When he's not producing killer guitar-related YouTube content – or gracing the TikTok community with hilarious metal-themed comedy shorts with fellow bandmate Johnny Ciardullo – Andrew Baena assumes six-, and indeed seven- and eight-string, duties in Canadian deathcore outfit, Carcosa.
While he boasts a considerably larger social media following than Carcosa – 212,000 YouTube subscribers to the band's 3,400, and even 108,000 Spotify monthly listeners to their 41,000 – Carcosa affords Baena the opportunity to exercise his extreme metal chops, which he demonstrates in this new playthrough, premiered exclusively at Guitar World.
The performance of the track – taken from the band's debut studio album, Anthology, released this year – sees Baena team up with co-guitarist Cooper Lagace to deploy a clutch of impossibly heavy low-register guitar lines and chugging riffs. Check it out above.
Gear-wise, both Baena and Lagace play 8-string guitars – a bright yellow Aristides 080R and a Kiesel DC800, respectively. They each utilize an in-the-box Neural DSP amp setup, with rhythm lines delivered using the company's Fortin Nameless Suite and leads coming by way of Archetype: Gojira.
“Hypnos was the final song that we wrote for our album, Anthology,” Baena says. “It came to us very quickly since we were running out of time and wanted to add in a final full song to our album before sending it off for mixing and mastering.
“We had been unable to write together due to Covid restrictions, so this was the only track that we were actually able to sit together and write, which felt great to do after waiting for so long. Ironically, it ended up being the first song on the album, as well as our favorite.
“It features a pitch-shifted section that goes all the way down to A in the bass range, some epic orchestral additions and a lot of chord shapes that we hadn't previously used in a song. Overall, it's a very fun song to play that features a few sections that were surprisingly difficult once we sat down to practice for upcoming live shows.”
- Carcosa's debut album Anthology is out now independently with digital distribution from Blood Blast Distribution.
