In 2020, Code Orange’s fourth album Underneath was universally hailed as a metal landmark. Featuring some of the most brutal noises you’re likely to hear outside a war zone, it was in turns innovative, catchy and disturbing, with the band expanding beyond their hardcore roots with more industrial and electronic elements than ever before. Frontman Jami Morgan called it “some of the hardest sh*t there is, period.” Now they’re pushing things a stage further with an album of remixes, titled What Is Really Underneath?
On the original album, guitarist Reba Meyers recorded herself making the most out-there noises she could imagine, before chopping them up into samples. Some of them were reversed, glitched, or pitch-shifted to sound even more messed up. “There’s so much to work with guitar wise in the tracks,” she says. “The amount of layers was absolutely insane. There’s so many cool little things that you wouldn’t know were there – sounds you wouldn’t know necessarily if they were electronic or guitar.”
That huge library meant there was no need to record new guitars for. Instead, Jami Morgan and keyboardist Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose got creative with those sounds, leaning into the electronic and hip-hop influences that separate Code Orange from traditionalist hardcore. “Shade had been doing a lot of remixes for other artists,” Reba explains. “We just wanted to create something that could live in a different world. Him and Jamie got basically obsessed over it and created the most insane remixes.” Reba is right on all counts: listening to is a wholly different experience from its predecessor, and guitarists will frequently be unable to tell which noises are even guitars. “I will let the listener use their imagination,” she smiles. “There’s a little bit more wonder involved in it. Although I love straight guitar-based music too, it’s cool to have a little bit of curiosity going on.”
