Interview by Kris Peters
Reliqa are one of the current emerging crop of must-see bands on the Australian music scene.
Since lighting up the scene with the delightful 2022 EP I Don't Know What I Am, Reliqa have poured blood, sweat and tears into cementing their status and earning their stripes. They have toured relentlessly and kept up a high level of engagement and generally gone noisily (but quietly in their own sense) about their business - which is delivering kick-ass, confronting music backed up with a breathtaking live performance that delivers the complete package.
Following the earlier release of new singles Terminal and Killstar (The Cold War), Reliqa last week dropped another pearler with Dying Light, all three of which feature on the band's debut album Secrets Of The Future which is due out on May 31.
HEAVY sat down with vocalist Monique Pym to find out more, starting with how she is feeling the closer the official release date of May 31 gets.
"I'm terrified," she laughed. "This is the longest record that we've ever released because given the landscape a lot of people listen to shorter form material these days. We've tried to honour that through our singles, but it will be interesting to see who latches on to this full 52-minute experience - and experience is one of the words for it because it is quite a diverse album. I'm so excited. I think that this album… it feels like we're sitting on a precipice right now, and once we release this album I think it's gonna open up a whole lot of doors, so let's just see what happens. We're taking it one day at a time."
We ask Pym to go into more detail about what to expect from Secrets Of The Future.
"It's something that honours how diverse and open-minded we are as people," she measured. "The four of us have such different life experiences and different influences and musical tastes, and that's something that we've always tried to hammer on through our music. Try to keep making records that we want to hear and ones that we want to listen to. Things that feel representative of us as people, not just as artists, but people as well. That's something that we've really remained true to on this album. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I think we have captured the right formula for it now. On our I Don't Know What I Am EP we sort of threw everything at the wall, and we went pretty crazy with it, but this album exorcizes a lot of restraint and I think that that's really cool because it shows that we've matured as people and as artists. It's also shown that we know how to write now in a way that services the song and services the wider product, rather than zooming in on parts and making each part perfect. Ultimately, I think the one word that captures this album is diversity or open-mindedness. There are so many different sounds on there. We call it progressive metalcore, but that progressive is the kicker. The progressive means that we've taken metalcore, and we've drawn in a whole lot of different influences, sounds and styles from other places. Hopefully there should be something for everyone on there. Something for the pop fan, something for the rap/hip hop fan, and then also staying true to our progressive metalcore roots. Hopefully people still love us for that (laughs)."
In the full interview, Monique talks more about Secrets Of the Future, how you gauge success in the modern age of music, the three singles released and how they represent the album as a whole, advancing their sound, maturing with their music and more.