WHAT LIES BENEATH
It’s just ticked past 9am in the London offices of Warner Music. Code Orange’s drummer and main vocalist, Jami Morgan, has only been in the building for a minute, but already he’s wandered off to take a selfie. He grins as he holds up his phone and snaps himself in front of a picture of motormouth ex-Oasis-frontmanturned-solo-artist, Liam Gallagher. Then he turns back to our party, which includes his far sleepier and more reserved bandmate, Reba Meyers, and declares: “Okay, we can start now. I just needed to get a picture with my boy.”
The hardcore musician and the Britpop icon might seem an odd pairing, but there are similarities. Both have combative personalities. Neither give a fuck what you think. And they’ve both marked a sea change in music.
Code Orange, you see, are a band who have amassed quite a reputation. Back at the start of 2017, they were just one of many hardcore bands who were working their way up the ladder. Having signed to Roadrunner Records following the release of promising second album , they dropped a musical neutron bomb on heavy music with – one of the most ambitious and superbly well realised hardcore albums… well… ever. The buzz around saw the band grow and grow; there were tours with System Of A Down, a slot on the Tour as main support to Trivium, the creation of a theme song for WWE Superstar Bray Wyatt and, perhaps most surprisingly, a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 2018. Pretty incredible stuff, right?
