Year: 2020
Country: US
City: Los Angeles
Label: none
Format: cassette
Tracks: 12
Time: 22 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Hardcore
Initiate is a SoCal-based that cooks up hardcore that has a lot to love about it. It's moshy, fast, angry-sounding, and just when you least expect it to be, melodic. "The band’s sound is honestly difficult to sum up in simply one description," guitarist Alec tells No Echo. "I think there are many differing a aspects of music that embody Initiate, but I guess the one underlying theme is that there’s always a sense of melody despite whether it’s fast or heavy. We all love lots of different varied music that I think adds to an interesting conglomerate for our sound."
Lavender is the newest release from the band, and it's easily their strongest batch of material to date. As I stated in the intro to this piece, the California group check off many of the boxes you want out of this kind of music, but they've clearly spent focused time on making everything flow in a powerful way: "The inspiration for the new record stemmed from a lot of different things," Alec explains. "The band was evolving musically as a whole therefore it felt right for the next release to be congruent with that. I drew inspiration from a lot of different things for the record, a lot of them being early '90s NYHC bands and also CAHC staples like Carry On. There’s also a big metal influence as well with the idea of the instrumental break near the end of the record as well as different riffs that pay homage to old '80s/'90s metal, which I love.
I ask Initiate vocalist Crystal about some of the lyrics on the new EP. "The record's title track, 'Lavender,' was inspired by Alice Walker’s book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens," the singer reveals. "There’s some other play on words in that song that I’ll leave for people to find on their own. I was introduced to the book by my professor, Dr. Anne Marie Mingo. She encouraged the class to make most of our academic sources by works of women. Read about the authors of our books and articles. Pay attention to what they’re doing. I had never intentionally taken my academics to that level and I became so in love with learning in a way I had never done so (*Review by No Echo ).
