Quickly moving their way up the ranks within the metal world, with good reason given their grasp of incorporating outside influences into their modern metal mix, Future Palace return with their third album, Distortion. An album that sees them continue to stretch their sonic boundaries and take notable risks with their music. We had an extensive chat with vocalist Maria Lessing about some of her struggles, both physically and mentally, some online pushback with their song “The Echoes of Disparity” and what it means to stand up for issues that are important as a musician, and the emotional connections in both Future Palace and what she attaches to music she hears, personally.
Dead Rhetoric: You’ve had some issues with wisdom teeth and surgeries – how are things now?
Maria Lessing: I’m good. Wisdom teeth are an easy fix once you have the surgery. I just had an issue with having an infection, because the tooth came out while we were on tour. I didn’t know anything about wisdom teeth. So I figured I would get it out once it started to be annoying and hurt. It took a few months – the tooth got out like 1mm and it first pushed on a nerve so my entire face hurt so bad! Like someone was punching my face every second. I couldn’t do anything without having ice cubes on there and having something to put on there every second. So I ended up having emergency surgery on New Year’s Eve last year.
Originally, I was planning to get all of my wisdom teeth out, because they are very crooked. When they come out, they will be a mess and make more drama, but since it was so infected, we had to delay the entire studio plan for about two weeks until I was recovered. Right after that, I noticed around a week or so later that I still felt pain in that area and it happened that the tooth next to the wisdom tooth got infected. I had a root canal infection and the pain kept going. I was on antibiotics, but now finally when the album releases I will get the rest of my wisdom teeth out. So I will have another surgery, but this time it’s planned. Hopefully nothing will be infected. But yeah, it’s the wisdom tooth year for me [laughs].
Dead Rhetoric: Tooth pain is honestly the worst, I have had some problems there myself. I don’t wish it on anyone.
Lessing: I totally underestimated it. I didn’t know. Nobody warned me that this would happen. I haven’t met many people who have had an infection. A lot of people have them grow through normally or they grow through a little bit crooked, but mine was like hell. It was very horrible pain.
Dead Rhetoric: From your perspective, how do you feel that Distortion compares to Run?
Lessing: I think it’s way heavier, musically. My vocals are heavier, the guitars are heavier, and I just actually listened to it yesterday since I hadn’t been listening to it for a long time. I just kind of wanted to check in again with what we are releasing in a month. There were some parts where I had to start laughing because I thought, “What was up with us in the studio to decide to do that? To go that heavy!”
The time is almost blurred because I was in so much stress and pain and panic with deadlines. Somehow the entire album process just went by, I wasn’t entirely 100% there, so when I look back on it, there are some really interesting decisions. So it’s more interesting, and more diverse, I would say. We tried out a lot of things, and I feel you can hear that we just did what we wanted. We always do that, but I feel it comes out a little bit more with this album. It’s a bit more creative and experimental.
Dead Rhetoric: Some of the songs on Distortion have been singles for a bit, such as “Malphas.” Do you feel it’s more necessary to spread the wealth on songs for a bit so that they get the attention you’d like for them to achieve?
Lessing: I think the thing that works now are singles, and that’s what we see when you look at the numbers. A single will have more benefits for you as a band than an album will have in these times of TikTok and streaming. I myself am a very horrible examples of the times because I will have artists on my Spotify that I only have a few singles of and maybe never listened to any of their albums. I watch that myself, and it’s not a purposeful thing, it’s just how Spotify works. You have weekly releases and playlists, it’s usually focused on singles and there’s rarely any album songs on those big playlists. So it makes sense to focus on singles, and it was not an intentional decision to have such a time gap between “Malphas” and the release of this album. It was just the nature of the situation we were in.
We were on tour when we released “Malphas” when we were on the road with Electric Callboy and I think there was just a time issue that we had – we didn’t have time to record an album. We had to find time. It takes a long time to record an entire album. We had to find the time to do it in one go. We recorded “The Echoes of Disparity” and “Uncontrolled” separately in between and then later on we did the rest of the album. As I said, I had health issues, it got delayed, we had another headline tour at the end of the year, we played festivals in the middle of the year, and you try to survive. I had like a September off, or one week of it off, where I was trying to be a human again. It couldn’t have happened earlier. So it wasn’t intentional.
Dead Rhetoric: Do you feel like Future Palace is more about making changes each time around rather than trying to simply replicate what was successful before? You can hear that you were doing like you said, in exactly what you wanted. There’s a whole lot of variety there.
Lessing: It’s a bit chaotic [laughs]. At the same time, it does have a red line that it follows, which is interesting because you can hear that it was all made in one go, and it does have a theme: topic-wise with the lyrics but also sound-wise we have electronic elements, we went heavier and have many breakdowns on this album, and we have a lot of synth sound that we embraced. It sounds like a new kind of mix – something you know of from us but some new elements but this time we also dared to go out of our comfort zones with songs that are absolutely not a single, like “They Take What They Want.” It is a very different song than we usually do. It sounds very chaotic, but I wanted to do something like that because I didn’t just want to be a pop/radio band or anything. We took more freedom this time.
Dead Rhetoric: “The Echoes of Disparity” also features Charlie [Rolfe] from As Everything Unfolds. How’d this collaboration come to be?
Lessing: It was very natural. She was on tour with Electric Callboy right after us I think. I thought it would be cool if we could collaborate, because we got compared quite a lot, which is the nature of being a female singer in the scene…you get compared a lot. I always really liked them and thought it would be very nice to have her on there. I really wanted to feature a female vocalist on that song, and I would not have released it without that. It was meant to be a statement, and to have another powerful woman on the song, to both embrace the anger of the message. We talked to each other on Instagram and followed each other, and it just kind of happened very naturally.
Dead Rhetoric: In a world where that didn’t work out with Charlie, is there someone else you would have loved to collaborate with?
Lessing: Yeah, originally if there had been more time, I was planning to do a Spice Girls metalcore edition. My original idea was to have as many women as possible on there. But as everyone was pretty busy and it’s hard getting to contact people you have to be realistic. We had very strict time plans so it made more sense this way and we are very happy with how it turned out. Who knows if it would have worked out with more people on there, because it’s not the longest song. I would have loved to have many women on there though, like maybe Courtney from Spiritbox or Tatiana from Jinjer. Very big artists! But really anyone who stands for this message we would take. I wanted to do a girl choir but that wasn’t realistic. Just any woman who wanted to join, honestly!
Dead Rhetoric: I made the mistake of looking into the YouTube comments for that song and saw there was some pushback with the lyrics to that song. Do you feel that sort of reaction kind of proves the necessity of the track in the first place?
Lessing: Absolutely, yes. When I wrote it, I was in a conflict with myself – like is it good enough? Like, what is my point? Even though I knew what my point was. But oftentimes when you start writing it’s so hard to structure your thoughts and make a good point within that song. That’s also part of who I am. I often think that it’s not that big of a deal – it’s just my song…like who cares? I thought that way about some of the most traumatic times in my life, like how other people have it worse. But with that song, I was like, I’m not just speaking for myself but so many others, so do the song. Take the room and be loud for this topic. Uploading it, I thought that people wouldn’t even react to it since it’s so common sense.
But when I saw the comments, I was like, okay that’s shocking and sad. But I knew when we were shooting the video and when I saw everything I thought it looked provocative. The decision that we made with having a male dancer wearing a bra. It was made to be very provocative, and I think that’s also what I wanted to do. But the backlash, it was so random. I thought people would focus more on the story and lyrics, but people were so stupid. “Ugh, this dancer is disgusting!” and they didn’t pick up on anything else from the song or the message. Some of them would say things like “aww, cry about having too many rights” or “you’re annoying” so it was big proof that the song was needed, and that we did have fans that stood up for many different things than we do. I’m very glad that they now know who we are and what we stand for. That said, I hope that some of them will open their view a bit in the future, but who knows?
Dead Rhetoric: I’ve seen similar things happen with other groups that have spoken out and have a female vocalist, such as Vexed, and they have something similar with a song from their last album. It wasn’t quite along the same lines as “The Echoes of Disparity” but it was a similar pushback. There is a tendency for more pushback with a female vocalist, which stems into exactly what you were writing about.
Lessing: Absolutely, and that’s so ironic. But I’m very happy that I did the song. It’s one of the few times in my life that I’m happy to receive hate, because it shows that we did something right and something important. If there’s still people that think that this is not normal, then it’s so needed to speak out about on stage and embrace it.
I’m a little scared to perform this song live, because so far we have had pretty relaxed shows in countries that are pretty open-minded, but as soon as we might go to areas that are less open-minded and conservative and I speak out on stage about the topic, I’m pretty sure there will there will be people in the crowd that will not agree to that. But that’s how it is, that’s what I chose to do [laughs].
Dead Rhetoric: So you feel it’s important for artists to speak up for issues that are important to them?
Lessing: Absolutely, to me, that is the reason why I make music – to feel something. Getting through stuff with music together, that has helped me my entire life. Music is an emotional medium for me to just live. Of course, happy music and do the same, and dance music, but to me it was always very important to be who I am and with what I write, and to connect with what I write. I don’t want to be a cover singer or anything.
I want to do more beyond just singing and performing. I want people to connect with it and feel like they can relate to it or me. To feel like they have someone that they can look up to that also went through so much shit in life and still keeps going. To make people feel less alone.
Dead Rhetoric: Given the emotional standpoint of much of your music, do you get a lot of those, “hey, this song really helped me out,” or “this song got me through this” type of feedback?
Lessing: Yeah, I do get that a lot. Just on Instagram yesterday I got a few messages. On our band account as well, and we get emails of personal stories. People telling us some different stories and things that they went through, like a break-up, someone died, or they are dealing with mental health issues. There are so many different things, even if they aren’t what the song was originally about, they can relate to the pain and I think that’s very nice.
Of course, that’s what you wish for, but it can also be overwhelming. You wrote that because you felt that way, not because you were like a hero or anything. It can be that people idolize you a bit. I want to give people hope, but I’m absolutely not perfect. These songs help me so much as well, and it’s beautiful that it helps others too. When we tour, there’s a lot of people that come talk to us, or show us that they have tattooed our song lyrics. It’s very emotional and close.
Dead Rhetoric: You’ve been on a number of very big tours since Run came out. What have you taken away from those experiences?
Lessing: I think you can hear on the new album that I was a bit overwhelmed by everything. There are many songs about burnout and time stress and not having any power anymore. If we look at the more changing things about being a musician, it can be very draining and you feel like you don’t have much power left. If you have to work the entire time, you face challenges, be it mental health or whatever it is. It can be very hard to maintain [yourself] and go on stage every night and be a strong person. I noticed that I started to have challenges with that and mental health, and I have more work to do with that and to protect myself/my mental health.
But on a positive note, it also felt very beautiful to finally be on big stages and have many people sing-a-long with you, or even just show up for you. You see that the work has it’s point, and it’s not useless. That’s the biggest point – to see that people feel and connect with your music and show up for you and like you. Also, I struggled with imposter syndrome in the last few years as we grew. Like, why do people even like us and show up because I suck! I started having that battle as well [laughs], and I had to learn to make this voice more quiet in my head and just be grateful for people to show up and just accept it. If you start questioning it all the time, you will always find reasons for people to not like you, I think.
I noticed that as the bigger the stages got, the more the fear and doubt grew inside of me. I feel like it’s getting better again, I have started to grow and accept this kind of life. It’s very new for me and very weird.
Dead Rhetoric: It’s a lot easier to look in the mirror and say that these are the things I don’t like about myself, rather than the good things.
Lessing: Looking back at it, you can see so many good things, but while you are in it – that’s also what this album has many songs about, such as “Rays of Light,” – it’s about the struggle and conflict of not being able to enjoy beautiful moments that you should enjoy because you are so inside of your side and your doubts, to dos, and stress. It was very hard for me to enjoy things early on, last year for instance, and I had to really push myself and be like, “you do this because you love this and you should enjoy this.” When you build your band up and you want to grow yourself up so much, and that’s what we want to do. We give our lives for this. We work so hard on Future Palace, the three of us, and you can get a bit obsessed with it.
That’s what might happen to people who follow something, you get so focused on it – you want to be the best or the quickest. You lose yourself within that. We have made some big jumps year to year. We haven’t existed that long. I noticed that all of this weight got on me and I really want to enjoy things. I want to think of how I can still get to the next step, and that’s also what kind of happened with this album, I want to have fun with this. Let’s make this fun, because it can be. It’s a lot of mindset. There’s a lot of things that suck, and are exhausting – like waking up at a hotel at 5am and then getting back at midnight and being up at 6 again. It’s exhausting! But you have to be good with your mindset.
Dead Rhetoric: What excites you, hearing music that is not your own, as an artist yourself?
Lessing: I connect so much more with other songs. It’s very hard for me to see my music objectively. That’s why I listened to the album again after months away from it. To understand what I created and I will always be so critical about what we do. When I listen to other people’s music, I’m more forgiving and less critical than with my own music. I will allow myself to be very emotional with the music. It’s very easy for me to connect with the music, emotionally. I want to put my own emotions into it, like I had mentioned how everyone else does. It’s the same with food or anything. If I love something, I really love it and if I don’t, I’m very indifferent. But when I love something, I listen to it over and over again and it will be my theme song for a few weeks.
For example, there are many different artists I listen to, but Bring Me the Horizon’s Sempiternal album and That’s the Spirit, I listened to them a lot while I was very depressed. I had some emotional break-ups and very abusive relationships and I just moved out of my toxic family’s house…just very shit things. I listened to these albums so much. When I listen to these songs, I remember watching Bring Me the Horizon with Pvris and Beartooth here in Berlin and it was a great concert. The line-up rocked! It was great! I saw all of the bands and they were all very, very good. When I listened to Bring Me the Horizon’s “Drown” live I remember I started crying because they had confetti popping out. They don’t know how much the song meant to me and how much it carried me through things.
If someone can have that feeling with my song, first of all I can’t believe it because it’s so weird for me, but if I can give someone else that feeling, it’s so beautiful. It’s so personal. These bands don’t even know how much you connect with the songs and how much they help you. That’s the same for me, I guess. That’s what I want to do when I write music. It’s why I want to be so open and honest. It’s so beautiful how music can support you emotionally.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s planned for the rest of the year? Any thoughts on getting to the US in the future?
Lessing: Yes, we have lots of plans, always. We will play our final festivals for the year. I’m kind of sad because it went by so fast. I am very amazed by how quick it went by. We played a lot of festivals and some really great ones. We are going to do a pretty crazy thing and play at the Metal Hammer awards here in Germany. It’s in our hometown in Berlin. We have never played at an awards show ever. We don’t even know what it will be like. That will be very exciting because there are huge artists nominated, and if they end up being in the same room as me, I will have to perform for them. It’s bands like Metallica and AC/DC, but I don’t think they will show up. If they do, I’ll pass out on stage. It’s different playing a huge festival with big line-ups and headliners, because they won’t see you, usually. But it’s an award show and everyone is facing the stage. It’s good and horrible at the same time [laughs]!
We will release the album September 6, and then we will jump on to a headline tour through Europe and the UK. The rest is officially secret, but I can say we will absolutely go further than Germany and maybe even further than Europe.