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Exclusive: Rock Sound Introduces New Supergroup Ancients

There's a new supergroup you need to know about!

Ancients is the new supergroup formed by vocalist Mehdi Safa of *shels, bassist David Gumbleton and guitarist Matt Holden of ex ambient post-metallers Rinoa and Dan Hoang of Crydebris.
Excited? We thought you might be.

While it's still early days for the band, Rock Sound is happy to bring you a brief sample of a forthcoming track which you can hear by clicking below:



More details of the band will follow over the next few weeks, but we decided to ask David Gumbleton a few questions about starting up the new project.

Tell us something interesting about Ancients...
"One interesting thing is that Me, Matt and Dan started Ancients years ago but Dan had to leave to go to uni, so that left me and Matt bandless. That was why we started Rinoa with James [May, drums, The Dead Formats, Tek-One]. But now Dan’s back from uni so we thought we might give it another go. We sent some ideas to Mehdi from *shels and he really liked them so we asked him to do vocals."

Has he written all the vocal lines for songs yet?
"We haven’t actually finished recording everything yet, and he’s recording all his vocals in America, so it’s a bit of a Postal Service long distance thing going on. But it’s cool. It’s sounding good already which is nice. A lot of the time when you start a band it takes about a year to really get to a point where you’re ready to record, but we kind of went in the deep end and recorded straight away which seems to have worked out quite well."

After Rinoa broke-up were you worried about starting another band?
"Yeah, its always that thing when you stop a band there’s that scary fear that gets into your mind when you’re like, ‘shit, is that all I’m going to do musically? Is everything I do now going to be covers bands?’ So it was nice this came along quite quickly. Matt had been writing some stuff for himself anyway for a while so I think he’s using a lot of that."

How different is Ancients from Crydebris, *shels and Rinoa?
"It’s definitely a hybrid band, there are elements of all those bands. At the same time it’s got its own sound where it’s not quite as aggressive as Rinoa and it’s probably a bit heavier than *shels. It’s got mixes of both of the bands but it’s got its own uniqueness to it. One thing we’re starting to do is use a lot of synths. Our drummer Dan does a lot of stuff on his own, solo stuff, under the name Field Scarecrow, he does loads of really cool kind of jingles on the PC so we’re starting to integrate some of his synth stuff to the music as well so were adding something new as well."

Who have you got in mind to produce it when its done or is it too early?
"Well, we’ve already recorded with Jonny Renshaw from Devil Sold His Soul. We’ve recorded a first demo with him and I think well like to stick with him cos he’s so good at putting ideas into the mix and he comes up with some great stuff when you’re in the studios because he’s into that sort of music. He has lots of good ideas. We are recording, like I said, the vocals separately though, Mehdi’s going to send those over. But hopefully well get some gigs when Mehdi comes back over to the UK."

And what about the concepts, will they be in heavy rotation?
"Oh yeah! there’s a lot of background concepts with space and the cosmos. So the first tracks called ‘Constellations’. The whole concept again is to do massive landscapey stuff, similar to Rinoa where all the songs kind of grow and there are a lot of massive chord progressions and layers. It’s going to be huge. The clip we’ve just put up on Youtube I think sounds really quite big and that’s not the final mix and it hasn’t got the ending section in it. I’m pretty excited about it. Unfortunately at the moment were trying to be a bit patient which is frustrating because everyone wants stuff now. We want stuff now! We want to be listening to an album rather than just one track."