Arcane Roots are back with intent. “It feels like some kind of anime montage,” Andrew Groves says. “We’ve kind of all gone away and sharpened our skills, and now we’re back together, and we’re stronger.” He smiles as he speaks, his rugged beard reflecting the years he has spent living in Iceland.
After nearly eight years away, they’re re-emerging as a five-piece. The return comes with the new single ‘A Wave, Across The Sea’ and festival appearances at 2000trees and ArcTanGent this summer.
This is not the same band that stepped away in 2018. Where Arcane Roots once operated as an energetic trio, they now return expanded in both line-up and ambition, joined by returning member Daryl Atkins and the Icelandic composer Bjarni Biering.
While it’s easy to get swept along in the forward momentum of their journey, the years between then and now are where the real story lies.
It was the end of summer in 2018 when they announced they would be taking a break. They already had shows announced; intimate dates to accompany the release of the ‘Landslide’ EP, which adapted songs from ‘Melancholia Hymns’.
“The electronic shows were never meant to be a goodbye show. That was never the case,” Andrew states.
Actually, he reveals that the EP was intended as the first part of a trio of follow-ups to ‘Melancholia Hymns’. ‘Landslide’ put the songs through an electronic lens while the subsequent unreleased iterations leaned towards orchestral arrangements and heavier interpretations.
The issue wasn’t the band. It was everything else. They had spent years saying “yes” to every opportunity. From the biggest festivals to the smallest of venues, Arcane Roots toured them all in their first 12 years together.
“The music stuff always goes great. I don’t think we’ve had an argument in our entire existence. I don’t think we’ve had one. Best of friends. I still love playing with them more than anyone else in the whole world. I still love them all incredibly dearly,” Andrew says.
“But, as always, there’s the other side of the coin, and that’s real life and making that work…You can be away and come home, and then you’ve got an absolute mountain to deal with.”
That mountain seemed to grow larger every time, and it was taking a toll on the parts of their lives that mattered most.
“The pressure was outside, and whether that’s families or just living and paying for things, we were all very much at the point where a lot of our relationships were suffering because of it, and certainly our own happiness was very much suffering because of it.”
Standing at the fork in the road of returning to the studio to make another album, Andrew decided it was time to pause. It was an act of self-preservation, both practically and creatively. “I could feel like a glass ceiling of sorts,” he explains.
That ceiling was self-imposed, defined by the pressure of taking another creative leap forward when it no longer felt possible. They had just executed the jump from a hooky rock band in the ‘Heaven & Earth’ EP to the expansive, electronically infused sound of ‘Melancholia Hymns’. They didn’t feel like they could do it again.
It was time to get some air. Andrew instigated the break, but the decision was unanimous. The only regret was how it all ended. The intimate, electronic shows booked around ‘Landslide’ were not the goodbye they would have imagined.
“To be painfully honest, at the time, it felt like, ‘Okay, I need… we need to move on with our lives’ and the idea of planning another tour and the amount of work that it would take…” he trails off. “In a weird way, the amount of work it would take to say ‘goodbye’ was so overwhelmingly crushing that I think it would be just as much work to stay,” he admits.
“I think we knew there was always going to be another chapter”
There was a sense of unfinished business, but for Andrew, there was a lingering doubt that it was truly over. “I think we knew there was always going to be another chapter,” he adds.
The band stopped, but the friendships didn’t. Life moved forward. Families grew. Creativity found other outlets. Andrew relocated to Iceland just two weeks after their final show, beginning a new chapter as a producer and songwriter for others, unknowingly laying the foundations for Arcane Roots’ return.
By coincidence, Bjarni Biering also recently returned to Iceland. In a country where creative communities orbit tightly around shared spaces, the two found themselves working out of the same studio, a proximity that, at first, amounted to little more than passing encounters.
Then, the pandemic arrived. While life in Iceland slowed without entirely stopping, they continued to cross paths. Bjarni, whose partner is English, had spent 8 years living in London and, before that, had completed a Master’s in Composition in Bristol. The sound of a familiar language around the studio drew Andrew’s attention.
“We ended up at the same studio, and just everyone is so close to one another as well because there’s nowhere else to go that you just witness so many great musicians. Honestly, it was such a wonderful experience to come here and feel so little and be completely unknown and just also be schooled.
“One of the things that really drew me to Bjarni was just how talented he was and how incredible he was, and Arcane Roots was formed on those ideas. We all look up to each other so much, and we all want to prove to each other how much better we are now as musicians. We want to excite one another.”
A friendship started to grow, and after listening to one another’s work, a creative understanding quickly formed. “I would listen to his music, and I would almost finish the sentence,” Andrew explains. He jokingly refers to Bjarni as the Lennon to his McCartney. What followed wasn’t a plan to resurrect Arcane Roots but a growing desire to impress, to challenge, and just see how far the ideas could be pushed.
As green shoots started to appear, it was clear they were recognisably Arcane Roots. Andrew reached out to Daryl to get his opinion. Daryl had left the band in 2015, but his friendship with Andrew, which started in their college days, had never faded. Arcane Roots was “just an extension of our friendship,” he says. His departure was a similar story of feeling worn out: physically, mentally, and creatively.
“I fell out of love with playing the drums, to be honest. I really did feel like I’d got myself into a little bit of a box in many ways and didn’t have a creative excitement really for like writing and playing the drums, and that’s why I moved more into electronics and programming and production because I felt that there was just more to satisfy my brain,” he says.
So when Andrew sent over that early draft for Daryl to take a look at, it had to be something he could sink his teeth into. “It was about there being an interesting creative contribution for everyone that feels the natural kind of next step,” Daryl explains. “We wouldn’t go back and do Arcane Roots as it was. It has to be under the premise that it is creatively interesting for us.”
That mindset extended to every aspect of Arcane Roots. The music is just one facet; how they release it, how they perform it, and how fans engage with it are all up for consideration as they aim to bring a sense of occasion back to music. “It’s like one incredible passion project essentially,” Daryl says.
Inspired by their own teenage treasure hunts for fragments of information and new sounds, they want to feed people’s excitement and curiosity.
In rejoining the band, Daryl’s impact now stretches beyond the music itself, helping challenge long-held assumptions about how a band can operate. “I think this project has sort of saved my musical appetite in many ways, and I have a real passion for what we’re doing and a real excitement for what we can achieve,” he concludes.
Bjarni, meanwhile, joins Arcane Roots as a similar driving force for their creativity. In a musical sense, he comes from a different world, but he shares the same visual language. “It’s been a really interesting transition for me coming from a more serious, corporatey music. I do a lot of production music as well, and I’ve essentially burned out of that. I was like, ‘This is so shit. I’m literally writing music to fucking toy commercials’,” Bjarni explains.
“And then meeting Andrew, it reminded me that music can be fun. Music can be enjoyable. And I’m actually enjoying making music again.”
It had been almost 20 years since Bjarni was last in a band after spending some of his teenage years ripping off Radiohead. “I had completely given up that and thought I was way too old to start to be in a band again, but here we are!”
It was Bjarni’s piano line that sparked ‘A Wave, Across The Sea’; the first song sent to Daryl and the rest of the band. Andrew’s quest to challenge traditional songwriting sensibilities spoke to the composer’s ambition not to write “a song” but to go with the flow.
“In my mind, it’s kind of like a film score for me,” Bjarni reasons. “We’re scoring something. We’re creating moods. We’re juxtaposing, putting things… weird things and cutting really sharply, and so that’s been our approach to this single.”
He adds, “It’s much more of a song than I thought it would be, actually,” before exclaiming “Fuck!” to a chorus of laughter.
The point of all of this, adding Daryl and Bjarni to Arcane Roots, is growing more than a single point of failure. There is room for families and life, but also a momentum split between them.
Andrew poetically puts it as, “It enables me to then trust that the world is turning when I’m not pushing it myself.” They become a sum of parts. Multi-talented. Multi-faceted. A force to be reckoned with.
So, today, ‘A Wave, Across the Sea’ arrives as a statement. Familiar but sprawling into something darker and more cinematic, it is an intentional foray into the new world of Arcane Roots.
Andrew likens it to ‘Curtains’, the song which unlocked ‘Melancholia Hymns’. Similarly, this was the seed from which they could experiment.
“I really wanted to try and make each vocal feel like almost a different person,” he says. “I wanted to play with the idea of time. I think no one really cares when something happens as long as it happens. I think as long as you have suspense, and then you give some kind of release. I think it’s interesting when you create those things.
“For example, the tempo is changing throughout the whole song. Every section has its own beats-per-minute, but it’s very subtle. It’s just gradually getting faster and slower when we want it to. The timings for all the riffs and all these other things are completely drawn out, and I like this idea of just trying to think of it almost like it was a film.
“I hope it comes across that way.”
Despite the ambition, the foundations remain intact, distinctively Arcane Roots. Daryl defines their guiding principle, “beauty and chaos”.
“The challenge and the evolution of Arcane Roots over the years has been how do we do heavier stuff that’s still ‘the beauty and the chaos’? How can we amplify both of those things, and how can they coexist?
“We never wanted to be a band that’s all out heavy and starting to lose sight of the narrative or the songwriting. How can you do that stuff and still make it interesting and palatable and creatively something that we can all get really excited about?”
If that was the question, well, ‘A Wave, Across The Sea’ is a resounding answer.
Between them, they have found a way to see the big picture and the small details more than before. They’re not just adding piano, synths, and strings for decoration; they come in and out of focus as scenes shift, characters enter, and the narrative changes. Every detail has been considered.
“We’ve been doing a devastatingly long amount of hours on this,” Andrew admits. “This single is by far the most work I’ve put into anything in my whole life.”
It went through numerous iterations, and from it, the single comes with several different endings. “There are three separate endings, and I’m not sure exactly how we’ll release them, but we’ve thrown the kitchen sink at it basically,” he adds. One ending features “a massive string arrangement” while another has “one of the heaviest pieces of music we’ve ever written by far,” comparing it to something that would give Meshuggah a run for their money.
Throughout, lyrically, Andrew steps away from biography into a world of his own making. “Since the beginning of Arcane Roots, everything has always felt very visual. I don’t think I really even realised that I was such a visual person,” he begins. He likens it to synesthesia, but more like a blurred daydream that he tries to grasp.
“I really wanted to achieve a song where it felt like there were multiple characters and multiple ideas being put together (and that’s nothing new in music or in lyrics really) but, this idea that you could have almost contradicting ideas or contradicting lyrics, I always like doing that in quite a few of our songs where maybe there’s one idea at the beginning and by the end it’s kind of changed and it has a narrative.
“Naturally, it felt very apocalyptic, and I have a great love for 80s sci-fi, so it’s always got that tinge to it, but it’s all very much rooted in themes that are going on now.
“I wanted to create a separate world to just enjoy those images without tying them necessarily to anything or tying them to modern politics or anything like that. It was like a mixing pot to tell a story or to tell some points of view,” he continues.
Andrew also references East Asian filmmakers and the Chainsaw Man author, Tatsuki Fujimoto, as we try to bring more of the daydreams into focus. “Sometimes the bad guy wins. The main character is tenuous at best. What I really enjoy is just the surreality of it as well,” he reasons.
The aim, it becomes clear, is not comfort. It is pressure. Disorientation. A sense of scale that places the listener inside something far bigger than themselves. Since moving to Iceland, Andrew has found those ideas mirrored in the physical world around him: earthquakes, volcanoes, forces that cannot be negotiated with.
“Your brain is unable to put that together,” he says, thinking back to the feeling of the ground moving beneath his feet. “And I think a big concept of that, hence where the riff really comes in, and this big focus and change is really about being a human in that situation, and it’s just like your world is turning upside down. Fight for your life. Hold on to your kid. Grab your wife. Grab yourself,” he says and begins to laugh.
“You can pull that analogy in very many ways, whether that’s politically or in a relationship or whatever, but this idea of just this emergent force of all these things that we might have been burying over all these years, all these bad ideas that society has had all over the years that have very much surfaced now. It feels like this wave and this idea of trying to manage to be a human in the middle of all of that. It definitely pulls at those strings for sure.”
Daryl, who shares the same mental image, adds, “There was some really interesting creative ideas around that concept of the sleeping giants that are just hidden beneath the ocean, and I think a lot of the ideas for the songs and creative concepts and visuals really stem from that seed.”
Between the five of them, it’s taken nearly four years across two countries to get to this point. But it took a call from the organisers at 2000trees last summer to really put them into gear, though. The plan to join the festival line-up there and at ArcTanGent gave them something to aim for. They had a year to get in shape.
“It was also somewhat of a relief because we weren’t coming back with headline shows. It was all about the festival. And I think with a festival, it’s nice because, as nerve-wracking as it will be, it is just about the band. You can’t really do as big a production, or you don’t have as much control. You’re kind of just a stone in the stream, and you have to kind of go along with it,” Andrew says.
With months still to go before they step on stage, they’re already thinking about their setlist. While there is such momentum pulling them forward, there is a conscious effort to honour their old songs with the same enthusiasm they have for their new ideas.
“We’re very excited to show those old songs as bigger and better,” Andrew says and adds his stern determination to defy anyone who thinks they may have mellowed in their time away.
Daryl, who has extensive experience in show design, sees the expanded line-up as an opportunity more than a complication. “As a three-piece, it’s always been about trying to cover as much ground sonically [as possible] and cutting all over the place and that can be quite an athletic process live to cover all those bases and there’s so much on the table with the all of the the previous music that we can reimagine and recontextualise and just split between us and rethink about in different ways.”
“We’ve got way more hands now,” he reasons as he outlines their overlap on synths, bass, electronics and drums, which will allow them to perform their earlier songs in ways closer to the recordings themselves. Even for ‘Melancholia Hymns’, where electronic drums came to the foreground, he plans to humanise those elements.
“I can’t wait to be on that stage and smile at my brothers and play those songs,” Andrew admits.
There is a clear wave of excitement that the band is riding. Nothing is impossible for them. But they are not finished yet.
“It’s really just the beginning,” Andrew explains. “We’re still learning so much ourselves about this relationship, but also the world-building and where we want to take it. We would like to bring the visual world to life a lot more as well, and maybe start to look at interesting ways we could present the records, and even with the live shows, the sky’s the limit, and it feels that way for the first time. It really does feel like we can achieve whatever we want to achieve so long as people want to hear it.”
They are far removed from the band that stepped away in 2018. From feeling increasingly boxed in, Andrew is now looking outward. “I like the idea of really just abandoning the idea that there was even a sky, let alone a ceiling,” he says.
Arcane Roots are back. No longer drowning but waving, beckoning a new beginning.
Arcane Roots’ single ‘A Wave, Across The Sea’ is out now.
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