UNDER AUBURN SKIES
PHOTO CREDIT: GUSTAVO DIAZ
1. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! Would you please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and what you do in the band?
Of course! My name is Oscar Morales; I was born and raised in Southern California but have been living in Colorado for the last 20 years and in Denver specifically for the last 15 of those. I play lead guitar but also manage the band outside of just playing in it.
2. How would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t heard you before? What are your primary influences?
I’d like to say we are a melodic metalcore type of band. Think of early Bullet For My Valentine and Parkway Drive had a baby. That’s the more mainstream way to think of it haha. But primary influences come from a lot of bands. To name a few that really inspired this latest release, I’d say Invent Animate, Currents, Make Them Suffer, Polaris, After The Burial, Darkest Hour, Born of Osiris and so on.
3. When and how did you guys form?
The original line up of this band started just shy of 10 years ago. October 2016 was the first time the project became a thing. Most of the band was coming from another failed project and 3/6 members (now 5) came from that. Then our drummer (Martin) joined the project 2 months later and then other 2 members were already on reserve as we knew we were going to do this just before the previous project ended.
4. Your EP Diminisher of Hope came out recently. What’s the reception to it been?
So far, it’s been awesome! We knew we had to come back strong since it had been about 5 years since our last release so the anticipation was killing us. With all that, though, we’ve been getting quite a bit of positive responses!
5. What was the writing and recording process for it like?
It was a bit of a hassle but also a learning experience in general. This is our vocalist Sebastian’s first band. So I tried to give him some tips with trying to make time together to do some pre-pro and demos in general since we had a tight deadline and vocals had yet to be finalized. All in all, we all learned how to communicate a bit better since then, but aside from that stress, it was a lot of fun spending these days getting to really dial in our own tonight’s for these songs as a collective being.
6. What themes and sounds does the EP explore?
This record is our darkest tone to date. A lot of it comes from very tough periods that we were going through individually and we wanted to really bring that out. When these songs are represented as our outlet of what’s going on in our own worlds, we want to be honest and a bit vulnerable as most of the dark energy of this record wasn’t a great time. The biggest highlight was all of us getting together and really finding our voice in all of this to make it make sense to not only us, but to anyone else going through these same emotions.
7. How would you say your sound has evolved from the beginning to now?
It evolved in the dumbest way honestly haha. Back in 2022 we lost 3 members all at once. After that only Martin (drummer) and myself were left and we were uncertain of the future of this band, so for the second half of the year, we took it off to try and figure out what to do. At the beginning of 2023, my brother and I went to Mexico and I brought my laptop with me and had recently downloaded Guitar Pro. What was supposed to be me just learning how to really learn the program led to me writing the first song of the record (“Dathomir”). The pro of all this lead to me writing A LOT of this record by just using Guitar Pro… The downfall was I wrote a lot of these riffs and leads without actually touching a guitar and wrote what I thought just sounded sick haha. Turned out we had to edit quite a bit of those riffs, leads and solos due to realizing we had to actually play these songs live and I over-did a lot of the riffs without realizing I wrote things that we couldn’t really play haha. But because the songs came out great, we had to step up our game and just get good and learn how to play these songs to our best ability that made sense.
8. What does the band have coming up that we should be keeping an eye out for?
We have 2 more shows before the year ends!
1) 10/06 we play in Grand Junction, CO @ Mesa Theater in support of Psychostick and Galactic Empire.
2) 11/14 we play in Denver, CO @ The Oriental Theater in support of Fear Factory and Darkest Hour.
Past that, we have plans moving into 2027 with tour in mind, but that’s still yet to be solidified.
9. Who are some dream bands you’d love to share the stage with that you haven’t—and aren’t slated to—yet?
OOF, THERE’S A LIST! Some dream bands would be: After The Burial, Currents, Invent Animate, Architects, Parkway Drive, Polaris, Boundaries, Make Them Suffer and Dethklok to name a few!
10. What does success look like for Under Auburn Skies?
Honestly, being able to make this band be able to pay our bills would be the highest form of success for us! I don’t think we’re any different than most bands in just wanting to play for a living, travel the world and just experience the world while playing our music! Tours, festivals and everything in between is what we want to do and whether we make money or not, we do this for the love of the game. But if we can quit our day time jobs and just do this instead, you wouldn’t hear us complaining haha.