Out today/Friday, Oct. 14 is Darkbloom, the first album in five years by the Detroit metalcore troupe We Came As Romans. Most importantly it's the group's first album since the August 2018 death of co-frontman and keyboardist Kyle Pavone at the age of 28 from an accidental overdose. The album was produced by Drew Fulk, who worked with WCAR on 2017's Cold Like War, and features collaborations with Brand of Sacrifice (on the title track), Breaking Benjamin guitarist Keith Wallen, Beartooth's Caleb Shomo, Wage War's Cody Quistad, For Today's Ryan Leitru, Zero 9 and others.
Guitarist and chief songwriter Joshua Moore tells us that Darkbloom — which follows the 2019 singles “Carry the Weight” and “From the First Note” — is entirely about losing Pavone. “Every song on the new record is lyrically, um, it's about a different part of the grieving process with losing Kyle, different emotions we felt, different things we went through…We make it a point in the band, we always try to say we’re moving forward. We don't say we’re moving on, y'know, 'cause we're never gonna move on from losing someone that we all cared so much about. He was our brother. We lived with him for 12 years. Like, you don't move on from that. You just hopefully move your life, and as you grow as a person and kind of process that loss and grief, even through the years, it affects you differently and hopefully in a more, I guess not positive way, but a less detrimental way.”
Moore says that partly thanks to the pandemic pause, WCAR was prolific in writing songs for Darkbloom, and that wealth of material helped the band make an album he compares favorably to its revered 2099 debut To Plant A Seed: “This is the first time since To Plant a Seed that I truly felt that every song on the record is the absolute best we could've made it, and when we sat down and we were like, 'OK, what are we doing for singles?' I was like, 'Every one! Every one's a single!' I feel like every song is that strong…This is definitely the first time in our career I've felt like every track is the absolute best we could've made it and fits the absolutely best for the part that it needed to fill on that record, the emotion it needed fill, the message it needed to fill.”
WCAR advanced Darkbloom with six singles, including the title track and “Black Hole” in 2021 and a reimagined version of “Darklboom” (with Brand of Sacrifice), “Daggers,” “Plagued” and “Golden” this year. Moore says there was nothing left from Pavone to include in the album but that the band tried to stay true to his creative spirit throughout Darkbloom: “When Kyle passed we were in our in-between period of, like, records…. So there's not anything on it that Kyle wrote, but I do think that if he were to listen to it he would be stoked about everything. We kinda crafted every part, all the heavy stuff and all the melodic stuff, to be exactly what we all loved. If you listen to the record there's not gonna be anything on there that you'll be like, 'Oh, I can't believe We Came As Romans did that!'…We didn't push any boundaries or do anything crazy. We just wrote a record that sounded like the best version of what our band is.”
After heavy touring during the summer, WCAR played a couple of small home town shows to celebrate Darkbloom's release and will be part of The Ghost Inside's Rebirth Bash on Nov. 19 in Las Vegas. The group plans to tour extensively during 2023.
The full tracklist for Darkbloom includes:
1. Darkbloom
2. Plagued
3. Black Hole
4. Daggers
5. Golden
6. One More Day
7. Doublespeak
8. The Anchor
9. Holding the Embers
10. Promise You
