EPK – Sunbeam Overdrive – Diama (2023) (Tentacles Industries / Season of Mist)

EPK – Sunbeam Overdrive – Diama (2023) (Tentacles Industries / Season of Mist)

Publicist – Jon Asher – jon[@]ashermediarelations[.]com

“An adventure, solitary, a life journey, its trials and tribulations translated in the form of a wide sound surrounding the listener to try to confront them with themselves, their own experiences, their own emotions …. make them start their own journey.

This record is about elevation, travel, adventure, and energy. It’s meant to lift you up yet make you endure the storm both inside and outside of yourself. Although not designed as a concept album, Diama nevertheless turns out to be crossed implicitly by a coherent line, which appeared to us once the album was finished. This line is that of the crests of the summits, more precisely a notion of ascent, elevation, exterior as interior. It translates into the quasi-cinematic succession of pieces forming an initiatory journey throughout its 10 songs.” – Sunbeam Overdrive

For fans of Periphery, Architects, The Human Abstract, Born of Osiris, Cynic

Band Name: Sunbeam Overdrive
Album / Single Title: Diama
Release Date: May 12, 2023
Label: Tentacles Industries
Distribution: Season of Mist

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Band Name: Sunbeam Overdrive
Album / Single Title: Diama
Release Date: May 12, 2023
Label: Tentacles Industries
Distribution: Season of Mist

Track Listing:
1. Ascending (1:47)
2. Diama (6:14)
3. Slave To The Void (5:14)
4. Crimson Stains (4:49)
5. Diamond Shape (7:10)
6. Junction : Buhl’s Eye (1:20)
7. Deaf And Blind (4:47)
8. Shen (5:45)
9. Out Of Plato’s Cave (5:05)
10. Hard Sun (5:49)
11. Fainted Core (Bonus Track – Live Acoustic) (6:08)
Album Length: 54:08

Album Recording Credits:
• All songs performed by: Sunbeam Overdrive
• All songs written by: Tom Abrigan (except lyrics for Diama, Slave To The Void, Crimson Stains and Out Of Plato’s Cave by Karim Arnaout, and Hard Sun by Indio’s Gordon Peterson, covered by Eddie Vedder)
• Produced by: Tom Abrigan
• Mixed by: Tom Abrigan
• Mastered by: Brett Caldas-Lima (Tower Studio: Devin Townsend, Cynic, Pain of Salvatio)
• Album Artwork by: Christophe Dessaigne (Midnight Digital)

Album and Live Band Line Up:
Tom Abrigan – Guitars & Vocals
Karim Arnaout – Vocals
Laurent Duclouet – Drums
Bruno Morgana – Bass

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The album as a whole (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

This record is about elevation, travel, adventure, and energy. It’s meant to lift you up yet make you endure the storm both inside and outside of yourself. Although not designed as a concept album, Diama nevertheless turns out to be crossed implicitly by a coherent line, which appeared to us once the album was finished. This line is that of the crests of the summits, more precisely a notion of ascent, elevation, exterior as interior. It translates into the quasi-cinematic succession of pieces forming an initiatory journey throughout the 10 songs:

“The Ascent… (1. Ascending) of an immense mountain, a power monster: You… Me… Us, the Nanga Parbat.
Doing it via a glacier that no one has yet crossed… (2. Diama)
Doing it without being a slave to anyone or anything, facing the void in front of you just like within yourself (3. Slave To The Void)
Ignoring having been treated like a puppet from whom you could take whatever you wanted then leave it in a corner. (4. Crimson Stains)
Seeing that diamond shape again, over there, through the mist. (5. Diamond Shape)
Reaching the junction, seeing the eye of the Bull. (6. Junction: Buhl’s Eye)
And continuing, even deaf and blind… (7. Deaf And Blind)
Invoking what is most ancestral in us. Without ever going astray. (8. Shen)
Coming out of our own Plato’s cave. (9. Out Of Plato’s Cave)
And reaching for the sun… The hard, high sun. (10. Hard Sun)
There, then… We’ll know a little bit who we are…” – SUNBEAM OVERDRIVE –

Track by track (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

1. Ascending: An instrumental intro that places the listener at the beginning of their ascent of a Himalayan Mountain (Nanga Parbat). It’s airy, bewitching, and foreshadows significant events…

2. Diama: The first real track on the record, powerful, aggressive, and catchy but also airy and progressive. Lyrics were inspired by an extremely intense, burning, sudden, ephemeral, and ultimately volcanic adventure. Volcanism is the metaphor spun throughout the text, because it evokes fusion, lava flows, eruption, and therefore, in the background, carnal, erotic union; heat that burns, but that fertilizes afterward (there’s nothing like a volcanic rock for a fertile soil). And in the context of the whole album Diama, which turns out to be an initiatory journey in the form of the ascent of a mountain, with all that this represents in terms of trials, doubts, determination, dizziness, and vertigo, the figure of the volcano is inscribed in the field of heights, of mountains.

3. Slave To The Void: The band’s desire to lay the foundations for a more alternative, urban, and raw sound. It ends with a pronounced airy side that is redundant but pays homage to more alternative influences such as grunge or 90s metal. The lyrics evoke the paralyzing power of the void, whether an actual void like a precipice or an abyss, or inside ourselves, and the strength it takes to lift yourself from the entropy and apathy that life can bury you in. It’s an invitation to keep your head up and become the sign you are vainly waiting for to start living.

4. Crimson Stains: The band starts with a faster song, with a more punk spirit, reminiscent of early Soundgarden or Pearl Jam albums, but with more metal/progressive riffing. The lyrics are about the mental load and burden, and sometimes physical aggressions that women are faced with; based on the testimonies of many and only just trying to imagine how it feels like to live with such a disadvantage in a patriarchal world…

5. Diamond Shape: An autobiographical track, slow, and airy but heavy and sad. Reminiscent of Black Sabbath, Tool, and a sad period in the life of one of the musicians who take stock of what his life has been like in the form of various images, especially memories of a mountain in the Alps, which looks like a gigantic diamond from a distance, and how it feels when everything you have built for years collapses.

6. Junction: Buhl’s Eye: To talk about ascents again, and in particular that of Nanga Parbat (Diama being a glacier adjoining the mountain), the junction of 2 routes on one of the sides of this mountain owes its name to Hermann Buhl. This piece is an aerial instrumental featuring a guitar solo to define a milestone that is being crossed. Altitude, lack of oxygen, a brain on the verge of asphyxiation, mirages…

7. Deaf And Blind: This piece is intended to be heavy, dramatic, and catchy to translate the anger of a people against the elites, the system in which they are trapped, and the questioning of their existences.

8. Shen: A very ethereal piece whose text confronts today’s China with its spiritual ancestral past.

9. Out Of Plato’s Cave: A very energetic piece with djent and progressive accents to mention Plato’s allegory of the Cave, describing how difficult it is to look away from the illusions that easily feed our minds, to stand your ground when everyone around you thinks you’re a fool, to look for the light, for elevation, for the truth, and have the strength to keep your eyes and soul open when it hits you.

10. Hard Sun: Into The Wild was a milestone in our lives, and we felt that Eddie Vedder’s interpretation along with all the images, emotions, and impressions the film triggers, deserved a cover with the Sunbeam Overdrive sound. It goes well with the entire record topic, and makes for an amazing solar ending, after ascending, looking into the abyss, sadness, oppression, and memories, after finding the courage to escape from Plato’s cave: it’s a big hard sun that frees us all.

11. Fainted Core (bonus track): We wanted to pay tribute to the 90s MTV unplugged concerts, so we actually did half a dozen takes of that song recording sound and image, and picked the best version for a very simple yet aesthetically pleasant video already available on YouTube.

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Hailing from Marseille, southern France, SUNBEAM OVERDRIVE is mixing progressive metal and ’90s alternative rock founded in 2019.

Hard at work since day one, the band quickly released its first 3-track EP and performed their very first show at famous German Euroblast Festival in October 2019.

Sunbeam Overdrive was about to hit the stages when the Covid-19 pandemic started… In turn, and after a few line-up movements, they started producing their first full length album “Diama”, to be released worldwide in 2023.

Sunbeam Overdrive:
Tom Abrigan – Guitars & Vocals
Karim Arnaout – Vocals
Laurent Duclouet – Drums
Bruno Morgana – Bass

Discography:
2023 – Diama – LP (Tentacles Industries / Season of Mist)
2019 – Sunbeam Overdrive – EP

Shared Stage with: Psykup, Ten56, Ze Gran Zeft, Kvark

Tours and Festivals:
2019 – Euroblast – Köln, DE

Sponsors / Artist Endorsements: Vola Guitar, SP Custom, Skull Strings, Hyraw, RocknFreeLife, Carl Thompson