released as singles, Tether is a complete and complementary album that takes Of Mice & Men’s old-school metalcore roots and adds in softer, more-textured sounds, including synth and Pauley’s clean vocals, that border on nu metal.
“I feel like each album is a step in a more refined direction,” Arteaga explains. “Every album is kind of like a yearbook and shows where we were and what we were thinking about and how we were creating at that moment in time. As cliché as this sounds, as we get older and more mature, we’re writing more mature music and talking about more mature things.
“We experienced a lot more in life – loss, pain excitement, success, failure and all kinds of stuff. We can really hear that in the music,” he continues.
But one thing that hasn’t gone awry since Of Mice & Men got together in 2009 is that “we’re all trudging through this shit together,” according to Arteaga.
“We’re all on this Earth together. We’re all experiencing the same thing. We’re not immune to anything,” he explains. “Music is always a good balance to be able to help people feel like they’re not alone. To take them to a place where they can almost escape reality and those feelings and realize, ‘Oh, My God, someone is going through exactly what I’m going through.'”
Of Mice & Men, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 26, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $40-$80.
