Lorna Shore Regroup Ahead Of Their Biggest Australian Tour To Date
Will Ramos reflects on what has been a formative album cycle for the American deathcore favourites.
Words Sosefina Fuamoli // Image supplied
A broad grin stretches across Will Ramos’ face when he thinks back to his last visit to Australia.
“I love going out to that side of the world, I never get to do it,” he says. Embracing new experiences and meeting like-minded music lovers so far from home is something he never takes for granted. “There’s so many good things going on and it’s hard to keep track of it.”
Ramos’ band, Lorna Shore, was only in the country over the past summer, performing on the Good Things Festival tour.
Bringing their acclaimed fifth album, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, to festival audiences for the first time, Lorna Shore was able to capitalise on the ferocious energy they generated on their debut Australian headline run earlier that year.
“Doing that tour…I was thinking, ‘We’re probably not going to be back here for a while’,” the frontman admits. “I don’t know how the order of events usually goes, but as far as I was concerned, we’d been a band for years before we finally played [Australia]. So I thought it would be a couple more years [before we returned].”
The good news for both Lorna Shore and their Australian fans alike though, was that the wait in between visits was only to be a short one. Come October, the band will be back in the country – this time tackling arenas, arguably one of their most ambitious moves yet.
In Adelaide, the band graduates from the Hindley Street Music Hall to the Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre; an impressive jump for any band, much less one who has only one other show in the city under their belts.
“The fact we’re coming back so fast to even bigger and better places is incredible,” Ramos agrees.
Much of Lorna Shore’s appeal, says Ramos, is the band’s genuine approach to what they do: from the studio to stage, this is a band of brothers who share a strong sense of identity in sound.
Since officially joining the group in 2021, Ramos’ input as a writer and vocalist has bolstered Lorna Shore’s already fierce output; their latest album pushing them further to the forefront of this current wave of heavy music champions.
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“The only thing that we can do is stay true to what we want and what we want other people to be able to experience,” he explains. “As long as we stay true to what we’re doing, not forcing ourselves to do something we don’t want to do…it seems to be working. I’ve tried hard in every band I’ve been in and somehow, this one is working, baby!”
Noting bands like Parkway Drive as influences on their latest collection of work, Lorna Shore have managed to keep the balance between the brutality of their deathcore sound and an openness in the way their live shows have come together as a result.
“They have music that is very good in the studio, period,” he says. ”But then they also have songs where, when it’s played live, they have this whole other atmosphere to it. We learned that [when] we did our first tour with Parkway Drive, it was only a few years ago, which is crazy. We wanted to capture that energy somehow and bring it into our own music, in our way.”
The audience plays a significant part in the generation of momentum at a Lorna Shore show: something Ramos is keen to elevate when the band returns to Adelaide.
“When you try to think about what an ‘arena song’ is, you have an idea of it in your mind, but when it comes to writing it, you don’t even know where to put the pen down to begin,” Ramos laughs. “That was one of our biggest trials. ‘Unbreakable’ is one of our heaviest arena songs that we have, and I love it, but when you play it live with the right group and crowd…when you hear everyone scream, ‘We are unbreakable!’ It's the best feeling ever.
When we do a song like ‘Pain Remains’, everyone is screaming it...that moment of unison is for me, as a vocalist, what I wanted to bring into our music. I feel it when we do ‘War Machine’, I feel it when we do ‘Oblivion’. That’s the most important thing for me, carrying that energy and just doing it as big as you possibly can.”
Catch Lorna Shore performing at AEC Theatre on Saturday 17 October. Tickets on sale now via ticketek.com.au.
