“He had an acoustic guitar and he started playing this little melody for the bridge… It felt magical – like classic Smashing Pumpkins”: Code Orange on their spellbinding Billy Corgan collaboration and how simplification brought honesty to their playing

Aggressive metal and teeth-grinding tension go together like energy drinks and vodka – in more ways than one. They’re likely to ramp up the intensity and energy levels of a band, but they also can lead to emotional turmoil, instability and crippling volatility. 

The six touring members of Code Orange – guitarists Reba Meyers and Dom Landolina, vocalist Jami Morgan, bassist Joe Goldman, multi-instrumentalist Eric “Shade” Balderose and drummer Max Portnoy – don’t need caffeine and booze to feel jumpy. Theirs is an anxiety born from ambition, insecurity and a little chemical imbalance, and working together simultaneously feeds their neurosis and gives them an outlet to purge their poisons.

“We’re not five stereotypical rockers trying to put our best ass-kicking shit out there and show you our killer chops,” Meyers says. “It’s not really about that. It’s more about figuring our shit out and coping with stuff. For me, that’s the whole point. I love playing guitar, making music and doing shows. I love being in the band, but all that’s the icing on the cake.”

On albums like 2017’s Forever and 2020’s Underneath, the challenges that motivated Code Orange yielded a turbulent, off-kilter mix of hardcore, metalcore, nu-metal and industrial. The cathartic torrents of sound were as effective as primal scream therapy and twice as noisy. And there was no shortage of contorted guitars or jarring pedal-driven effects – or rage.

“I used to be really angry and have blowouts and see red all the time,” Meyers says. “I still get upset a lot. But I’m not as bad as I used to be, and I think being in this band has really helped me get through that.”

At the same time, being in Code Orange has caused a sometimes palpable friction between the band members. Since Morgan, Meyers and Balderose formed the group in high school in 2008 as Code Orange Kids, the three founding members have evolved from a bunch of impulsive teenagers to one of the most creative bands on the modern metal circuit. 

Focusing obsessively on their band for 15 years and being together nearly non-stop has made them as close as family members, and occasionally as flustered as family members working in the same office day and night.

“We’re five individuals with an intense amount of strong writing ability and an intense amount of passion and personality,” Meyers says. “We’ve all grown into ourselves, but the more we know who we are, the harder it is to know what the band’s identity is. And the more we struggle to have our voices heard and make our mark.”

Code Orange started working on their new album, The Above, shortly after releasing 2020’s Underneath, which was written and recorded largely during the pandemic lockdown. They started by recording demos, most of which were scrapped. Then they recorded seven songs, which they also discarded since they didn’t fit the tone they wanted for the new album.

Considering how hard they searched to find the right voice for the album and how much material didn’t meet their criteria, fans might have expected another brutal machine gun blast of low, serrated guitars, slamming beats and feral vocals. 

While some of The Above is jarring and furious, it’s far less savage and musically complex than the band’s previous four releases, tempering primitive, staccato bursts of guitar with simple open-chord arrangements and textural flourishes, and even including the melancholy pop-rock song Mirror and a nuanced duet with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, Take Shape.

“I love brutal music more than anything, and I consider myself the metal riff guy in the band,” Landolina says. “But at the same time, after releasing a bunch of albums that were heavy as fuck, it’s like, ‘Okay, maybe it’s time to try something a little different.’ How many more insane mosh parts do we need to write?”

During an unseasonably warm New York afternoon in early fall, Meyers and Landolina discussed the self-imposed challenges they faced working on The Above, Code Orange’s unyielding determination to grow and expand their musical reach, the physical and mental scars that keep them motivated, and working with two legends in the music business, Corgan and producer Steve Albini. 

Right from the start, did you want The Above to be less chaotic and more commercial than Underneath, to appeal to a more mainstream audience?

Reba Meyers: “For me, it truly was not anything about the audience. I just wanted to hear more honesty in my guitar parts, and the best way for me to do that was to simplify my playing. That allowed me to get my personality into the songs more easily.”

Did some of the more complex and aggressive parts on past albums get in the way of what you wanted to express?

Meyers: “If I’m dealing with too many parts, sometimes I feel like the emotion is getting lost because I’m just playing a bunch of notes. I enjoy that sometimes for heavier music, but for this record I wanted to play fewer ideas and I almost wanted to be a little sloppier, so the music didn’t sound too perfect.”

What about you, Dom? Did you want to approach the album differently?

Dom Landolina: “Every time we do an album, I’m the guy that’s always pushing for the heavy riffs. That’s where I’m different from the other people in the band. They like to leave space and let the songs breathe. I like to fill everything with all these parts.”

It sounds like you had different goals. Did you and Reba write together and then merge your styles to make them sound cohesive? 

Landolina: “Sometimes. We wrote about 25 songs while we worked on this album. So, we had two or three albums’ worth of songs to choose from. And they were written in all kinds of ways. We came up with some parts separately, and we worked on some of them together. I worked with just Jami on some stuff. So the songs all came together differently. We did some of them in two days, and others were pieced together over a long period of time.” 

Meyers: “I was trying to encourage people to get in a room together because we hadn’t done that in a while. Like, on Splinter the Soul, me and Dom worked with each other and pulled from all this stuff we had been fucking around with and merged all these parts together.

“I think that song’s really cool because it has both of our voices in it. But you can’t listen to it and go, ‘Oh, this is Dom’s riff, that’s Reba’s riff.’ We molded our styles together in a really cool, cohesive way.”

One of the heavier songs, The Game, features rapid staccato, Slipknot-style chugging followed by slower, vibrato-laden riffs and pinch harmonics. Then it goes rhythmically off the rails with a skittering rhythm and electronic enhancements. 

Meyers: “Most of that entire song was Dom’s riff. I heard it and loved it, so we kept it like that. I just didn’t see anything I could add to it to make it better. And then there are songs like Theater of Cruelty, where it’s more of this weird collaboration of different styles and dynamics.”

Landolina: “Theater of Cruelty is a great example of how we work together. There’s a pinch harmonic-centric riff that comes and goes and riffs through the whole song with the chorus. Then you get to the end of the song and there are a lot of fast pinch harmonics. That’s my thing. A lot of the other parts are less heavy and more melodic, which was more Reba. I guess I think about what I want to play as a guitarist, and maybe the rest of the band thinks about the whole song.”

Maybe it’s that contrast between you and them that makes the music diverse and creates a duality between the more textural parts and the heavier, more aggressive sections.

Landolina: “Yeah, but I just feel like those guys are probably better at writing songs than I am. I just like to see what I can play on guitar that sounds cool. But when Reba and Jami put a song together, I just sit back because I don’t know shit about chords. That’s just not how my brain works. But Reba’s perfect for that.”

Reba, do you consider yourself a metal player?

Meyers: “I enjoy metal, I don’t consider myself a metal player. I write metal occasionally and use it to inspire me. But I think of myself more as a songwriter that uses guitar to help tell my story.”

Do you think your longtime fans appreciate the nuances you’re weaving into the songs with the electronics and creative, melodic atmospheres?

Meyers: “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter because we’re not thinking of them. We’re doing this for ourselves – I guess because we need to. We’re not trying to sound like anything else, or not sound like anything else. We just want to express who we are. 

“If we were trying to make songs that would appeal to certain audiences, we wouldn’t do something like Grooming My Replacement because that song gets pretty fucking weird. I don’t think anyone from the mainstream universe would ever understand what I’m trying to do with that. 

“But to me, you just pay attention to the aggression and it’s more about the mood than about the song. And the heavy things are interesting because they go through so much of a process of bringing everyone’s ideas in more than the more melodic ones do.”

Landolina: “I think those are the harder ones to write because each person is bringing their own thing to the table, and it all goes into the grinder. And then we all end up wrestling with it to get it right and get everyone’s personal stamp on it. You really have to go through a million versions. There’s a riff in The Game that we workshopped at five different times over two years.”

Do you both use pedals to create additional noise and texture?

Meyers: “I love pedals to help create different elements for the music. We all brought our pedalboards into the studio, and I had two of them connected to each other. 

Landolina: “On this album I was less reliant on pedals, which goes back to what we were saying a minute ago. We have our own ways of doing things, and I’m all about riffs. The more open-chord rock songs like Snapshot were done with me out of the picture.”

Reba, the structures on The Above are simpler than the ones on Underneath. Did playing less complex rhythms give you more space to shape the songs?

Meyers: “I just feel like if you don’t have too much happening in the song, you can really hear what your hands are doing, and it’s easier to tap into a groove that way. That’s the most important thing for me. The effects and other stuff are fun to put in after you know what you want to say with the music. 

“A lot of the problem I have with connecting with a lot of music that’s being put out today is that people seem to be so worried about putting in all the notes and making sure they’re playing stuff that’s complex and technical enough to show how good they are. They’re not worried about the feeling and the mood and just being themselves.”

Do you write the frameworks for your songs before you add the effects?

Meyers: “I like to see what I can do with just the songwriting because that’s where the power is coming from. And then the pedals can amplify that to an insane degree. Once we have something, I like to mold the tone to my liking. I’ve been using more fuzz pedals because I’ve found that they work great as a tonal tool. 

“But you don’t always need some crazy piles of effects. I already went through that phase, and I still like to do it sometimes. But making new albums should be about growth. I don’t want to repeat what I already did.”

Did you start writing The Above right after you finished Underneath?

Landolina: “We did them both pretty close together. When Covid happened, we realized we were going to have that extra time. We thought that maybe we should write an EP. And then we started coming up with ideas. And then more ideas started coming. We kept working and working, and eventually you have 25 songs on your plate, and you realize you could do a double album, so why do an EP?”

Meyers: “We’ve been writing this damn thing forever. That’s why I feel so good to finally be able to let these songs out. I Fly, Take Shape and a couple more are freaking three years old at this point. That’s a long time for a song to be sitting there. It gives you too much time to think about it and too much time to fuck with it. You don’t want to over-paint the painting.”

You wrote a bunch of demos and recorded seven full songs that you threw away before you recorded anything you were all happy with. In the end, you had 25 songs you had to whittle down the 14 on the record. Did you feel creatively stifled?

Meyers: “Not at first, because there was so much shit coming out of us that in the beginning, it was fun. We were figuring out the identity of the record and it was taking shape. But for me, it did get pretty frustrating after a while. Some of the guys in the band enjoy the process and throwing shit at the wall for a long time until it forms into this masterpiece. 

“But I got tired of that. There were times I said, ‘Okay, isn’t this enough? Let’s just look at what we’ve got and take a snapshot of the moment.’ But that’s hard because there are so many identities within the band. There’s literally multiple bands within this one band.” 

You’ve been working on The Above for a long time – and you had a few stops and starts. When did the vision for the album come together?

Meyers: “I don’t think that ever happened, which is funny. Jamie would text me and go, ‘Reba, why aren’t you sending more songs?’ And I would literally have to say, ‘No, that’s it! I’m not sending anything else because we’re done, and that’s it! We have to put a cap on this.’ We all tunneled in deep on this record and became like moles burrowed into the ground. We needed to dig our way back out.”

Smashing Pumpkins founder Billy Corgan sings on Take Shape. How did he get involved?

Meyers: “At one point, we shared management. It was cool because he had a genuine interest in the band. He’s a very creative person and he understood that we had some commonalities. He could see we were a very odd bunch, and we were trying to use our strong personalities to shape the music.” 

Did you contact Billy, or did he ask you if he could be involved? 

Meyers: “It started off as us sending him the songs and talking about them, like a lot of musicians do with one another. That led naturally to us getting in a room together, which wasn’t originally part of the plan, but he wanted to do it. He had an acoustic guitar and he started playing this little melody for the bridge of Take Shape and sang the part that he does on the record. It felt magical – like classic Smashing Pumpkins.”

Mirror is a different kind of song for Code Orange. The guitars are rooted in open chords and single notes, and there are a lot of musical embellishments, including strings, background effects and keyboard samples. It’s almost a melancholy pop song. 

Meyers: “I was feeling a lot of tension and pressure around the time we did that. The guys knew I was upset, and they encouraged me to use that frustration instead of crawling under a rock and moping. Sometimes it’s hard to sit down and write when you’re upset. But I took their advice and sat down and did what I consider to be one of my favorite songs. It represents a moment and is very pure.”

Landolina: “I knew it was going to be great, but the first time I heard it, I was not so sure it belonged on the album. I listened to the demo and thought, ‘Wow, this is really good, but is this a Code Orange song?’ In retrospect, I’m really glad we used it. We added it to the set at some of our shows and it feels really great when we play it.”

Reba, what were you upset about when you wrote Mirror? Were you frustrated that the album was taking so long or wasn’t progressing the way you wanted it to? 

Meyers: “No, no. It was really personal shit. Honestly, I get upset a lot. I’m less upset now, and I think creating the album helped me figure out some things about myself that I needed to figure out, which is the whole point. I’m not going to go into the details, but when you’re in that position, you try to use those feelings to your advantage to figure out what is going on inside. 

“I’ve never been that verbal of a person. I’m not great at talking about my feelings. I’ve been that way since I was a kid, so it’s been helpful to have an outlet to create and deal with my shit. And then when I look back at it, I can say, ‘Oh, I see what I was going through.’”

What was the greatest musical obstacle you faced while working on The Above?

Landolina: “I have a different challenge than Reba. By choice, I put myself in a box. I want to be the riff guy, and that’s a big role to take on. When you sit and write riffs all day long, and you’ve got the same five frets you’re working with – because nothing’s that heavy once you go past the fifth fret – you’ve got the same little tricks you can do with pinch harmonics. 

“So you’re sitting there all day with your back against the wall, and then eight hours later you come out and realize you have absolutely nothing. Or, by accident, you wrote the exact same thing you wrote the day before.”

You recorded the album with Steve Albini. Was that a positive experience? 

Meyers: “It was great, but he’s not a typical producer. He tries to be invisible, and I think we needed someone who would let us do our thing and encourage us to play in the room together at the same time and just help us with the sound.” 

He did that, and it brought out the best in us. 

Landolina: “He was so extremely not a voice in the room. It was almost funny. He has no opinion. Once we were there long enough, we established a bit of a rapport where we could joke around with him. One time, one of us asked him, ‘What do you think of that song, Steve?’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you when it’s out, ’cause I don’t know.’ 

“And he was being serious. You never see him smiling or nodding his head when he’s recording something. He’s like a human computer. He has all the facts for you. And that’s all he does. And that’s exactly what we needed.”

It makes sense for a band like you to record everything together as if you’re onstage. In the past, did you take a more traditional approach in the studio?

Landolina: “It was always us tracking in the control room with a guitar, and the amp was a mile away. This time, we were all together like we are onstage, and we didn’t worry about everything being totally perfect. There’s a section at the end of The Above, where Reba and I play a harmonized lead together on our wah pedals. When we were tracking it, the volume made my notes feed back. 

“We did a bunch of takes, and I remember being bothered by it. Now when I hear it on the record, it sounds real to me. And it sounds live in a great way. If we had recorded that during the Underneath era, we would have made it perfect-sounding, which wouldn’t have been as good. There’s stuff like that all over the record.”

Meyers: “That real and natural thing is the message of the record. I look at The Above as a true expression of this band, and I think, ‘Man, this is the way we should have been working all along.’ There’s no reason for a band like us to be isolated in a control room. 

“We’re not fucking pop musicians. If it sounds good and it’s real, who cares if there are mistakes in the songs? If someone listening to it can’t tell that something is not what it was originally supposed to be, and it sounds cool and adds to the feel of the record, is it really a mistake?” 

• The Above is out now via Blue Grape Music.