His latest single, “Scream,” released appropriately on Oct. 31, strays away from Arland’s ethereal, sweeping ballads and veers into metal territory. The song is far more aggressive than his earlier work, with massive guitars chugging beneath Bowers’ dichotomous vocals, both guttural and clean.
At nearly seven minutes long, “Scream” adds another intricate layer to the ongoing storyline Bowers has been crafting since 2022.
The sequencing of a band’s first release — whether that’s a standalone single or the opening track on a debut record — is arguably the most important decision a band will ever make. It’s a critical selling point for a listener. For Arland, that first release was “Islands,” a song that begins and ends everything, narratively speaking. It’s one that Bowers has clearly thought a lot about.
“Islands” exists in a quantum superposition, as he once explained to me, meaning that it can exist in multiple states at once. What that entails musically, this writer doesn’t have the capacity to fully understand. Lyrically, however, Bowers says “Islands” looks forward and enacts change. “Scream,” on the other hand, reflects on everything that came before — that moment leading up to the end of life, just before taking the final step forward.
He says the songs exist in the same relative point in the narrative timeline. Whether that means “Scream” also exists in a quantum superposition is anyone’s guess.
Bowers is a software engineer by trade, but the passion with which he speaks about his catalog’s underlying narrative is more akin to how a cosmonaut would wax about high-grade vacuums. The precision of his musical choices is profound, sometimes unsettling. His compositions feel engineered as much as they’re felt, as if crafted in a lab.
On his mantle at the time of our talk was a whiteboard with a sine wave and accompanying equations, as if to illustrate this point. This, he said, was his way of figuring a workaround for his surge protector. He is an engineer, through and through.
Even within individual songs, movements shift and evolve like a piece of prog or math rock. Bowers relishes the freedom that longer songs allow; they give him room to explore, to experiment, to pack ideas in.
But as the Arland universe expands, he knows not everyone will follow every thread. The interconnectivity isn’t meant to confuse, rather to reward those who listen.
“I try specifically to have an element that can stand alone,” Bowers said. “I want to have that interconnectivity, but I want each song to be its own piece of work that someone can get something out of.”
Asking a musician like Bowers to explain his art feels a bit like asking a magician to reveal their tricks or an author to annotate their metaphors. The mystery is part of the point.
“The idea is that some of that vagueness allows you to kind of come up with your own interpretations and engage with what the actual meaning winds up being,” Bowers said. “It’s something you have to figure out.”
Bowers admits his songs are rooted in reality — some drawn from personal experience, others from broader ideas about humanity. But, true to form, he’ll never say which is which.
Arland’s new single “Scream” was available digitally Oct. 31.
Brandon Berry covers the music and arts scene in Dayton and Southwest Ohio. Reach him at branberry100@gmail.com.
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