Treebeard discuss new album ‘Snowman’
Australian band Treebeard straddle the genres of post-rock and post-metal while also not quite sounding like any other band out there. On their new album, Snowman, the band traverses dynamic, layered soundscapes on an emotionally charged journey through the perils of isolation. They talked to Andrea Moss about Snowman, its origins, what’s behind the cathartic release of that final track - and an unexpected influence.
First questions first: Who, or what, is the Snowman?
“The Snowman is you the listener,” says Pat Cooke, the band’s lead guitarist and vocalist. “It’s the person you’re picturing on this journey as you’re listening, whether you want to internalise that as yourself, or if you’re more the outside observer.”
The journey itself - where it begins and ends, its triumphs and failures - is open to listeners’ interpretations, but it has its origins in two subjects characterised by isolation: Melbourne, Australia’s extensive Covid-19 lockdowns, and dangerous exploratory expeditions.
Like many Melburnians, Pat spent much of lockdown immersed in reading.
“The overarching theme of the books was explorations, or failed, explorations of extreme environments, in particular the Arctic and the Antarctic,” he says. “I found the imagery of all that really interesting. The landscapes of those places are intense and scary, but also beautiful. I thought: What if you could create that journey through music? How do you demonstrate a journey of someone going into the unknown and basically getting their arse handed to them by Mother Nature?”
He saw clear parallels between the isolation imposed by the pandemic lockdowns and that of traversing polar environments. “And going through your own mental health struggles, and learning about yourself. It was a melting pot of all those things.”
Given the stark emotions laid bare in the album, and at times the music’s brutality, is the journey chronicled a failed one?
“With the last track, Snowman, in that last little measure where it builds up in intensity, I always picture that as someone just getting overtaken by a blizzard … and they’re gone in the wind,” Pat says.
But drummer Beau Heffernan - whose favourite track is that atmospheric titan, Snowman - has a somewhat more positive take. “I hear a potentially uplifting aspect to it. Now whether that’s a ‘getting out of it’ or a ‘coming to peace’ … I don't think it’s a totally negative vibe. It’s cathartic.”
We’ve jumped straight to the album’s final track here - but then, the journey of writing Snowman was itself not a linear one.
Pat sketched out all the songs initially. In Tooth and Claw was written first, around 2018-19, when he was in another band. At that point it had no vocals. Lieutenant followed in early 2020. Then came a flurry of writing during one of the early pandemic lockdowns. “Erebus was the first, and then Nigel, Snowman, Great White - all these songs just came together in that short period,” Pat says. “Once I start writing a song, it tends to come together in a night.”
Ice-cool Incognita also emerged during lockdown, as did Mountain of Madness, which, with its screamed refrain of “so weakened, fallen mind”, was a direct response to the frustrations of isolation.
“I remember whisper-growling into a microphone in my little apartment (during lockdown), trying not to be too loud for the neighbours because I knew they were all home,” Pat says. (More on those vocals later.)
But fleshing out and recording the tracks - creating Snowman the album - wouldn’t come for some time. First up was rerecording Treebeard’s debut album Nostalgia as a band, replacing founding member Pat’s original solo recordings.
Nostalgia, a collection of tracks mourning a lost earth, is what brought the four musicians together.
“We joined Treebeard because we liked it and we wanted to be part of it,” Beau says. “The rerecording was mainly to have us on the record - we as individuals are better at what we do than Pat might be at all of it. We all agreed that it deserved more. We all really liked what we heard so it was more about finessing it and making it better.”
Guitarist Josh Bills adds: “Like getting a decent bass tone.” They all laugh.
It wasn’t until 2022-2023 that the four began working as a group on what would become Snowman the album. If Nostalgia brought them together, it was the process of creating Snowman that truly made Treebeard a band - not just “four mates playing music”, Pat says.
“Pat was keen to get recording the tracks, but we were like, ‘We’ve got to actually figure them out’,” Josh says. “And it took a lot longer than what we initially thought.”
The songs were “in various states of completion”, Beau notes. “Some were fully formed. Some didn’t have any drums at all; some just had drum beats that Pat liked; some had bits that had drums in them and bits that didn’t. Some weren’t even fully completed as a song. It was just about coming together and doing one at a time.”
Despite disagreements, it was an enjoyable process, he says. “We could all criticise and critique each other to get it to where it needed to be. We know each other and know what we can do. For example, Rhys (Brennan, bass player) will go, ‘You can do that better’ - I want that. We all want that. It means you end up with a product that you’re a lot happier with.”
Rhys adds: “We all trust each other musically. We all know our opinions are worth something. It all comes back to why we joined the band in the first place. So when someone says, ‘I don’t think this is working’, we take it seriously.”
Swelling, melancholic post-rock track Great White, which would later become Snowman’s first single, took the longest - especially figuring out the outro, which originally had three additional riffs.
“And they’re all very good riffs - great riffs - and we hope that they get used somewhere else!” says Beau. “But we spent a month going: 'Do we switch this riff with that one? Or do we leave this one and get rid of that one?’ We were going through it for ages. Then Rhys said, ‘Why don’t we just not do them, and we go back to that bit before that we don’t really revisit’ - which is what the outro turned out to be.”
How did Pat handle the dumping of his riffs?
“Pat, credit to him, took it on the chin,” Beau says. “It's a hard thing to tear your bandmate to shreds over three riffs and say ‘let’s not do them’. None of us thought they were bad - they just didn’t fit. Too much riff!”
Great White was a teething process and once they’d nailed the track, the other songs fell into place more quickly.
All the work they put in leading up to recording paved the way for a smooth process.
Rhys says: “With Nostalgia it was like ‘how do Pat’s songs go again?’ This time we put a lot more effort into writing each of the instruments to work well. So recording was mostly ‘hit the button and lay the part down well’ as opposed to trying to feel your way through it. Because we’d done all the hard work beforehand.”
Take Pat’s screaming on vocal epic Mountain of Madness, which represents a new heaviness for the band, as another example of this.
Originally, he wasn’t even going to perform the vocals himself - but in the end, his vocals were recorded in just two takes.
“Pat initially mentioned, ‘I might get someone to scream on this, or I might do some screams’,” Beau says. “Then he gave us the demo and he literally screams from the get-go! Which was a lot for us, but we all loved it.”
Pat says: “I was going to get one of our friends in the scene to do it, but then I got somewhat aware of how to scream, what the technique is. It hurt like hell for the first few months - I would completely blow my voice out - but these days I’m a lot more aware of how to actually sit and not push that hard, and warm up a little bit. Before recording it, there was a lot of growth vocally.”
‘Snowman’ by Treebeard
Laying down Snowman’s title track - one of the band’s favourites - was a special high point, and it is something of an outlier as the track that evolved most during recording itself.
It went “piece by piece”, Pat says.“It wasn’t like a normal song - before we recorded it was just a drum part and a guitar part. So we got to chuck all these different pieces on.”
Josh: “We went nuts on the layering. There are even a dozen layers of vocals at the start. I got a bit excited. You can barely hear them but it just adds to the vibe.”
And there are three drum layers on it, Beau says. “Josh and I were fucking with the distortion on the drums … and then seeing Rhys nail the bass on it was a beautiful thing to watch. I felt like I got to see all of these guys at their best.”
Pat, for example, is “always fucking around on the guitar, always diddling and doing something stupid - but it was actually good to watch him do Snowman. He was doing all these harmonics and tapping the guitar and going ‘add this little layer’ - but they all worked so well”.
“Then Josh did the piano, which took it to another level,” Beau continues. “And it also had us stamping our feet, and using stomps and saws. It was just a really fun process to record that song.”
While bands often have to cram recording into expensive, limited studio time, Treebeard was able to spread it out over a couple of months - weekends here, weeknights there. The secret? Josh is the brains - and owns the equipment - behind the recording.
“That’s the beauty of Josh having all of this,” Beau says, gesturing around the studio we’re sitting in. There’s a full deck of sound equipment on one side, a drum kit opposite, and racks of guitars and bass. “We’re very fortunate.”
Josh already had several albums under his belt as producer: Nostalgia; three albums and an EP for his other band, stoner rock outfit Khan (which also features Beau on drums); music from Australian groups Heinous Crimes and Kvll (for which Rhys plays bass); and a forthcoming record from fellow Melbourne post-metallers Skin Thief.
The record producer doubling as a band member also brings an intrinsic understanding of the Treebeard sound. “We’ve been on the journey with Josh, so when it comes to trying stuff, we all know what we’re trying to go for,” Rhys says. “And Josh is the band dad in terms of the sound of Treebeard. In terms of how everything’s set up musically, and how we come across live. ‘What does Josh say, what does Josh want us to do’ - because he’s the master at it.”
Josh is thinking about recording “at every stage of the process”, Beau says.
Josh laughs: “Working on Pat’s tones.”
Rhys: “A full-time job!”
“Josh definitely wins the bread for the band,” Pat says, unoffended.
Not taking themselves too seriously is a core part of Treebeard. And that brings us to two subjects that anyone who follows the band - and Pat - on social media such as Instagram will be familiar with: memes and rock band Creed. Even better, memes that involve Creed (Cremes?).
“Pat loves memes so much that he sort of actually loves them,” Beau says, turning to Pat. “You did it as a joke for so long that it became a part of you.”
“I’d like to say that stuff doesn’t work its way into my writing, but it probably does,” Pat says. “The filter these guys apply on me cuts most of it out, but I don’t know if it’s all of it.”
The love for Creed at first seemed ironic, but now often feels whole hearted. The recent album launch of Snowman at Melbourne’s Shotkickers even featured My Sacrifice as Treebeard’s outro track.
“The next album’s going to have so much Creed in it,” Beau says.
Pat: “The current album has so much Creed in it!”
All four say they would happily go to a Creed concert, and one - who will remain nameless but should be obvious - even wistfully brings up the Creed US-to-Bahamas cruises.
But do they genuinely listen to the US rockers?
Josh admits only to listening to a wide variety of music: “Bands I’m recording, over and over. Demos, thinking about what I can work on. And the better, bigger bands in the scenes that we play in. I take bits from everything. There are influences from everywhere for all four of us. It works well and we filter out the crap.”
Pat: “I don’t filter out the crap.”
Beau: “When we say filter out the crap, we mean filter out Pat.”
Pat muses over whether his musical taste is ironic or post-ironic. But scene heavyweights are definitely part of it. “A lot of the same post-rock bands that inspired Nostalgia are the same that inspired the band, and as Josh says, they tend to be the better, bigger bands that dominate the scene for good reason - your Monos, your Mogwais, We Lost the Sea. And with the post-metal stuff, Mountain of Madness very much came out of Isis, Neurosis, Old Man Gloom - there’s an Old Man Gloom song, To Carry the Flame, that’s quite similar in its forcefulness, where it just comes in and it doesn’t fuck around. Russian Circles - any metal influence in the songs comes from them. Soundtracks - Hans Zimmer, Max Richter - are something I listen to a lot as well. But then if you ask me what I’m listening to in the car driving to work?”
There’s a chorus of “It’s Creed!” from the rest of the band.
“It’s trash, it’s garbage,” he laughs.
Rhys says he “loves a bit of everything”. “When it comes to bass, a lot of the influence I get is like Tame Impala and Thundercat, psychy groove stuff, where there’s a really clear sense of rhythm and space. But I get bored listening to the same thing. I like to jump between genres. We’re not just post guys.” (This would be a good point at which to note that Rhys is in several other bands including aforementioned sludge/doomers Kvll, blackened doom/sludge outfit Ghostsmoker, and blackened punk group Who Bastard.)
Josh points out that he “didn’t even know what post-rock was” before Treebeard. “But I’ve definitely listened to a lot more since. And now, with the sound of Treebeard, we’ve found our own vibe.”
Listening to genre giants such as We Lost the Sea, God Is An Astronaut (whose Australian east coast tour they will support in February 2025), Russian Circles (who Treebeard played support to in Melbourne in February 2024) and Cult of Luna helped Beau to get in the zone when writing drum parts for Snowman. He also listens to a lot of metal. “A lot of bands I like are bands that are in a genre but are very different from their genre - such as Deftones and Mastodon,” he says. “They fit with something but do whatever the hell they want.”
Treebeard also tries not to stay strictly within the confines of one genre - while still appreciating the flexibility and space afforded by post-rock.
Pat says that with the screaming vocals of Mountain of Madness in particular, they’ve moved more into “a post-metal/alternative metal sphere”. “Post-rock has always been a really nice label because you can be so creative with it, because what does it really mean - atmospheric music, instrumental focus. I like the fact that it doesn’t have those constraints of traditional rock music or metal, and you can just express yourself how you want,” he says.
Russian Circles, Beau adds, have done post-metal “so well … and we’re like ‘we can straddle both post-metal and post-rock’. We can jump into different worlds.”
Finally, what impact do they hope that Snowman has on its listeners?
“A life-changing one,” Josh laughs.
Pat: “‘This album got me off drugs!’”
Beau is content if listeners just “feel something”, he says. “I feel lucky that we get to do what we do with each other and the experiences we get, and if other people listen to it and love it, that’s a cherry on top for me. I’m just happy we’ve released it.”
Pat turns serious. “Nostalgia had a good impact for us, but I think it was hindered by the circumstances that it came out in. I think it has lived a good life since. I’m hoping that Snowman has a faster impact, where people hear it and they’re like ‘fuck yeah’; they come out to see us live and they’re like ‘fuck yeah’. I hope people get as much enjoyment out of it as we did making it. I hope that the emotions that I poured into the songs as the person writing them in that shitty dark period come through and resonate with people.”
Ultimately, the album that was born out of isolation is, at its heart, about connection.
Treebeard play Dunk!Festival on the 31st of May in Ghent, Belgium.
Snowman is out now via Bird’s Robe and Full Contact Safari Records.
Follow the band on Instagram at @treebeard.band
