An Interview With DIVULGENT!

These guys came out of nowhere, and with a blow! If you haven’t heard of them yet, you really need to check these guys out. Divulgent is a new band in the scene, who published their page and two songs anonymously and have recently revealed themselves. We got a chance to have an interview with them, and talk more about their music and plans. Read up if you’d like to get to know these guys better!

  1. Hey guys! How are you doing? Thanks for talking to me today. It’s always exciting having a new band on board! Let’s get straight to the questions that everyone is waiting for! So, how did DIVULGENT start and how did its current members find each other?

Hello Maya, thank you for contacting us! We’re really excited to have finally surfaced in the scene as well.
It all began when Adel was playing with another band and was searching for a guitarist and drummer for that band. He contacted Ziad and Hassan, but at the time they both didn’t want to “join” a band. Months passed before Adel was free again and contacted both Ziad and Hassan and decided to start something fresh from scratch. Peter and a bassist were contacted after, and we decided to sit down and discuss what kind of project we would each like to start. Our original bassist was always busy with university and work, so we decided to keep his spot empty until we find the perfect person. That is when Ziad contacted Danton, his childhood friend and band-mate, and he showed a huge interest in the material we were already working on and decided to contribute to the project and fill our missing spot.

  1. Was there a common goal before or after you guys got together?

Well, it wasn’t easy to draw a common “goal” at first. Finding such musicians was something and getting these somehow strangers to get to know each other more and sit in one room and work on music and set common goals was another thing. But it wasn’t too long until we started seeing what everyone liked and disliked and took it from there. And since day one there was always this goal to do something that has never been done in Lebanon and do it in our own way. I mean, like every band we wanted to do something big and unique, and we had to work step by step until we could all reach the same vision of where we want this band to go and how to do it. And that was always our priority, to start with something simple and produce something unique out of it.

  1. What were you doing before DIVULGENT and how did your musical careers/differences affect you as a band?

Before Divulgent each of us had a project going, they’re all still active with their bands except for Adel. Ziad and Danton play with Madjera, Hassan with Blaakyum, and Adel used to play with Phenomy then DeathTone for a short while. Peter was the only band-free musician until he recently joined Eden as a session guitarist, but he was and still is doing his own thing, which is covering songs online. Besides these mentioned bands, each member had several bands before and gained a lot of different experiences and that’s maybe one of the reasons we were able to work together on something new, with a fusion of all our past experiences.

Interview With DIVULGENT

  1. How did you come up with the name DIVULGENT and what does it mean? 

Well we spent a lot of time looking for a name we could relate to with our ideas, and most importantly we wanted a unique name. Every name we thought of was either taken or found in different ways, since there are thousands of bands out there, until Adel said why not find something that means “digging for secrets and sharing them”. And there it was when the band took some time to come up with Divulgent. It’s not an actual word, we took it from the word “divulge” which means “to reveal a secret”. So Divulgence was an option until we ended up with Divulgent that for us meant “the one to reveal a secret” and it was the perfect name for us.

  1. That’s cool! So does that mean there is any specific concept to your band, whether lyrically or musically, and does it relate directly to your name?

Let’s break this into two parts since the answer is both yes and no. It’s a “yes” to the lyrical side where we want to send messages to people about many things that are not topics that we hear about a lot in music, and really are things that can make a huge difference in everyone’s lives and that’s our main direction…musically it’s a “no” since every song is supposed to have its own identity through the theme given. And usually the themes are discussed before actually writing so that when the music starts being formed you can actually have an idea about the song’s theme and direction. And both ways what we write and discuss is always about the message that should be delivered so here’s a yes to the relationship between our concept and the name.

  1. How would you describe your music and what do you think influences your musical style?

Our music is a variety of styles, but we can simply describe it as straight-forward. I mean we have the abilities to go very technical, complex and progressive the whole time but why not just be simpler and straight to the point? It doesn’t always matter how fast you can play or how theoretical you can be in writing music as long as you can express it clearly. Yes, we do experiment mainly with the music patterns and their flow, but not really with sounds as some would expect from the term “experimental”. We tend to always keep different grooves flowing through the song from beginning to end, sometimes we tend to break it but it always comes back to hit you again. Maybe that’s due to the very different influences that we have from bands like The Faceless, Meshuggah, Lamb of God, Slipknot, Necrophagist to the likes of Dream Theater, Animals As Leaders, Metallica, Linkin Park and many others. You see, we have many influences and that’s the main reason we can write with no limits and not be restricted with our music as long as it’s groovy, catchy and represents the theme. We can go from djent to groove metal to death metal to nu-metal in a very simple way because we have all these influences and a great chemistry and understanding between us.

Interview With DIVULGENT

  1. What are other non-musical things that inspire you when you are writing?

Everything is inspiring for us. History, technology, politics, sociology, environment, and anything in our daily lives is a place of inspiration. But choosing the best ideas for our music usually comes from what is going wrong with the world around us and the messages that should be delivered. And as previously said, not the mainstream issues that have been talked about millions of times. That’s how we choose the topics… We don’t look much at something, instead we look deep into it to find even more issues lying behind this huge curtain we’re not supposed to look beyond.

  1. Did you start out by writing songs to a specific style and stuck with it, or did you have to experiment to reach your current sound?

Honestly at first we thought we would be playing a certain style which was mostly Djent but there was always something missing that we needed to add on to feel a certain satisfaction. I mean the band is not 1 composer and 1 brain deciding what to do next. Everything we do, we decide on collectively because we are very aware that with all the different influences and experiences we have, something better can be done somewhere and any of the 5 people in this band have the same 20% chance of making something better in each song and taking it to a different place. Thus, we had to experiment a lot and will keep experimenting to find the best components for each song we want to write.

  1. That’s very interesting to hear! So how do you compose your songs and do you usually have a concept behind each one prior to writing it or does that part come after?

Writing ideas is always there whether there is a theme or not. I mean we’re musicians and always have something to write, and if we want to throw an album now we absolutely can because we have tons of material but that’s not our purpose. When it comes to executing a song it’s mostly a theme translated into a music piece and then developed. Unless we come up with a piece that translates to specific topic that is important to talk about as our first song was written, so we discuss this theme and develop the piece into a song while we always spend time researching about each theme to have a better understanding of the topic especially when it’s time to write the lyrics. We do care a lot about the concept of each song so we would never just throw random pieces together just to finish a song without a complete understanding of how to make this song itself talk about the theme with every single instrument.

(Continue Interview in Next Page)

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