Imminent Sonic Destruction Opens the Metal Floodgate
Michigan-based prog metal masters shine on fourth album, "Floodgate"
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection! Three years ago, I covered the release of The Sun Will Always Set by Michigan progressive metal band Imminent Sonic Destruction in this newsletter. The band’s third album represented a leap forward in maturity and cohesiveness. It was great catching up with vocalist/guitarist Tony Piccoli for that release, as I’d been Facebook and message board friends with Tony for many years.
Imminent Sonic Destruction is back with a new album, Floodgate, which dropped Friday, April 25 on FC Records. Once again, the lads have stepped up their game, and I was honored to discuss ISD’s latest release with Tony and keyboardist/vocalist Pete Hopersberger.
Let’s get to that story.
The idea of suffering for one’s art isn’t new. Many great works of art across every medium have been spawned by personal tragedy or loss. That phenomenon of having a burst of personal creative energy following a serious life event — such as a bad breakup of a longterm relationship or the death of a loved one — is the focus of the two bookend tracks on Imminent Sonic Destruction’s fourth album, Floodgate, which dropped April 25 on FC Records.
In eight songs, the Detroit-area progressive metal marauders provide their own burst of creative output, as the band has taken another step forward both with their sound and their songwriting.
The five-piece out of Detroit includes Tony Piccoli (lead vocals/guitars), Pat DeLeon (drums), Pete Hopersberger (keyboards/vocals), Bryan Paxton (bass), and Scott David Thompson (guitars/vocals).
The ISD lineup got a scare recently — between recording the album and preparing for the short tour to support the album release — when DeLeon had an accident with a power saw, losing part of his right middle finger and cutting his index finger badly. However, the ex-Tiles drummer has adapted to life with a shorter digit and is still going strong.
“He’s doing great. When we’re playing, it’s like nothing happened, honestly,” Piccoli said. “And mentally, he handled it like a champion. There was that fleeting thought that you have for a second there where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, he’s never going to be able to play again,’ but obviously that wasn’t even close to the case.”
“We were all pretty floored by that. It was a scary moment,” Hopersberger added.
Nick Hagen, who also produced the excellent The Sun Will Always Set (2022) for the band, returned behind the desk for Floodgate. Hopersberger said Hagen gets the band and what it’s trying to do. Because ISD enjoys working with him, it was only natural for him to remain involved.
Floodgate was initially born out of an upheaval in Piccoli’s personal life after a breakup. He wrote a few songs that he had earmarked for a potential solo album, but they ended up being the basis for the new Imminent Sonic Destruction record.
“Three of the songs that are on this album I wrote in 2017, 2018 or so. I didn’t even really intend to give them to the band, if you will,” Piccoli said. “I wrote all three of those songs in a really quick span after a bad breakup. You know, it sucked. Those songs came real quick. And the idea came to me that a floodgate of creativity opens after some significant life event. That was kind of the idea behind the title of the album and the theme, I suppose. It’s not like a concept album in any way, it’s just really kind of a collection of songs that came quickly out of a flood of creativity.”
What changed Piccoli’s mind about sharing these songs with his ISD mates was simply the usual time-consuming practice of writing for the next album.
“We had some good ideas, but (writing) was already starting to take a while, and after a little bit, it’s like the clock starts ticking,” Hopersberger said. “And Tony’s like, ‘Well, I do have some songs already.’ And then we just sort of shifted gears. Even with that, any of these ideas, I think they all take on a different form when everybody starts throwing their ideas in, or just their personal touches in how they play or how we sing.”
The striking thing about Floodgate is the heavy, sludgy bottom end. The heavy aural assault — in all the best ways — remains from previous ISD albums. There seems to be a little more grunge influence on this release than in the past, although there are all the band’s usual influences from Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Meshuggah, Genesis, Strapping Young Lad, the Devin Townsend Band, Tool, Pantera, and Rush.
“I feel like we’ve got to give more credit for the sound to Nick,” Piccoli said. “Because he just kind of took what we did and he made it the way you’re hearing it now.”
“The riffs I think were a little sludgier on this album for some reason, maybe,” Hopersberger said. “It’s hard for us because we’re so close to it and we’ve known these songs for so long that they feel like totally second nature.”
The titular “Floodgate I” opens the album and introduces the theme of the creative burst idea lyrically in Piccoli’s vocals, which sit on top of a crunchy, sludgy, brutal guitar onslaught from Piccoli and Thompson, with some Deep Purple-ish organ support by Hopersberger. The song pulses forward with atmospheric verses and more thunderous sounds in and after the chorus.
One of the areas in which Imminent Sonic Destruction continues to improve is with recording vocals. Piccoli said he feels the vocals on Floodgate are the band’s best to date, and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. The band recorded harmony vocals a bit differently on the new album. Hopersberger had been reading Ted Templeman’s book and wanted to try what the legendary producer had done with the Doobie Brothers to achieve fuller harmonies — having each vocalist record every part (low, high, and middle) rather than just having each vocalist to just “their” part and doubling them.
“This is the closest I think we’ve ever come to hitting what’s been in our heads as far as how we want the vocals to come out,” Hopersberger said.
About halfway through “Floodgate I” is some excellent bass work from Paxton, followed by a Piccoli guitar solo that starts out almost as if it’s hiding in the atmospheric middle, but then it launches and soars over more of that nasty bottom end crunch. DeLeon’s drumming powers the band through an explosive instrumental outro, with a combined Thompson and Piccoli guitar assault.
Hopersberger wrote the lyrics to the second track, “Memento Mori,” basing them on something his late father used to say — “nobody gets out alive.”
“It’s kind of a flippant thing to say, but if you think about it, it’s pretty deep,” Hopersberger said. “You can’t live your life like, ‘Oh, it’ll take care of itself later.’ You’ve got to live like, ‘What if this was the last day you had? How would you want to be remembered?’ It’s a Latin phrase that means roughly, ‘remember that you must die.’ It’s mostly about (living your best life). I just think that’s a good practice for people.”
The song itself shares some musical DNA with some of the heavier tracks from Porcupine Tree’s In Absentia / Futile era. The instrumental middle section of “Memento Mori” before the vocals kick back in is a sublime album highlight. Piccoli’s solo on this track is one of his best to date in terms of emotional heft. It’s what you might get if you asked Marillion’s Steve Rothery to provide a solo for a heavy metal song.
“That’s one of those real majestic sounding sections,” Hopersberger said.
“No One” is the angriest-sounding song on the album. Not only does ISD go into thrash metal mode at the start of the song, but Piccoli also belts out some powerful vocal moments in the chorus that gets the adrenaline pumping. Imminent Sonic Destruction juxtaposes breathless thrashier passages with more atmospheric sections that allow the listener to catch their breath.
The song nearly didn’t have a chorus, as the band couldn’t settle on one that everyone liked. Eventually the band focused on the line “no one gives a damn” in this song about people posting every thought in their head on social media, as if they are imparting some vital, universal truth.
“I’m not saying don’t share your opinion, but at the same time, if that’s your whole personality, uh…shut up,” Piccoli said with a laugh.
“It came so close to not having a chorus,” Hopersberger said. “We had so much of that song that we loved and we could not come up with a chorus that we didn’t all think was terrible. And in the studio, we finally came up with something and some harmonies, and we were like, ‘I think that’s it!’ And we put it down, and now we love it. I think this is probably Tony’s best vocal performance, or at least it’s my favorite. I just love where he is in that range and how he’s belting that out in that song.”
“It was literally like the 11th hour when we came up with that,” Piccoli added.
Hopersberger pushes out front on “The Game,” which starts with some gentle Wurlitzer-meets-Fender-Rhodes-sounding keyboards. His bluesier lead vocal provides contrast to Piccoli’s in the verse melody over atmospheric backing music, with the full might of the band crashing in during the soaring harmony chorus vocals.
“I had the initial idea — the beginning keyboard part and the chorus,” Hopersberger said of the song. “So I went over to Tony’s, so we could kind of lay it all down, and he came up with that riff that’s in between the verses and the chorus.”
“The way that song came together was one of those magical moments where, when you’re writing with someone else and it clicks, and it happens kind of fast, that’s what ‘The Game’ is musically,” Piccoli said. “There were lyrics written for the second half of that song that didn’t have music yet. And I just did something real quick at home, sent it to him, he’s (like) ‘I loved it,’ and I demoed out some vocal harmonies.”
Lyrically, Hopersberger said it was a bit of a social commentary about whether some people believe what they’re saying or if it’s just part of an act for clicks or attention. The extended bridge section in the middle is a showcase for the group’s harmony vocals, followed by a chunky Porcupine Tree-esque section that allows the band to stretch out and use their considerable chops.
The eight-and-a-half-minute “Find Center” is one of the album’s proggiest tracks. Lyrically it’s about getting out into nature and putting personal problems into perspective. Floodgate has fewer extreme vocals than other ISD releases, but Piccoli uses them for effect a couple of minutes into the song after the initial verse and chorus. The wall of sound accompanying the chorus contrasts nicely with the atmosphere of the verses, and there’s an extended jam in the middle of the song.
“‘Find Center’ at first was like six and a half minutes. And then, of course, it gets ‘ISD’d,’ if you will,” Piccoli said. “Pat wanted to do some cool King’s X kind of stuff in the instrumental section, and it became what it is. When he first heard the demo, that short instrumental section really excited him. He was like, ‘I love that. I have these ideas. There’s things I want to do.’ And I’m like, ‘Cool, we’ll work it out.’ We started jamming on it, and kind of as a band, we took Pat’s direction as we were kind of learning the demo, learning the song, and building on it. He wanted to do some cool King’s X-style accents.”
“We’re all big fans of them, too,” Hopersberger said about King’s X. “They’re good at gradually opening things up. It’s not this mindblowing shredfest, but it keeps your interest. Even though it’s a long jam, it keeps your interest by changing and changing and changing.”
“The Light at the End of the Tunnel,” might be my early favorite song on Floodgate. Lyrically, I love the song’s subversion of having the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel shut off. That light symbolizes hope or some kind of relief, and I find the the thought of seeing that light, only to have someone shut it off, to be a devastating analogy. However, it’s not all bleak, as Piccoli sings that he’ll be the one to turn that switch back on.
Piccoli said this track was a particularly personal one from his experiences and that he appreciated the band accepting it and making it an ISD song.
Musically, “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” starts like a ballad, with a gentle acoustic guitar pattern and piano accompanying Piccoli’s lead vocal and some harmony vocals. Bass and drums kick in a minute into the song, building tension. The chorus brings a wall of sound highlighted by Hopersberger’s keyboards. Alternately pensive and angrily triumphant, the buildup near the end includes a scorching guitar solo and a Dream Theater-esque finish.
“The Weight” starts with a gentle shuffle on DeLeon’s snare drum, a simple-but-meaty bass line from Paxton, and Piccoli’s lead vocal. Hopersberger joins in with a lovely keyboard accompaniment. The song maintains its slower pace throughout, but the intensity ramps up in the back half of the song with some call-and-answer vocals between Piccoli and Hopersberger.
“At the end of ‘The Weight,’ there was a part vocally where I sang it,” Piccoli said. “I did a great job. I crushed it! (laughs) But then Pete was like, ‘Let me take a crack at it, boys!’ And you hear him at the end of the song and he absolutely crushed it. Me and Nick (Hagen) were both sitting there going, ‘Yup! That’s the one!’”
That vocal call-and-answer section is followed by a tasteful, prolonged guitar solo. The instruments fall away gently, leaving just a beautifully atmospheric piano finish.
“Floodgate II” is the album’s epic closer at nearly 14 minutes long — more than five minutes longer than the second-longest track, “Find Center.” Piccoli said he’d envisioned the song as the third part of a Floodgate trilogy — as “Floodgate III” with a short, “shreddy” instrumental as “Floodgate II” in the middle of the album. In the end, the bookend idea prevailed and it was just two parts to “Floodgate,” which reprises some of the musical and lyrical ideas from “Floodgate I.” However, the album closer, “II” includes some tonal and tempo shifts from what ISD did in “Floodgate I,” along with new material.
It begins with an atmospheric intro with a gentle guitar pattern and hushed vocals. Dark, jagged guitar chords come crashing into the mix about 90 seconds in, like something off of Porcupine Tree’s The Incident album — perhaps the evil cousin of a riff from “Occam’s Razor” or “The Blind House.” There’s a cool, but slightly dissonant (when listening loud through headphones, anyway) combined guitar/keyboard duet with piano laid overtop, held together by the DeLeon/Paxton rhythm partnership for a couple of minutes that allows the song to stretch out and breathe before the second verse kicks in. From there, “Floodgate II” becomes almost hypnotic until the five-minute mark, when it shifts tonally to a major key and Hopersberger’s keyboards shine both as a lead instrument and backing washes. Piccoli’s vocals in the bridge, with lush backing harmony vocals, elevate the song to its high ground in the middle for a full minute before culminating in one of his defiant screams as the meaty guitars and DeLeon’s drums come crashing in with brute force.
Piccoli does some understated soloing around the seven-minute mark that leads straight into a big Hopersberger synth solo while the bass and rhythm guitar chugs along, with DeLeon’s drums and cymbals providing the song’s bedrock.
After the instrumental middle, there is hopeful lyrical content in the lead vocal and a bit of jamming that transitions the epic into its final minutes, heralded by a long, sustained chord drenched in reverb which fades into an acoustic guitar pattern that might have walked in off a Guns N’Roses album. Piccoli revisits the “open the floodgates” lyrics from “Floodgate I,” only presented much more softly and optimistically. There’s a beautiful guitar solo at just about the 11:30 mark and then the song builds to its climax, with another big sustained chord leading into a gentle — almost pastoral — closing minute of electric guitar noodling that concludes with three final distorted high notes.
The conclusion of the album gives one the sense of the safety bar coming up and releasing a rider of some epic, metal-based roller coaster, and it’s a ride you’ll want to get right back on.
Floodgate shows Imminent Sonic Destruction taking the next step in the band’s development. The music varies from dense and heavy to more atmospheric. It’s not a big departure from what’s come before, but the compositions seem tighter and more refined. The band is growing more confident both in terms of songwriting and capturing their ideas during the recording process. It is, in short, Imminent Sonic Destruction’s finest musical statement to date.
The album should appeal to fans of progressive metal who love their music loud, chunky, and unapologetic. At the same time, the vocal harmonies and keyboards, along with ISD’s ability to recognize when to leave space between the notes and the riffs, add some lighter touches to offset the heaviness.
The band is currently on a short tour of the Midwest U.S. to support Floodgate. One can only hope there is an opportunity for Imminent Sonic Destruction to a capture live performance (or performances) of the band’s usual high-octane energy, as it would be fantastic to this new material documented in the form of a future live release.
Tracklist:
Floodgate I (6:46)
Memento Mori (5:00)
No One (6:51)
The Game (6:45)
Find Center (8:33)
The Light at the End of the Tunnel (6:50)
The Weight (4:58)
Floodgate II (13:47)
For more info on ISD, check them out on Facebook or their official website. You can order their music at imminentsonicdestruction.bandcamp.com.
For my full interview with Tony Piccoli and Pete Hopersberger, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 151 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. In addition to discussing the making of the album and some of the stories behind the songs, the pair discussed drummer Pat DeLeon’s power tool incident that left him half a finger short, their modest tour of live shows in the Midwest, and more.
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