Fit For A King has spent most of their career on the road, as tour support up until their last record when they started to see momentum and started to sell out larger venues, but that halted once more when coronavirus shut down their tour, just five shows in.
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With their new record, The Path out September 18 on Solid State Records, they are hoping to continue that momentum they picked up earlier this year, because the last four records have been challenging times for the band, especially vocalist Ryan Kirby. Their previous album Dark Skies was rooted in hopelessness and uncertainty that plagued Kirby during a time when he began to question music as a career and if it would ever even be that.
“Going into Dark Skies, I was in a dark place because I felt like I wasn’t where I wanted to be with my music as a career,” Kirby told American Songwriter. “It was a job, but not a great paying job and we were on our fourth record and still not headlining, if we did it was only 300 people, nothing that instilled confidence that I’d be doing this when I’m 50.”
“I can’t sleep in a van when I’m 50,” he laughed, “I’ll have all the back problems. So, I was thinking am I being unrealistic? Do I need to make the tough decision to make music a second priority? I’ve been making music since I was 14, so it was not fun to think about.”
But he said that all changed quickly- and the hope that was re-instilled in him about his music career was carved out on The Path, which carries the overarching theme of victory and features more heavy metal styles, aimed to reel in the average listener and make them a fan of the genre overall and not just metalcore, which Fit For A King is known for.
“I was feeling good going into the studio and (our guitarist) Bob Lynge was writing some really uplifting music like on ‘Breaking The Mirror.’ And I like to write vocals after the music is written, so, I listen to what Bob writes and will get an emotion from it. I heard ‘Breaking the Mirror’ and it sounded like- you’re not quite where you want to be but you’re on your way- so I steered the direction of the lyrics that way, which is kind of what I did with the other songs.”
To gain the attention of a broader audience, the band led with their single, “God of Fire,” a song layered with electronics and synths that give it a pop sensibility. The song also featured vocalist Ryo Kinoshita of Crystal Lake, who were scheduled to tour with Fit for a King prior to the pandemic. The song was played with Kinoshita during their encores a few times before the tour was shut down and Kirby said it was always a good time.
“When we originally wrote that song, there were zero electronic elements and we all came to the consensus this is not our favorite song and we were debating to even keep it on the record because it was pretty bland at first,” Kirby said about ‘God of Fire.’ “And we kind of sat down and our producer Drew (Fulk) starred messing with it and we said if we were going to keep it on the record let’s at least give it a unique flavor and it’s now something you can’t find anywhere else in our discography, so it stands out.”
Their song “Annihilation” is also song Fit For A King wrote with their fans in mind. They were looking for a heavy song that they could imagine people moshing and headbanging to, with a hook that everyone could easily remember and scream back into Kirby’s mic, when he reached out to the crowd.
“We wanted to write a more mainstream heavy song,” he explained. “We wanted it to sound like something where pyro would shoot off, with a huge pit and people banging their heads. And we did our virtual concert shoot in July with that song and it’s just fun to listen to, play and see live. I want people to be able to sing along after listening to it a couple times. There’s a time and place for technicality but we just embraced that song as an almost easy-listening heavy song.”
The shift in styles for this record, is in part due to new guitarist Daniel Gailey, who came from a different background than the guys in Fit For A King. Kirby recalled bands like As I Lay Dying, Avenged Sevenfold and Black Dahlia Murder as some of his biggest inspirations as a teenager. And Gailey came from a more thrash kind of background, and played lots of more technical solos. And that difference had an impact on the writing.
“This album was more of a collaborative effort than in the past,” Kirby said. “Daniel who is a new member, who tours full time, is still figuring out how he writes because he’s from a different background than our band. It was a lot more shredding and solos, and we wanted to put some of that in our music. The rest of the guys in the band, we’ve been writing together three or four albums now, so we have a good chemistry. And Daniel came in last album to sit in and see how we wrote and for this new album we had him come in and write a lead or just put his seasoning on it.”
With Gailey reinventing some of the guitar styles and Lynge and Kirby writing more anthem like songs on The Path, it would seem that Fit For A King has overcome the hopelessness that they were feeling on Dark Skies. But they are not oblivious to the challenges they will face again when it comes to this record, releasing it several months before touring will even be a potential possibility. But they are looking at it from a practical and humble perspective, ready to jump back in at whatever cost, even if they have to open tours or play smaller venues with capacity restrictions.
“We’re in constant brainstorm mode,” Kirby said about what’s next for the band amid the pandemic. “But what do we do even if touring returns in May, that’s still seven months that we have to figure out stuff, hopefully we don’t have to do it much longer.”
“If the greenlight goes off for tours, and we can tour smaller crowds, we will immediately,” Kirby added. “Whatever the restrictions are, we will accommodate that and just go wherever; US, Europe, Australia, we just want to hit the ground running and make up for lost time.”
Check out The Path everywhere September 18, including Spotify and follow them here to find out more on potential livestreams and new music videos.
