If I Die Today - I Felt Nothing LP - The edges of the cover have very light wear from shipping to Stickfigure

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"“I Felt Nothing” works differently. Fat calls it “driven by external and less personal matters, still very subjective but it is more of a scream towards what we do not like about the world.” The sequence this time follows the sound rather than a narrative. He is blunt about the register: the writing was more fluid, maybe less introspective, “but I do not think we ever issued a record so permeated by sense of urgency.”

The urgency has a thesis behind it, and Fat states it. The record is an exorcism aimed at a community rather than at individuals. Where “The Abyss In Silence” sat with private pain, this one turns that pain outward into rage at the larger system. The line from their own statement, “we too are part of the problem,” is the hinge. He could talk about white privilege, he says, “which is something undeniable,” but the point was simpler and harder: to shake the listener out of apathy.

“We are somehow lucky enough to live in the rich area of the planet and our choices matter, especially in times as the ones we are going through. Shouldn’t we as a society that claims to be ‘developed’, stop looking away and maybe start admitting to have (more than) a problem? Which is the inevitable first step to solve it.”

The world, he adds, is not moving in that direction, which he thinks makes the criticism more relevant, not less.

You can hear the thesis land across the eleven tracks. “Monsters“, a feature spot for Alex from Rope, ends on the question the whole record keeps asking: “monsters, aren’t we all?” “Cowards” puts it in flatter terms: “if there is an hell is among us.” “1984” borrows Orwell directly, lifting “who controls the past, controls the future” and signing off with a thank-you to him at the bottom of the lyric sheet. The record’s most direct dedication is “Rachel“, written for the life and sacrifice of Rachel Corrie, 1979 to 2003. None of it reads as slogan. It reads as guilt shared out evenly, the band included.

The sound has moved to match. “I Felt Nothing” is the first album If I Die Today have made with Mana on drums, and Fat credits him with a jump in tempo and force, higher BPM and more impact than anything before it.

The three of them who play instruments all come out of metal, he says, while the attitude stays punk, and Frez’s push towards a harsher vocal has been pulling the band this way since “Cursed“.

Where the last record kept its shape, this one lets go of it. “We let the chaos take over,” Fat says. “We abandoned the strict concept album idea.” The guest list reads like a map of who they have been sharing stages with: Papero from Tons on “Isolation”, Mare on “End”, Alex from Rope on “Monsters”, Santa from Infall on “Tar”. “Tar” carries one of the coldest lines here, repeated until it sticks: “we are nothing but a memory of someone else.”

Before any of it reached Will Putney, it went through Danilo Battocchio, the band’s live sound engineer, who tracked and mixed the record at his Deepest Sea Studio in Turin. Fat calls the mix almost as a dare. They put so much into it, he says, that the finished version worked “like if it was a statement from us to mr. Putney.” Handing the master to Will, a Better Lovers fan’s dream on top of the work, turned out to be the easy part. For the first time in the band’s career, the first version came back and nobody wanted to change anything.

“Once we got the Master V1 all of us 4 couldn’t find much room for improvement and we just send it to the vinyl factory. That was quite a surprise knowing how picky we can get.”

Will started from what Fat calls a challenging mix, clear but already loud and full of detail, and pushed the volume further while keeping the songs breathing. “He totally understood what we wanted,” Fat says, “harmonized the sound throughout all the songs, added enough compression but still kept the dynamics.”" - Karol Kamiński / IdiotEQ

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