Track by Track: Massa Nera Explain the Songs & Meanings Behind ‘Derramar | Querer | Borrar’

AJ: I wrote the opening lyrics (“The distance between…beginning and ending”) while I was working at my first full-time job. I had an abusive boss, I was drinking a lot, I was emotionally spending. I kept using destructive habits in an attempt to ameliorate my situation. I felt trapped.

One day, we were developing the opening musical passage. I brought up these lyrics and suggested pairing them with the music. We tried it out and liked that sort of off-mic sound (we literally didn’t have a mic in our space at the time). It quickly became clear that this was going to be the beginning of the album. Shortly after, Mark and I compared lyrics, realized we were writing about similar things, and decided to combine them for this song.

Mark: On a long bus ride, having crawled out of a deep depression and finally feeling a measure of peace, I made a promise to continue growing and moving forward. To consecrate that promise, I started working on a poem that would never be finished. So much for that.

Months later, I found myself staring blankly at a computer monitor in a basement office, pretending to look busy. No one in the building knew my name, even though I’d been working there for five months. Whatever peace I felt on that bus ride was gone. Back to square one. Utterly exhausted, I bristled at the memory of my unkept promise and revisited that poem. I took the opening words (“From the burial plot…I offer one final plea”), altered them slightly, and wrote the next five or so lines. I guess it was at this point that the album’s thematic preoccupations started to shift into focus (for me, at least).

The latter half of this song came together much later, after we had fully developed the themes and ideas animating the album. Chris and AJ helped out with the “Close my eyes” section, which was a lot of fun. Some of the lyrics were plucked from other songs, a choice that arose from our desire to create a “lyrical spiderweb.” We wanted the songs to feel interconnected in a rhizomatic way, such that by the time you get to “Anchored,” you should (hopefully) feel the accumulated weight of the entire record.

“The one who feeds you controls you” is an allusion to a Thomas Sankara speech. Conversely, “The shadow of a dream deferred” is not a deliberate reference/homage to the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes. However, as I was familiar with the poem, I can only assume I unconsciously pulled from it.

One more note: the opening guitar part was written ages before the rest of the song, in January 2018 or so. As soon as Chris played it, I was confident it would open our album. I’m happy that turned out to be the case.

Allen: Poverty is a common struggle that can be observed in all countries. It’s one of the few problems that affects people worldwide. For me, to be a leftist and not have compassion for poverty-stricken people is hypocritical. We can’t care about racism, sexism, and other social injustices without having the same energy for poverty.

Mark: I wrote these lyrics in the middle of an especially productive jam session, during which we essentially finished both this song and “Hipócrita” (the first two songs completed for the album, musically and lyrically). Beyond a couple extremely minor revisions, the words never changed (with one exception: “un derrame de sangre,” which Allen improvised while we were recording the album). I remember being extremely excited about these songs. They displayed greater range than our older material, moving between various styles and sections, yet also flowed better, all without sacrificing energy (if anything, they had more energy than our previous work).

In some ways, “Hipócrita” and “Lost Faces” set the tone for the rest of the record as far as lyrics were concerned, in that they established a directness and economy of language that informed the remainder of the writing process, even as some of the other songs became a bit more long-winded.

I think “Lost Faces” has an openness that lends itself to a couple different interpretations. Rather than make them explicit, I’ll point out a couple allusions: “We die like partisans…” is meant to evoke “Bella Ciao” (specifically the “partisan” version), while “we dare to invent the future” is a very slight paraphrase of a Thomas Sankara quote.

Mark: Technically, this was the first song written for the album. Allen and I worked on the musical skeleton back in December 2017, before AJ was even in the band. In other words, five entire years before this album was released. Hopefully it doesn’t take us five years to finish our next LP. To be fair, we didn’t have a stable rehearsal space until January 2020, so while we were chipping away at the album throughout 2018-2019, the writing process didn’t become consistent until 2020.

At the time, I was toiling away at a demoralizing job (though not the job I had while writing “An Endless Cycle,”). I kept telling myself that I was going to either a) quit, or b) organize, but kept setting deadlines for myself. Like, “I’ll quit once I save x amount of money.” Each time I reached my self-imposed deadline, I set a new one, thus prolonging my situation and exacerbating my unhappiness. All this, despite my bone-deep fear of becoming like some of the people in my family, enduring a job that robs you of your vigor and turns you into a tired husk. More promises unkept.

Lyrically, “Adrift” is a comedown of sorts after “Lost Faces'” relatively hopeful conclusion. If “blood for blood” and “we dare to invent the future” can be viewed as rallying cries of sorts, “entombed in bloodless flesh” (bloodless, in this case, meaning “dull” or “lacking in feeling”) points to a renewed sense of exhaustion and defeat. For me, the previous song’s allusions to Thomas Sankara and “Bella Ciao” represent a revolutionary energy that ultimately lacks direction. This song, then, suggests that squandered energy, no matter how great, can’t withstand the miserable grind of work.

By now, the “lyrical spiderweb” should be revealing itself. There are obvious callbacks, like “None of this is real” and “maybe I’m nothing but the weight of my work,” as well as more subtle things that I’d rather let people discover on their own.

Lastly, “stolen moments” is the name of an Oliver Nelson composition. That tune (specifically the version which opens The Blues and the Abstract Truth) was one of my favorites while I was in college.

AJ: This song came about while I was trying to figure out my gender. At the time, I still self-identified as non-binary. I felt like people weren’t really seeing me or taking me seriously. I didn’t believe I could truly be out in certain situations. I felt like I needed to hide myself.

At the time, we had this super heavy song that didn’t have any words. I had already shown Mark these lyrics. It was actually their idea to match them with the music. We played a practice recording of the song on one phone while reading the lyrics off another phone to make sure it worked.

Mark: Allen wrote this song single-handedly, though the rest of us came up with our own parts. It was his idea to have the song move from thrash/hardcore/etc. to electronica, though it took a lot of trial and error for us to determine how we wanted everything to sound. Chris ultimately spearheaded that process. He’s responsible for 99% of the electronic section. 

Since we’ve seen some confusion about genre shift, I think it’s worth pointing out that the electronic section is not an interlude (who makes an interlude 5 minutes long? That’s 10% of the album). Nor did we decide to genre-hop for the hell of it. 

We were really inspired by “hauntological” artists (e.g.: The Caretaker; The Focus Group), as well as electronic acts like Burial. Those artists use their music to interrogate “the lost futures contained within the past.” We felt this was a good opportunity to do something similar. However, since we came in after the proverbial “end of history” (and after the end of UK rave culture), we’re interrogating a past that we didn’t experience firsthand. 

ALSO: On Side A, there are three moments where the lyrics briefly strike a somewhat defiant, hopeful tone. After each moment, the music shifts to a more danceable style/sound. This is the culmination of that. As in, “we’re staking a claim to who we are and what we want. Now let’s party.” But because the vibe is hauntological, the party has already happened. It’s like the echo of a rave. And by the next song, we’re back at work, and nothing has changed.

AJ: I finished this song right before I quit the aforementioned full-time job that was making me miserable. I remember writing it at my work desk before texting my bandmates about our then-upcoming Southeast Asia / Japan tour. At that moment, I realized I didn’t need to stay at that job.

For a while, these lyrics were just sitting in a notes app (up until we began demoing the record). One day, I arrived at the space a bit earlier than everyone else in order to set up recording equipment. I decided to set these lyrics to this music. I liked how everything flowed and showed it to the rest of the band. After that, we tightened the arrangement and subtly changed some lines. It came together super easily.

Mark: I think the last line best illustrates the intent behind the “lyrical spiderweb.” “We dare to invent the future” is pulled from “Lost Faces,” but the subtext is completely different. In “Lost Faces”, those words felt defiant, maybe even hopeful. This time around, they strike me as bitter, almost sardonic, like they’re making a mockery of the idealism that used to animate them.

Chris: From a musical standpoint, one of the driving principles for this record was “less is more.” I don’t know if I achieved that, but I think this principle kept me grounded in terms of my decision-making, especially for this song. When I was writing it, I felt like my Italian screamo influences were coming out. That being said, the final result almost reminds me of Thursday (even though I seldom listen to Thursday ). It feels like one of their songs to me. I wanted to chase that feeling.

At the time, I was having a lot of trouble articulating and processing my emotions. It was the peak of the pandemic. I wasn’t playing a lot of music; I was kind of laying in bed all day. I harbored a great deal of bleakness (as I’m sure many people did).

All of my lyrics are on Side B. They explore feelings of despair and hopelessness. This was a deliberate pivot away from the more explicitly work-centric and issue-centric songs of Side A towards an exploration of inner states.

Chris: I was aware of my emotions (the ones explored in the previous song) and how they were affecting me, but I tried to maintain a sort of false optimism that just reinforced this state of all-consuming sadness. 

I had a lot of fun writing the music to this song, especially the staccato, Latin-feeling chords in the bridge. For me, that section is a highlight of the record. It’s very satisfying to play. 

Allen: I was watching a lot of YouTube videos by the channel Invisible People. The channel owner is formerly homeless and interviews homeless people of all ages and backgrounds. These videos helped me see this problem in a new light. I think the channel does a great job of showing us that homelessness is far more complicated than it’s often portrayed as being. People don’t become homeless because they’re “lazy and don’t want to work.”

Mark: This song was exciting to flesh out. Chris came up with the introductory guitar part but hadn’t gotten past it. I was pretty determined to have that guitar part on the album, and resolved to mention it every practice. Eventually, having presumably annoyed everyone into a state of acquiescence, we got together and wrote both this and “You Mean…,” almost as if they were one long song.

These were either the last or second-to-last lyrics finished for the abum. By then, the sequence was set in stone. As such, I was writing with a keen awareness of where the song fell in the tracklist and how it would impact the lyrical flow of the album. 

I view the record as an indirect narrative of sorts, a story told mostly through the sustained exploration of certain ideas/themes. Because of this, I was very deliberate in using more surreal imagery, despite every other song being more-or-less grounded in reality. It made sense from a narrative perspective.

Obviously, the four of us are way too close to this album to neatly summarize it. However, for me at least, in many ways it’s about unfulfilled yearning. We cast aside our desires and commit ourselves to work, having convinced ourselves that a good job is the ticket to self-actualization. When fulfillment inevitably eludes us, we search for happiness in distraction and consumption. In the end, such methods also fail to make us content, and we’re left with a base sort of wanting, an ache that might dull with time but never goes away. Maybe, when it’s too late, we take stock of our lives and realize we have nothing left but regrets. But perhaps even that realization isn’t enough to override our commitment to work. 

Chris: When I wrote these lyrics, time almost felt like a relentless blur. The light that filtered through the cracks in my bedroom window was the only indication I had of time’s passage. Minutes moved like hours. Everything had become punishing and burdensome. So yeah, for me, this is definitely the darkest song. Fortunately, I no longer feel like this. No matter how hard things get, I’m now able to maintain a sense of appreciation for my life.

Musically, I’ve always admired Oathbreaker, especially EROS | ANTEROS. I think this was one of the first times I deliberately tried to write a sort of homage to another band. This was also an attempt to push myself creatively (rather than technically), since I don’t think I usually write like that. It ended up being a lot of fun. I really enjoy the way this song came together. 

Allen: I don’t think I left much mystery with what I was trying to say here. I was at one of the lowest points of my life and just wrote about what I was feeling. 

Mark: The opening lyrics come back. The end becomes indistinguishable from the beginning. After all that time, we were just running in place.