If you’ve been following the blog long enough, you’ll know that the name Dessiderium is usually associated with great praise. Alex Haddad’s (Arkaik, Atheist, Nullingroots) one-man project earned a coveted AOTY from me back in 2021 with the release of Aria. Now, four years later, I got the chance to sit down with Alex via Zoom and talk to him about Opeth, a love of JRPGs, and his newest album, Keys to the Palace: an album whose material has followed Haddad through ten years of composition and performing, and gives insight into how he sees the world around him
It’s worth noting that this was more conversational than the interviews we’ve done in the past. As such, I will do my very best to translate our conversation into questions and answers. If anything gets lost in translation, Alex has my email to send hate mail to.
Hey Alex! Keys to the Palace comes out next week. How are you feeling on the record’s release?
Good, man! It’s kinda trippy, like the music is quite old. I wrote this stuff when I first moved to Arizona, which was ten years ago. So, the fact that it’s coming out now is kinda relieving, I’d say.
I’m sure it is. How’d you know what to keep rolling with these past ten years?
With these songs specifically? I would say it’s the first material where it feels like I’m offering something unique. Everything before this album, when I was writing in high school, was much more…just any band I was in love with at the time. The stuff I write would sound like them. With Keys to the Palace, I felt like I was stumbling upon something original sounding. I never doubted that it was going to come out one day. Initially, I’d planned for it to come out before Aria, before Shadow Burn was even a thing. You know? Life just happens and things change. When I finished Aria I said, “OK, time to finally record this album.” I’m always writing music all the time. So, if I love something, I always plan on releasing it. There are songs that are just as old that I want to put on an album one day. Not so much cutting stuff, just preserving it and waiting until the time is right.
I’ve had Keys to the Palace for a few months now, the day ‘Dover Hendrix’ came out, and I was taken aback at how different it sounded. It had a completely different sound to Aria and Shadow Burn, and a lot cheerier. I remember you saying something about “summertime metal” or something like that—
Summertime soul metal.
Yeah! Why the sudden change?
It’s funny to talk about, with the music being older than both the last two releases. So, I just have to think about what I was listening to at the time. I was coming off a two-year binge of everything Devin Townsend. Strapping Young Lad and all of his solo stuff I was obsessed with. Really, the only other artist I’ve been like that with is Opeth, which is more in Aria. I never got too into the instrumental djent thing, but I remember being in love with a project called Chimp Spanner. I liked Cloudkicker at the time, Animals as Leaders, Joy of Motion came out and just blew my mind. It was a lot of the stuff that was a little bit brighter sounding stuff I was listening to. I was also channeling a lot of my older melodeath influences, Children of Bodom, Wintersun and Ensiferum. It’s kind of a mix of all that more triumphant sound.
The first thing I noticed was Keys is more maximalist than Aria and Shadow Burn, to the point where I was almost waiting for those slower sections to kick in. While the songs do have those, I feel that everything is firing off at all cylinders.
More explosive.
Way more explosive! I find the Strapping Young Lad comparisons interesting, because while this record is cheery, I find that it’s got a lot of your heaviest riffing.
Yeah! Groove wise and everything, it’s less of the last two albums, which was embracing my love of black metal, shoegaze and creating a schmear of sound. This one’s more riffy. More of a riff-fest, I think.
How’d you balance those heavy riffs and cheery atmosphere?
I guess that’s where Devin Townsned’s always been such a huge influence on me. His sense of harmony isn’t what you typically associate with death metal, at all. He always says he feels like Enya mixed with metal, and I’ve always been inspired by that. Ultimately, I don’t relate much to evil sounding metal harmony. I like some of it, but the first thing I loved about death metal, and hearing ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ for the first time was the rhythms. Just how heavy it is, the parts that make you want to windmill. I love that aspect of metal but when I’m talking harmony, I’m inspired by stuff that doesn’t have to do with metal at all. It’s just marrying the two together.
What about non-metal influences on Dessiderium?
Video game soundtracks. I could never say that enough, always a huge influence. Legend of Zelda soundtrack, Final Fantasy, Xenogears, all this stuff.
I hear a lot of Nobuo Uematsu.
Yeah, I love a lot of his soundtracks, all of it’s huge. I love a lot of soul and R&B type music; I’m not like a collector of albums but all the Spotify playlists I listen to are all that stuff. I’m very into rich harmonies that come from that whole world. More romantic sounding stuff, really.
Shadow Burn and Aria are very much channeling that evil sound. I guess that style of songwriting lends itself to a build-up and release approach, but there’s not much of that on Keys to the Palace. There’s a whole lot of “go”. Did those soul and R&B rhythm influences bleed into the riff-writing process?
I’d say more so that style influences the sense of harmonies and chord progressions that I build. The vocal harmonies, and that kind of thing. There’s way more clean singing on this album, and it comes from the fact that I love singing along to that kind of music in my car, and I wanted to do more of that. I felt like this music called for more singing in general, because it’s not as sinister sounding. I like harsh vocals, but there’s a lot more room to be creative with singing for this album.
One of the big things I noticed was that your clean vocals seem to be projected a lot more on this album, as opposed to those last two where they sort of blend into the background. Even the production sounds less murky, hazy, black metal-y. Was that you sort of stumbling around trying to figure something new out?
That’s a good question! I’m not going to say the production was against my will, because that’s not the case. I’m kind of a noob when it comes to audio production. The guy who mixed and mastered it, Mendel, did the last two albums, and I’ve learned to trust his process and what he pictures for it. When he sent the first mix, though, it felt too “in my face” in a way. I’m used to having the singing more blended, but when I showed a bunch of friends they said the style of singing calls for it to be in front of the mix. That’s taken me a lot to get used to, because I’m not that confident of a singer. I sometimes think it could’ve been more blended at times, but overall I’m happy that it’s a different sound, rather than just repeating what we did with the last two.
You still used Brody Smith as a drum programmer. I’m not sure if you write the drums and send them to him, or if he writes and programs them for you.
I have ideas of how I want the drums to sound. So, I send him a rough track, and then he goes crazy with it, and I tell him what I want to keep or what he can go farther with.
So, why programmed drums?
The project is such a “bedroom project”, I haven’t had many opportunities to take it on the road. There’s not a lot of return financially for it, so I value the fact that we can do something budget-friendly. Honestly, I hate giving this as an excuse, but a lot of bands will just resample their drums, even when they do perform them live in the studio. So, to have that option to work with someone like Brody who can make it sound as if—he confuses a lot of people, a lot of people don’t even think they’re programmed.
I didn’t know. I had no idea initially.
That’s a luxury of today’s tech that I take advantage of. For the next album, we’re talking about him playing live drums. Because there’s something special about that too, of course. It’s just been convenience, really.
Despite you saying that it’s a bedroom project, you now have a live band. How was that whole process of figuring out these humongous songs live?
I had to find people who I knew could play them! Everything we’ve done has been with a different drummer. Jay, who plays bass, was going to fill in for Arkaik, but that never happened. I knew he was an amazing bass player, so I remembered him. I discovered his brother, Ben, from Instagram. I was like, “Dude, is that your brother? He shreds really hard!” The guy who I share harsh vocals with, his name is Cameron, and him and I have been doing a project for ten years now called Nullingroots, and he’s had a project called Light Dweller. He’s really showcasing how crazy of a vocalist he is.
You’ve got Nullingroots, Arkaik, and a ton of other projects. Did any of those outside influences bleed into the album in a way?
No, just because I’ve been doing Dessiderium for so much longer. That’s my heart and soul, and with Arkaik and Nullingroots it’s been joining a band and trying to fit my way into that sound. I’m playing in Atheist now, too, so that’s got a whole legacy behind it that I’m trying to fit into. But Dessiderium is me in my most musical, pure form.
You’ve been talking about re-releasing your debut album, Life was a Blur for a while now. Tell me about that.
Yeah, I hate how that album sounds. It’s a constant reminder that I didn’t know what I was doing back then, but I still like the music. It’s not music I’d write anymore, but I have a lot of nostalgia with those songs. I just want them to exist where people can actually enjoy listening to them, because the music’s pretty cool. I started that back when COVID hit and quarantine was happening, and I thought it’d be a nice little project, but then I started writing Shadow Burn and that took all my energy. It’s almost done! I just need to redo vocals for it, maybe have Brody redo the drums. There’s just so much other stuff happening that it’s easy to put on the backburner. I do plan on releasing it one day.
Not sure if you know them, Lykathea Aflame?
Yeah!
They’re one of the only death metal bands I’ve heard that use major scale riffing, and one of the things I noted in my review of Aria was there was a lot of major scale stuff in that album. There’s even more in Keys. Can you talk a little bit about going against the conventional metal riff-writing vein and how that fits into writing death metal songs?
Keys to the Palace is almost entirely in major key, the entire time. I think that major key has a stereotype of sounding happy, and I think that’s an insult because harmony’s way more complex than that! To me, writing emotional stuff in a major key creates that bittersweet feeling, which is my favorite feeling to capture in music. You can do that in minor, of course, but I feel that harmony in major key is really beautiful. Especially practicing some dissonance in that too. It’s that weird distortion of happy feelings that I’m attracted to.
There’s a lot of dissonance on Keys, and I really don’t understand how you make major key sound so heavy, but I guess that’s just the magic of it.
It’s not something I’ve thought too much about. I have my metal influences, and they can come through rhythmically and groove-wise, and dissonance wise even. But you apply that to a major key and it’s got a foreign feel for metal music.
You’ve been very outspoken about Opeth, and how much you love them. There’s a lot of Opeth influence on the older music, but there’s basically none on the new album. It seems that you, more or less, took the reins and went in blind. A lot of the prog-death stuff takes Opeth as the holy grail for a reason, but aside from the song lengths, I didn’t find Keys to sound like Opeth at all. What changed in the formula to make it sound a little less Opeth?
I have to remember, I’m writing a lot of this stuff back in 2014. Wintersun, one of my favorite bands, had just put out Time I. I think it came out in 2012? Hearing the three songs on that album, these massive epic songs. Especially track two, ‘Suns of Winter and Stars’, just like an epic multi-movement song. Still riffs super hard, without being in the Opeth way of repeating a chord progression for a while—which I love—but that inspired me and compounded with my love for old prog rock. That can be very riffy as well, but hearing those power metal riffs in the context of these almost fifteen minute songs…I think I’d be lying if I said that album wasn’t a part of my DNA when writing Keys.
It’s been fifteen years since you started Dessiderium. What has changed as far as going from that first demo tape you released—that I had to scour the internet for—
Is it there somewhere?
It’s on Youtube, if you wanna go find it.
No thanks.
How has the music evolved since that first demo and full-length to now?
When that demo came out, I actually had a live lineup at the time. I was obsessed with the idea of making a band out of it, touring, doing all the band things. It never really panned out the way I wanted it to. Also, a huge thing is I finally finished the first album, and I saw a few people commenting on it, even people who like it said I needed to find a mixing engineer. Suddenly, I went “Oh my god, I’m hearing it with their ears”, and I was disappointed by how it came out. It was right when I finished high school and I was going to university right after, so I stepped away from music for a little bit. I tuned in to other things in life. I was such a hermit with music in high school, and I missed a lot of experiences. So, I was trying to make up for that in college. But I ended up writing a shit-ton of music all throughout college. When I finished, I had to get back into it. Joining Arkaik also thrust me back into it, playing music, and learning from how those guys recorded, I applied it to my own music and made a good sounding album.
With the music evolving, there’s also been more symphonics added each album. There’s layers of MIDI instrumentals going on in the album, despite a real piano being used on ‘Dover Hendrix’ and ‘Pollen ForThe Bees’. Is this tapping into the video game OST influence, or is it merely for cost and time efficiency?
Yeah, you nailed it. Both of those things are true. I would really like to get into making orchestrations, because you can make them sound real. Some of the future stuff I’m working on is going to dip into that. Doing four or five albums with the same kind of MIDI sounds is getting a little…I don’t want to say stale, but predictable. I’ve always leaned into the fact that it sounds more video game-like if I use the MIDI instruments, and if I don’t mess with them that much. I just let a fake synth sound like a fake synth, or the strings sound super not realistic. Not like Septicflesh where it sounds like a huge orchestra, kind of lean into that cheaper, fake sound.
What other video game composers can you say influenced you on the album?
I always have to shout out Stewart Copeland for his Spyro soundtrack. That’s so huge for me, specifically the level Lofty Castle. The music in that level is one of my favorite pieces of music ever. Just really whimsical piano melodies, where all the intervals are spread apart, and it’s one of those things that I think about all the time. Especially when I program piano parts.
Are you drawn to a lot of these composers because of the more maximalist approach of how the Japanese composers tend to write their music?
Yeah, yeah. As opposed to the dungeon synth-y stuff. JRPGs feel very inspired by old prog rock, with those beautiful, magical flute melodies over string movements. I’m addicted to the formula, and I think they’re unmatched in terms of how well they match the atmosphere of whatever part of the game you’re at. That whole relationship of music and listening to these soundtracks while I’m not playing the game, I feel like I’m part of the world, and that’s the beautiful, escapist part of music to me. Those composers do that the best for me.
You have a lot more of a poetic approach to lyrical writing. It seems like it’s less standard metal lyric writing, and it almost feels like something that you’ve written in stream of consciousness and you stick it in songs where you think it fits. What about literary influences?
I’m way more inspired by that than a lot of other bands. There’s been certain big books for me…Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers, so his style I feel like I straight up copied for a while. Very inspired by his writing. Even guys like David Foster Wallace, that brutally transparent kind of writing. Whatever I’m reading at the time that I’m touched by has found a way into my writing style. I’ve also always been into writing, I like journaling. I’m more into a transparent, vulnerable kind of writing style. To me, I can’t write like a sci-fi thing, because I don’t see the point of doing it. It’s typically when I’m down in the dumps that I write well, because momentarily I don’t care about people reading it and can just be real. It’s funny that you said stream of consciousness, because I have vocal patterns in mind that I get really attached to, so it’s like filling in the blanks. Oftentimes, I’ll keep cutting it down until I can fit the vocal patterns.
Do you ever find great ideas for a lyric while you’re journaling?
Uh, no, not really. If I’m like, in my feels and listening to a song I made, I’ll just get the urge to put pen to paper and see if something comes out that adequately represents what the song is making me feel.
You worked with Adam Burke for the past two albums now, and this was the first commissioned piece from him. Tell me about the process.
For Aria, he already had the piece done. I saw it, and I was just like, “That’s the front cover, that’s perfect”. I bought that one, but with this one, I wanted the art to resemble a park I grew up near called Dover Hendrix. It’s kind of like a big symbol for the album. I sent him a picture that I took and he recreated it. I wanted the sewage gate tunnel, instead of being a sewage gate, to be a portal into the future. A different world. It’s about the sunny area that’s completely based off that park.
Like Aria, this is a concept album, and you seem to be very explicit in mentioning Dover Hendrix. This seems to have a recurring theme of childhood and a more hopeful or uplifting message than Aria does. I’m not the greatest at analyzing lyrical concepts, so could you tell me a little about the concept?
Initially, when I was writing it, those ten years ago when I was new to Arizona, the first song I wrote was ‘Dover Hendrix’. That song just conjured up so many nostalgic feelings for me, and it was the first time I lived in a new place away from where I grew up. I was writing all the music as a tribute to all the happy memories I had during childhood. I had a very fortunate childhood, I almost view it as a heaven on earth thing, a time of serenity. But now that I’m finally doing the album closer to age thirty, it felt weird talking about childhood, I’m a little far removed from that. It became this concept where it’s like the child self and the adult self meet, and the adult self relearns the value of life from his child self, but also the child self gets to peer into the future and get that first sense of anxiety. Dark things to come. That tension between the two.
I feel that the album’s central message is along the lines of “it’s going to be a struggle, but it’ll all be ok in the end”.
Yeah, I’d say the album ends on a neutral note. The end of the last song gets pretty dark, and musically it’s pretty bright, but the last line is “What did you do to me?”, which is supposed to be the child self asking the adult self how things went wrong. There’s no clear victory, it’s just “OK that’s what we talked about for this album and now it’s done”. Just acceptance of everything.
Lighting round! Any favorite smaller bands that you want to shout out?
Oh, man. I’d have to think. A few of them aren’t even active anymore, I think. One of them is a band called Bal-Sagoth. They haven’t been active for a while, but I listen to them all the time! I discovered them back in 2018-2019. If you’re into fantasy metal, power metal, melodeath, check them out. Best use of keyboards I’ve ever heard. Another band called Lunar Aurora, another band I’ve spent so much time with that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. I think they disbanded too. There’s gonna be a million others that I’m gonna remember and be upset I didn’t shout them out.
Favorite Final Fantasy game and character?
Favorite game is FF7, I know it’s a generic answer. It’s the first one I played, and I got into JRPGs kinda late. All those games were really overwhelming when I was six or seven, with all the reading. They’re huge! Towards the end of high school, I revisited my collection and that’s when I got into them. Favorite character? The knight from FF9, the big dude, Steiner. He just cracks me up. But also, Aerith from 7, powerful storyline.
If you could be transported into one fictional world, where would it be and why?
Oh, dude, damn. The obvious one would be Lofty Castle from Spyro 2. It’s responsible for the reason I love the color pink. The skies are all this beautiful pink. That whole world, Dreamweavers, from Spyro 1, that’s been a magical place for me for a long time. Any others would probably be from Zelda. Maybe Lake Hylia from Twilight Princess or the Fields of Hyrule.
What are some of the albums that have been on heavy rotation for you recently?
I’ve been slacking on music recently, if I’m being honest. I’ve listened to Time II a ton. I bought the whole package because I’m a die hard nerd for that band, and I’ve been listening to the battle album, I think that’s what it’s called? [Fantasy Metal Project by Jari Mäenpää] It feels like where Ensiferum left off. The new Opeth album, I’ve been listening to that. I’m not in love with it, but it’s some of the best stuff I’ve heard from them in years. Classical, post-romantic stuff. Arnold Schoenberg. Not a whole lot of albums.
My thanks to Alex for his time and taking part in this interview. Keys to the Palace drops March 14th on Willowtip Records, and you can go read the review now! I, and everyone else at the Subway, wish him a very happy release day and thank him for the amazing music he’s put out!
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