With AI technology advancing at an insurmountable rate, Smash Into Pieces’ ninth studio record poses an ominous question: are you prepared for what’s coming? Without a crystal ball to hand, ‘ARMAHEAVEN’ comes as the Swedish rockers’ own prediction as to what humanity’s future might look like – and it’s rather alarming.
Following on from 2024’s ‘Ghost Code’, Smash Into Pieces are looking forward into a world where digital code has infected daily life. Humankind has forcibly been plunged into the matrix, blurring the lines between man and machine – and mankind has to fight back, or bend to the will of technology.
While the group have always been ‘tech nerds’, even recruiting faceless ‘robot’ drummer APOC back in 2015, this year they’re amping things up a notch. To reflect ‘ARMAHEAVEN’s dystopian, tech-infused future, the record captures what the Rock Band Of Tomorrow may sound like. Melding rock pop-metal, and infectious EDM, it’s Smash Into Pieces’ very own version of an all-out existential rave. We sat down with guitarist and songwriter Per Bergquist to learn more.
Rock Sound: Smash Into Pieces has always been a very visual project – how are you planning to bring ‘ARMAHEAVEN’ to life?
Per: “We’ve ordered a lot of new lighting stuff, and we’ve been building all our stage props. Just like ‘Ghost Code’, we want to make fans feel like they’re stepping into a futuristic arcade game when they attend a show. I’ve been working hard in our warehouse re-wiring and routing cables in preparation for tour.”
RS: Sounds like you’re very hands on...
Per: “Of course! I have been working as an audio engineer for all of my life, so you could say I’m a tech nerd. Other bands usually get someone else to work on their sets and lighting, but we keep a lot of it in-house. Sometimes it’s an advantage because we really put our hearts into it… but sometimes you do need to put your hands up and admit when you need some outside help.”
RS: Would you say the visual element of Smash Into Pieces is just as important as your sound?
Per: “We’ve always been quite visual; when we’re writing music, we visualise how it will look playing it on stage. Even when we wrote 2020’s ‘Arcadia’ we cherry picked all the coolest looking imagery from our childhood – action movies, video games – and built a story around that.”
RS: Your latest record ‘ARMAHEAVEN’ follows on from 2024’s ‘Ghost Code’, which saw someone breaking out of a digital matrix world controlled by Ghostis. What’s the story this time around?
Per: “We laid the foundation of getting sucked into a video game on ‘Arcadia’, and the character was on a hunt for his freedom in ‘Ghost Code’, to escape and break out into the real world. However, when the character breaks free, he leaves cracks in the arcade game, which allows Ghostis to leak into the real world. ‘ARMAHEAVEN’ looks further into the future, considering how that has impacted people… which could be read as an allegory for AI, and how it’s influencing everything.”
RS: How do you feel about AI, in general?
Per: “I’d say AI is a glorious tool, but it’s also like the biggest threat. As a lover of tech, it can be a tough topic to address; when we recently discussed AI in our fan group on Facebook, someone said that if I use AI it’s like ‘eating steak, even though you’re against killing animals’. In my opinion, I think AI is a cool tool, but I am concerned for the future, because future generations are going to feel dumb compared to super intelligent AI. It’s really interesting to consider what will become of us, because of this thing we created.”
RS: Well, let’s pose a question you ask on ‘ARMAHEAVEN’s opening track, ‘NeoFuture’ – “are you prepared for what’s coming”?
Per: “I guess I’m not. All I’ll say is, everyone acts surprised by how intelligent AI is, but we saw it coming. It’s the same with the environment; we know it’s not good to hurt the environment, but we don’t stop until it actually gets to a tipping point.”
RS: It’s interesting that it dropped on Halloween – AI is its own horror story, really…
Per: “It’s a threat we don’t see, just in our screens all the time. There are even AI products now that can write entire tracks, and they learn by just analysing pretty much anything on Spotify, copying everything it can get a hold of. If it gets to a level where it can actually create by itself, then it’s gonna get real scary.”
RS: Existential AI dread aside, how was piecing together the new record?
Per: “We’ve loved it. We’ve been trying to chase a child-like wonder, hunting for a sound that feels entirely new; as you get older, you rarely hear things that feel absolutely fresh, and we’re chasing that feeling. This record explores some of that unknown territory, because we wanted to feel futuristic. We’ve experimented a lot on this record.”
RS: What elements feel like uncharted territory on ‘ARMAHEAVEN’?
Per: “When we decided that the album was going to be about the future, we knew we wanted to really push ourselves to sound like a rock band from the future. The ‘band’ on the record exist in a different, more advanced landscape of music. So I’d say there are fresh sounds all over the record. Take ‘NeoFuture’; when we were writing that, we were very interested in pushing into an EDM sound. We structured the song to have less lyrics, focusing on a few phrases that we repeated throughout the song, like an EDM track. We’re a rock band cherry picking elements from different genres, making it our own.”
RS: You’ve always been ones to push your sound...
Per: “It’s always been a goal for us to sound like a hybrid of sounds. Our drummer is half digital, so we’ve always wanted to sound like a middle-ground between a DJ set and a rock band.”
RS: Which tracks would you say are the most vital of the bunch?
Per: “Writing ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ really helped build the ‘ARMAHEAVEN’ concept. It’s about the duality of love, how it can be beautiful but also become quite destructive. Think of a butterfly; if humans see a pretty creature, they want to hold it, but then they grip onto it too tight because they don’t want to let it go. If you attach that to the beauty of the world and technology, you can see where humans have pushed things too far and it’s started to go wrong.”
RS: Speaking about the future of AI, we can’t help but wonder – do you ever actually use it?
Per: “I do have an AI version of Chris [Adam Hedman Sörbye, vocals], which I use when I’m recording a demo and he isn’t available. The vocals sound like a cheap version of Adam, but it works to get a sense of how a track might feel. It could never replace him – and I’d never want it to. Sometimes people ask if they can borrow the technology and I always say no. It feels like giving away something that’s far too personal.”
RS: Who knows what people could do with his voice.
Per: “People could be ringing up his family asking “Could I borrow £200?” No, I could never share that. But, just to prove I’m not an AI version of Per, here’s some history: when I was 18, I went to live in Brighton for a while, and I worked in a factory manufacturing pens for Parker Pens. So, I’m real, I’m not a robot.”
RS: Thanks for proving your humanity to us, Per.
Per: “You’re welcome.”
