Need Advice - How to deal with band members trying to change our sound

Hey everyone,

Would love some advice from people both old and new to bands and peoeple to get some perspective!

I'm in a NZ metal band that started about 6 years ago with me and my best mate. We started it because we wanted to bring back that older progressive/thrash/melodic death sound we loved from older Sylosis. We weren't really happy with the direction Sylosis were moving away from the atmospheric, melodic, progressive thrash sound of EOTE and Monolith, so we basically said fuck it, let's form our own band and write the music we want to hear.

Since then we've released an EP in 2024 and our first full length a few months ago, which we're really proud of.

We've just become a proper 5 piece and played our first gig last night, which went fucking awesome. Great crowd (almost sold out), great reception and honestly probably the best the band has felt.

We're now looking towards album #2, which probably won't be out for another couple of years, so we're starting to talk about where we take things and throw ideas around.

The main issue is our other guitarist. He's a fucking awesome player and dude and has played and toured in a technical death metal band, so his idea of "challenging riffs" is obviously pretty different from mine!

He wants us to branch out more with different tunings, different keys, more technical riffs and loads of different influences. He doesn't want us to get boxed into E standard, E minor/E Phyrgian, inverted power chords, thrashy riffs and the big atmospheric/heroic sections we tend to use.

We all have our strengths in the band. Our Drummer and Lead Guitarist are absolute MACHINES. Like insanely talented. Myself and our Bassist (who formed the band), are extremely composer minded and we are great at writing riffs, songs, stories etc.

I got on a bit of a burst of inspiration recently and wrote like 6 songs over a week as demos, and while the guys loved them and some of the riffs they were like "holy shit," they were like it just sounds like what we've already written.

I said, yeah, it is our sound but now I'm trying to push the boundary, and write better songs but within our style and I even delved into a few differnt keys and tonal centres and for me, the songs feel like an amazing progression for album II. The others don't think so. They like some riffs but don't like the heroic/melodic sections, or parts that "kill momentum."

I get where he's coming from. We've got some seriously good musicians now, so I understand wanting to push ourselves.

But I'm also like... that's our fucking sound?

I listen to heaps of different music, like a wide range of genres in metal and other styles of music, but what I listen to isn't necessarily what I want to play. I genuinely love playing this particular style. I don't really want to become a tech death, deathcore or metalcore band just because we have musicians capable of playing those styles, or incorporate those styles just because.

I also don't think using the same musical language means we're writing the same song. We can use E standard, inverted power chords and fast thrashy picking and still write completely different songs. I'd rather take the things that make us sound like us and get better at them than constantly introduce new influences just for the sake of being different.

So I'm a bit stuck and would love to hear what other people think.

Does a band actually need to pull from 20 to 50 different influences to develop a unique sound? Or can 3 or 4 strong influences be enough?

Our biggest influence is obviously Sylosis. I'm not trying to hide that. That's literally why we started the band. But the idea was never to become a Sylosis clone. It was to take the sound we loved and build our own thing from it, which I feel like we've started to do.

Is this something we should actually sit down and define as a band? Like what are the core things that make us sound like us, and what are we happy to experiment with?

I don't want to box the other guys in, and I don't want to control everything because they're all fucking incredible guys and I genuinely want them to have creative input.

But I also don't want to throw away the sound we've spent 6 years building.

The three big things our guitarist has brought up are:

1. I don't want to box ourselves into E Standard
2. I don't want to be a Sylosis clone. I don't either, but I'd be lying if I said they weren't our core influence. Every band has core influences.
3. I don't like the heroic and atmospheric sections because they "kill momentum live". I absolutely love these sections and think they're a huge part of our sound. For an example of what I mean, listen to 4:35 onwards in Paradox by Sylosis or 4:51 from Procession by Sylosis just as examples.

So yeah, how do you guys approach this?

Do you deliberately try to introduce loads of new influences and techniques, or do you stick with the musical language you've developed and try to push it further?

Compromise. Do a little of both. The main thing I agree with the guitarist about is the not getting boxed into a single key. You don't want to do that. It seems like the band wants to evolve a little and it's unsettling for you, as change often is. So I think you should discuss this with all of them and see if you all agree to maybe do half the next album following your original style and the other half trying out new things.

Random thoughts:

1. Always a challenge to balance not writing the same songs but also not changing your sound too far and turning off your fans. This will just get harder and harder the more you write.
2. Arrangements for albums and live don’t have to be the same. Maybe you keep one atmospheric part for live and other tracks you blow the audience away with some insane high energy technical sections to subvert expectations?
3. Write what you write, but the best sound will come from refining that and not just sticking with the first arrangement you come up with.
4. Record all of it, and then piece together a cohesive album that makes sense energy wise. Maybe you spread the atmospheric bits across album 2 and 3? More music is always good!
5. If you’re the primary composer and arranger, I challenge you to write to your players strengths. Write shit that highlights them and shows them off and is fun to play and they will want to stay in the band, write stuff they don’t want to play and aren’t challenged by and they will leave.
6. Double album, chill atmospheric side and ripping high energy tech side!
7. Shoulda put this one higher in my list - energy at a show comes from dynamics not just from ripping at 100% the whole time. You only lose momentum if the atmospheric parts are boring. Being able to intentionally lower the energy then bring it back is its own form of tension and resolution that will make the whole set more exciting - slow parts just have to not suck!

Both positions feel understandable to me. On one hand it's understandable to branch out a little further from your core influence, particularly if it starts sounding a little samey. On the other hand, and this is metal subgenre i'm not really invested in but still, probably don't put a slam in a melothrash song. Please.

Thoughts:

\- Try to explore what you could add to your band's sound that fit with your core style in YOUR opinion. So you can come up to your guitarist with more options to offer, and more possibilities to pick from. Would it be badass to you if sylosis had a song with an osdm riff? Modern tech death parts? Groove chugs? What kind of thrash or melocore riffs could you add to your sound? If your guitarist is an absolute machine compared to you, you might wanna write some really hard shit for him and play simpler parts, that's perfectly fine - if it fits your vision of course.

\- If your guitarist doesn't like the heroic/atmospheric parts, there might be several problems: maybe he just doesn't like the style you're doing that much, maybe the parts you're writing aren't good enough, maybe they're good but don't translate well enough to a live setting. You might change the energy of the parts by writing the same guitar parts but having the rhythm sections play some kind of midtempo groove undernearth, so the audience keep moving to it. You can also think about if you could retain some of the feeling of these parts while still going fast and balls out

\- Using several tunings over the course of a live set can be annoying, but you can always experiment. Keep in mind that even though the language of metal makes it so that one of the two lowest strings is gonna be your key center 90% of the time, you can still totally write riffs in a different key, with tricks that you find used from older trad heavy metal to uuuuh necrophagist or vektor. It's a bit more difficult to write an entire song like that in your style, but that will at least add some key movement to your songs.

\- I don't think there's a "correct" number of influences. It all depends. 3 or 4 can be enough. Sometimes 1 might be enough, as you might wanna explore specific concepts further than the original band ever did (i've done that before), but that's intentionally restricting your sound.

If you’re the “motor” of the band, you just have a decision to make: you want a badass guitarist, you’ll have to keep him interested. If you’re more concerned with not changing your sound, you probably can’t have the badass guitarist.
That’s reality. Bands are hard.

The best bands evolve and reinvent themselves, otherwise you're just putting out the same album over and over but with different lyrics. In my opinion.

I definitely don't want to box ourselves into one key forever, I'm more worried about changing things just for the sake of changing them. I guess you naturally write in whatever key your tonal center is. In E Standard, I wrote most of my songs in E Minor while our other band member was often writing in E Phygrian Dominant. I did write one song in G# minor as a challenge for the first album too.

On the demos for our 2nd album I've got a song in D Harmonic Minor which sounds super dark in E Standard, a song in E Phrygian, and then a few songs where it doesn't stay in a key but instead resolves to the tonal center of E while moving through different keys which gives a really atmospheric sound

I think trying new stuff is good if it actually fits the song, rather than going "we've used E minor too much so we need to write this one in Drop D" if that makes sense.

I definitely think it's something we need to sit down and properly talk about as a band though, rather than me or the guitarist just pushing our own ideas.

I actually really like a lot of this. I definitely agree that the atmospheric parts don't automatically kill momentum either! They build it ! I try and explain that. I think it's more about whether they're actually doing something for the song, and that's something I really care about too. Some of my favourite moments in our songs are the slower atmospheric sections because they make the heavy parts hit harder afterwards.

And it's funny you mention refining, because our debut album went through so many refinements, rewrites, alterations and transitions. And funnily enough, the original album was about an hour five minutes. And while we removed one song, added another song, we also trimmed the fat on a lot of songs, and the album actually came out at 50 minutes. We still have some long songs on there, but there were a couple of songs that meandered a bit too much, or were long for the sake of being long rather than the length serving the song, and so we trimmed those down and they turned into some pretty heavy hitters. So I definitely agree about refining!

I also really like the CONCEPT of writing to the strengths of the players. I just don't want to start writing technical stuff purely because we can play it. If it fits the song, absolutely, but I still consider our music challenging because for players that can play tech death etc, not much is challenging anymore ahhaha. He does say the solos I wrote for the album are hard asf though.

I think the biggest thing I'm struggling with is finding the balance between evolving the sound and abandoning what makes it ours. I don't want album 2 to just be album 1 again, but I also don't want to throw out the musical language we've spent years developing just for the sake of being different.

Definitely think recording a bunch of ideas and then seeing what actually fits together could be a good way of approaching it.

Yeah, I think album 2 is where I really want to build on the sound we've already created rather than deliberately trying to reinvent it. Maybe album 3 or 4 is where we start pushing further outside of that, but I think we've still got heaps of room to explore within our current sound.

When I look at Sylosis, I think of the progression from Conclusion of an Age to Edge of the Earth, and then to Monolith. Edge of the Earth was a massive step up in terms of scale, atmosphere and songwriting, and then Monolith took that same foundation and refined it even further. That's more what I want to do with album 2.

I don't want to just write the same album again. I want to explore more atmosphere and progression, have some crazier and more ambitious compositions and riffs where they actually serve the song, but also strip things back in other places and make the songs more dynamic.

I've also been thinking about the tonal side of it quite a lot. The first album was mostly E minor and E Phrygian dominant, so for album 2 I wanted to keep E as the overall tonal centre, but explore more around it. Some songs might be E minor or E Phrygian, I've got one in D harmonic minor, and I want to experiment with sections where there's not really a fixed key at all, but everything eventually resolves back towards E.

That's actually something I really noticed when listening closely to Monolith. I kept wondering why certain sections had this really eerie, dark and atmospheric feeling that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and when I started analysing the songs, I realised Josh wasn't always just staying within one key. E would often feel like the tonal centre, but the songs would move through different harmonic areas around it.

That's the kind of thing I want to explore on album 2. So for me, it's not about writing the same album again. It's about taking the musical language we've already established and seeing how much further we can push it.

Yeah, I think that's fair to an extent. I definitely don't want to lose him because he's an awesome guitarist and I genuinely want him to have room to contribute and challenge us.

I guess where I'm struggling is that I don't think "keeping our sound" means I don't want to evolve or challenge ourselves. I actually have quite a specific idea of how I want album 2 to develop, and it's not just writing the same songs again. I want it to be bigger, more atmospheric, more progressive in some areas, more stripped back in others and have some more challenging stuff in there too.

I just don't want the answer to "we've got an amazing guitarist" to automatically be "therefore we need to start writing technical riffs and pulling in 50 different influences." I want the technicality and experimentation to serve the songs and still sound like us.

So I think the challenge for me is figuring out how much room I can give him to push things while still retaining the core of what made me want to start this band in the first place.

To me it's rather simple.
Unless the band is (or will be soon) making a living for the members, things have to be enjoyable and a growth experience for all the members.

So compromises have to be made.

I am of the mindset that experimentation and pushing the skills and creativity of the members brings the most joy and (subjectively) the best music.

Perhaps you need to put in the work of sitting down and finding a sonic pallette that represents a new sound that you are all happy with and can play with conviction.

Nothing bad can come out of trying.

maybe my opinion is a bit redundant…

a little tangent, tl;drloved me some old school trash…moved more into soundgarden/aic…guitarist myself since the nineties…psychedelic/stoner…jazz..ambient…ethno…not angry enough for metal (or disciplined.

fav metallica album: load. why? they surprised me. great somgwriting, different guitar sounds. least fav: garage inc: „yo now were true to our roots again“.

really was into dreamtheater…
6degrees surprised me at everycormer … hymns songwriting, harmonic changes…songs i would hum at work… yea bit cheesy and heroic…

then i saw em live after black clouds and silverlining: almost fell asleep after 5th somg…perfection, shredding, chamges…very predictable constructed unpredictability…boring. wvery album since: like that. it sells it seems .

i listen for the song. the vocals. is the band elevating and carrying the singer? or is a fight going on for attention?

is the „band leader“ able to hand off the reign and let the stallions run? do they return and pull together?

if you catch yourself thinking „this is not our sound“ that might be the death off your band incoming.

„can we make that work?“

not so sure about calculated writing in certain keys.

the synth guy in my ambient project kept attacking me with key changes and jazzchords…

stop changing chords, find melodies! forced him to play in D for a year, im playing dadgad tuning…

maybe get your stringslingers to have a whole guitar in c or d. them you can write in a different key. it hits differently, different stuff comes up. challange your virtuoso out of his comfort zone for a bit. then hand it back.

sorry bit long:

i think the sound and spirit of a band comes from this creative back and forth tension and compromised, rather then finding the perfect formula of keys/sounds. you f you find it it might sell, but also turn the band into a JOB.

cheers!

I’ve never really had “success” in music so I’m not technically qualified to give advice, but I will share an observation that might be helpful.

There are lots of stories of bands shifting their style, and it’s the best thing they ever did with their band. But the common thread with these stories of it going well is that your whole band likes the songs when you make the shift.

My favorite example is Soundgarden. They started as a metal band wanting to be “Black Sabbath without the parts that suck.” A few albums in, they were kind of stuck with writers block in the studio. Their producer at the time, Michael Beinhorn, basically told them that their songs were stale re-hashes of their old work. Chris Cornell tells him “I’m trying my best to write for the Soundgarden audience,” and the producers like “Just write what YOU like. Your audience likes YOU.” Chris says “I like The Beatles, and Cream.” Then after a couple days, he writes Black Hole Sun, Fell on Black Days, The Day I Tried to Live…and they make their most successful record ever, Superunknown, which is also their first record with weird tunings all over it.

So I’d say this sounds like an opportunity to try some new things and see if it helps you write songs that you all like! Maybe something great will come out.