Credit: Steve GullickStarset‘s track “Monster,” the lead single from their sophomore album Vessels, has reached the top five on Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Songs chart. While the band’s music is accompanied by books, graphic novels and a backstory about an initiative called The Starset Society, frontman Dustin Bates feels you can still enjoy Starset’s music on its own.
“A lot of people might call our records concept records, or this band a concept band,” Bates tells ABC Radio. “But unlike many other acts that do that, I’m very careful to make it when you listen to it, if you know the backstory, you get a richer experience, but if you don’t, you’re able to ascribe your own journey to this: your own visual, make your own…movie to it.”
On Vessels, Bates feels “Monster” represents the “end of Act II…where the transformation into the darker place sorta happens, and it gets a little heavier there.”
“I like to keep…multiple threads going and interpretations in a lot of the songs, even if there’s three layers of metaphor,” he explains. “As a listener, maybe you can ascribe [‘Monster’] to a relationship or various types of relationships, or personal transformation.”
Lyrically, “Monster” contains similar imagery to that of “My Demons,” the lead single from Starset’s debut album Transmissions. In writing “Monster,” Bates realized that “My Demons,” which also reached the top five on Mainstream Rock Songs, was the “ying” to the new track’s “yang.”
“Whereas ‘Demons’ was about ‘Here I am in this darker place and you pull me out of it,’” he explains, “[‘Monster’] was more the opposite: ‘You brought me here to this place,’ and also an acknowledgement that maybe I did this to myself.”
Starset kicks off a North American tour April 24 in New York City.
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