GILT call themselves “nü emocore” — a blend of nü metal, metalcore, post-hardcore, and emo that’s as viscerally confessional as it is guttingly heavy. Throughout their latest album, I Saw Myself in the Black Screen, that sound emerges from all sides, with the band offering up the most ambitious, stylized version of themselves yet.
However, these songs do a lot more than evoke the soundtrack of Hot Topic in the early aughts. Produced and mixed by nightlife mastermind Hansel Romero, I Saw Myself in the Black Screen channels intense rage, trauma, and grief while drawing from a wide spectrum of film, video games, and anime. “Seattle Day 2” takes its name from a boss fight with The Rat King in The Last of Us — and mirrors that energy through nonstop groove and breakdowns — whereas “Bear Trap” references Saw, revolving around unhealthy attachments. Of the latter, vocalist/guitarist Tyler Fieldhouse tells AP, “Amanda is a great example of someone who absolutely did not learn the right lesson, but by the same token, we’ve been there in some version or other. We create reverence from and for trauma. Unhealthy cycles of being born again, burning out, and starting over.”
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The list of references scattered across I Saw Myself in the Black Screen goes on — and GILT’s Fieldhouse took AP through all of them, song by song, below.
“Always A Man, Always A City”
We wanted the album to hit you immediately. No soft intro or easing into the big ideas. When Elizabeth talks about human repetition in BioShock Infinite, saying there’s always a man and a city, we know this is just one of many pieces of art, especially one that goes out of its way to blend other existing ones into its own lore, but it is ours. If you enjoy fiction and think of stories as important escapes and learning tools, or just numbly scroll content, this is about both experiences. Important to band lore, this is also a song Asha wrote, and we wanted to focus leading off with something that flexed our new genre direction but also themes and voice that center her vision.
“Trailer For A Movie That Doesn’t Exist”
This song is about family. Asha’s uncle, rapper Willie Evans Jr., once presented the idea of a song (that was never formally released) sounding like a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist to her father for their rap group ASAMOV. Our previous EP, Conceit, was about his passing, and finding a way to blend our media homage motif with real personal references felt special. Trailer started as a narrative follow-up to “What Color Is The Light When It’s Turned Off?” (from 2020’s Ignore What’s Missing), a song about someone dissociated from their body wondering what’s on the other side. Starting with early Linkin Park-influenced digital drums and some of the album’s softest vocals, each chorus of “Trailer” gets harsher as our now-dead narrator haunts the family home and seethes about a life spent fulfilling empty rituals, stuck watching a family who never truly knew them struggle to plan a funeral or grieve appropriately.
The clip before the double breakdown is from Unbreakable, a moment where Bruce Willis’ son has to come to terms with not being the invincible man his father is. It’s extremely messy, just like family, just like death. This song also features Nico from i.liedtomyself on guest vocals, who was the GILT bassist during the Ignore What’s Missing era, so there’s a huge connective tissue to the creation of the track.
“She Has No Respect For Anything, Except For The Taste Of Blood”
We love nü metal. We love Queen of the Damned. We love watching people who have wronged us bite the curb.
“Reverse Bear Trap”
“Bear Trap” is about unhealthy attachments. Amanda is a great example of someone who absolutely did not learn the right lesson from Saw, but by the same token, we’ve been there in some version or other. We create reverence from and for trauma. Unhealthy cycles of being born again, burning out, and starting over.
“Roberta Sparrow Calls Miss Cleo”
’90s kids remember Miss Cleo, the TV psychic from the late-night ads, and depressed kids remember Roberta Sparrow (Grandma Death) from Donnie Darko as the woman who wrote the literal book on time travel. We all want to know the future, usually so we can try to change it. What if you could bend divinity? What if it had to hurt, though?
“DRYWALL”
“DRYWALL” was placed in the middle of the tracklist because it’s the center of our album’s universe, and all the media names are meant to insulate it. This is the only “real” song, no reference to anything, about a kid growing up in a home where screens and books provide an escape from real violence happening around them.
“fnord”
Fnords are a psyop, invisible to the eye, made to manipulate your feelings and thoughts. This was a somewhat stream-of-consciousness event we captured in the studio without prior discussion or planning.
“Spit Out Into A Ditch…” / “…On The Side Of The New Jersey Turnpike”
We created these songs together because we felt like they were each an end of the spectrum of our influences, and we wanted to see that connected. We usually split writing duties across the album, but Asha and I took this chance to have a song to ourselves to just do what we wanted completely and then see how they fit together. I wrote “Spit Out” imagining Ian Curtis of Joy Division coming back and seeing how commodified his art had become and finding a renewed sense of purpose doing this Killdozer rampage about it.
I chose him specifically because a lot of the song is asking someone who wants to just quit life, “Why not take it into your own hands?” Not that it’s necessarily good, but there’s a whole second life in vengeance. That’s what the seedling or casket line is about: knowing you’ve got options. I think where I was more so setting up this character and motivation, Asha took the “Why play dead when you can play God?” thing and just went full first-person power fantasy. She actualized it, for better or worse, justified violence or not, just pure feeling. The title is from Being John Malkovich, which is also about taking control of someone against their will and has this really grimy undertone to its leads, never trying to make them seem like great people. It’s specifically about what happens when you fall out of control, and we thought that fit perfectly.
“How Do You Kill An Angel, Barry?”
Barry’s name comes from the Kevin Smith film Dogma when the protagonist Bethany doesn’t realize she’s talking to the fallen angel she was sent to stop from destroying God. It’s a song of rebellion, about biting the hand that feeds. Is God jealous of free will, even if we exercise it to hurt or kill ourselves? We wanted the vocals to be ambient, big, and religious to that idea, but with constant noodling guitar and busy drumwork. We wanted it to sound like an incessant digital information feed like in Serial Experiments Lain, the sound clip from the beginning, an anime which explores similarly bleak themes of social isolation, divinity, and suicide.
“Ohms en serié”
Oms is a ’50s French book that was made into a ’70s animated film called Fantastic Planet that was a favorite of Asha’s father. Aliens the size of skyscrapers have kept humans as pets for so long that people forget all history and culture. It’s our biggest swing at mixing sounds. We wanted everything about this to feel massive and overwhelming. We got Dillon to make the intro beat for us, and spent a lot of time figuring out how to connect the breakdown into a drum-and-bass groove for the outro. We knew it all had to be there together. Most of the chorus lyrics were for what was supposed to be the title track of Ignore What’s Missing back when we thought it was going to be called “Swim,” but we could never get that song right. This was a big stitching together of a lot of ideas and goals, past and present.
“Seattle Day 2”
“Seattle” is GILT’s first release in years, and we wanted to immediately set the tone. Its name is from a boss fight with The Rat King in The Last of Us game series, and we wanted to channel that. No soft vocals, no pauses, just groove and breakdowns. Lyrically, it’s about succumbing to your worst self and is intended to feel inescapable. We also wanted to link the idea of digital media in the visuals and were lucky to get Kace Valentine of Siryn to do a campy horror subplot as a possessed YouTuber.
“Hartwell”
We don’t talk about “Hartwell.”
