By Robert Duguay

“There are no weak spots; I feel happy and confident with how every song came out.”

An ideal album creates the right flow, sequencing from song to song so that listening becomes a unified experience, one in which you get more out each time. That’s what the Massachusetts hardcore punks Oh The Humanity! are aiming for in their new album, Ground to Dust. And the quintet, made up of lead vocalist Kevin Athas, guitarists Chris Dileso and James Silvio, bassist Kyle Paradis, and drummer Christopher Santoro, feel that they have pulled it off. It is hard to disagree: the tracks “Gutted”, “Circumstances”, “Blues” and “Last Gasp” hand off to each other with roughshod power. The disc is being released via Sell The Heart Records.

I asked Dileso and Paradis about what it was like to work with a producer who was a friend of the band, the decision to create a more deliberately crafted album, and what they hope listeners will take away from Ground To Dust.

The Arts Fuse: For Ground To Dust, you guys teamed up with Trevor Reilly from the band A Wilhelm Scream, recording the album at Anchor End Studio in New Bedford. How did this collaboration come about?

Chris Dileso: I’ve been a fan of A Wilhelm Scream going way back to the mid-aughts and I had a passing acquaintance with Trevor. I started to know him after we were introduced at a festival down in Gainesville, Florida. I think it was the first one the band played in the state, back in 2017. Trevor and I chatted a little bit. Then we would catch up at a Wilhelm show and he started coming to our shows when we were opening for bands he was friends with. I knew he was putting a studio together. We had our last album mastered by his father Joe, who has worked on a lot of Wilhelm sessions as an engineer.

Back in the early days of the band, Joe Reilly used to record A Wilhelm Scream in their home studio. When I was working with Joe as he was mastering our last record, he told me, ”Just so you know, my son Trevor is making a beautiful studio right in historic downtown New Bedford.” I was like,”Oh, ok. That’s awesome.” So the first time after COVID we saw Wilhelm, I went up to Trevor and told him that we were working on some new songs and that I had heard from his dad about the studio he’s working on and that we’d love to record there. He said,”Yeah, man. Come down and check it out sometime.”

A couple months after that, myself, Kyle and Kevin [Athas] went down to New Bedford. Trevor showed us the studio and told us how he likes to work. We were like “Yeah, man. We would love to record with you and have you produce the album.”

AF: What was the experience like, songwriting and recording this album, in the post-COVID period?

Dileso: We finished recording our previous record right before COVID, and then lockdown started. I began writing material because there was nothing else to do, so we had all these new songs. Kyle Paradis is a great engineer himself, so we ended up demoing the songs in his basement.

A look at Oh The Humanity! Photo: courtesy of the artists

Kyle Paradis: You could say that we made this album twice. We made it once down in the basement of my house because we wanted to have an idea of what we were doing before we went into the studio. We didn’t want to burn through money and waste time. Like Chris said, it was heavily demoed. It wasn’t a carbon copy of the finished record, but a lot of the guitar layers and vocal layers had already been worked out. Then we recorded it a second time with Trevor.

I like knowing what I’m gonna do before I go make an album. I’m a big fan of the demoing process, It makes sense in this age where everybody has a Pro Tools rig. My other band, I Was Awake, does the same thing before we go record. We always demo it at our practice space.

AF: It’s good to be prepared ahead of time so you’re more efficient. Chris, that previous record you mentioned was the band’s self-titled release. Is there anything you guys wanted to do differently in making Ground To Dust?

Dileso: Working with Trevor was a creative departure. We had done all of our previous recordings with Sean Cahalin. He is a great engineer, but he’s like one of us. He’s filled in on bass and he was our drummer. We wanted to get someone outside of the group, who brought in an entirely different sensibility. Personally, I spent more time thinking about how every single song on this album needs to have some kind of a hook rather than being a cool sounding riff. You can have cool sounding riffs, but where is the big, memorable part going to be? It’s not that we hadn’t had songs with hooks before, but I thought about providing more of them this time around. Also, we put more thought into the kind of gear we had. We were all sitting in our houses for a year and a half during COVID, so I had time to think about sound I wanted the album to have. Do we want the guitars to be brighter? Maybe I should try using a different amp.

When we recorded before, we took the songs we had and recorded them. This time, we intentionally thought about each song and how it fell into the sequence of the album. We didn’t just write a bunch of songs and then try to figure out which should be an opener and which should fall somewhere in the middle. We were more intentional this time around

Paradis: Ground To Dust isn’t just 10 songs; the album is long piece of art that’s broken up into different segments.

AF: I appreciated the cohesiveness of the tracks. What do you want listeners to take away from the album?

Paradis: There’s some great songs on the back half of the album that we haven’t played live, so I’m looking forward to people hearing that stuff. I am a fan of listening to a record from start to finish. I’m not a playlist dude and I’m not into singles. I hope that people to listen to the entire album because I know how much work we put into sequencing the tracks on Ground to Dust and crafting its sound. It’s one continuous piece.

Dileso: Everything was intentional this time around, in a way it wasn’t in the past. Those who have heard our previous records should notice the improvements across the board. We played better on this album than before and we made a considerable effort to make everything fit together seamlessly. I love the way the vocals fit on this record and I love the way the songs are arranged. Our song arrangements are better and the songs are catchier. As Kyle said, from beginning to end it’s one continuous thing. There are no weak spots; I feel happy and confident with how every song came out.

Rob Duguay is an arts & entertainment journalist based in Providence, who is originally from Shelton, CT. Outside of the Arts Fuse, he has also written for DigBoston, Aquarian Weekly, Providence Journal, Newport Daily News, Worcester Magazine, New Noise Magazine, Manchester Ink Link, and numerous other publications. While covering mostly music, he has also written about film, TV, comedy, theater, visual art, food, drink, sports, and cannabis.