You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
The band Oathbreaker formed in 2008 in Belgium.
In this episode,
Caro and Gilles from the band break down the two-part song that opens their third album, Rhea.
These two tracks, 1056 and Second Son of R, were written and performed as one song.
Coming up,
they talk about how and why their sound transformed from a pure hardcore band to something more amalgamated,
and Carol talks about her own evolution as a vocalist and as a lyricist,
writing candidly about her own past.
My name is Carol.
I'm a singer in Oathbreaker.
My name is Shil.
I play guitar in Oathbreaker.
The start of that song is basically like, I was trying to have like a shoegaze band.
And I don't know, in my head, like this idea of a band and Oathbreaker were very separate things.
But like, why have these two separate bands?
Like there has to be a way to like combine all these things I'm looking for in music or in a band.
Why can't we like... blend those two together, and that's where it all kind of started making sense.