Bound Unveil ‘Making Of’ Video For Their Elevating New Post-Rock LP — Watch Here!

The D.C.-area post-rock group Bound are dropping their new full-length album Haunts on October 1 via Jetsam-Flotsam and Diehard Skeleton Records. Calling the group “post-rock” might obscure the poignant breadth of sound packed into the band’s music — “cinematic” is one of the tags on Bandcamp for their latest album, and that descriptor seems truly on point. The music is a very grounded form of sonic cinema; it moves between extremes with ease, as if truly capturing a journey through some of life’s most paradigm-shifting travails.

Get a first look below at a behind-the-scenes video that’s been put together chronicling the creation process for Haunts.

Bound includes Bryan Buchanan on guitars and vocals, Trish Harris on synths and vocals, Kotu Bajaj on bass, and Dan Richardson on drums and electronics. Buchanan also contributed field recordings and auxiliary percussion alongside harmonica and banjo performances. Harris, meanwhile, contributes a performance from what appears to be her own great-grandfather’s piano on track one, “The Bellows.” It doesn’t take long to realize the steeply beautiful cinematic breadth of the band’s creation.

“The Bellows” is available to listen to now as a single. For most of its runtime, the song feels inescapably propulsive, but the energy doesn’t feel oppressive. Rather, the rhythms feel almost elevating, as if they’re musically encapsulating a kind of desperate reach towards the heavens amidst some kind of earth-level turmoil that the person in the song’s central perspective wants to — and needs to — escape. Within “The Bellows,” there’s not an overwhelming sense that the metaphorical journey reaches the speaker’s attempted destination — it is the album’s first song, after all — but there’s still the beginning of an outline of some kind of catharsis via the lilted rhythms.

“This video is really just an in-studio sort of thing,” Buchanan explains, discussing the “Making Of” production. “What you don’t see is everything that happened before and after. Losing loved ones, a grueling writing process, major production snags, putting too many eggs in flimsy baskets, COVID wreaking havoc, and on and on. Under our original plan, the record would have come out a year ago. It’s just been one thing after another in trying to get it over the finish line, for what seems like forever. But we just stayed the course. We’re beyond excited that it’s almost here now – and that we’re able to release it on October 1st, the start of the haunting season and a very special time for all of us, personally.”

Besides the group members, the video also features recording engineer Kris Hilbert, who owns and operates the Greensboro, North Carolina-based studio Legitimate Business. (Bound has recorded both of their albums with Hilbert.)

In the video, Hilbert characterizes the band’s sound as fundamentally quite complex — case in point: at one point, he shows off around two dozen pedals in the active workstation. The video also features Will Benoit, who mixed the record at his Connecticut-based studio, The Radar Studio.

Featured image via Farrah Skeiky.

Pre-order Haunts at this link. Scroll down for more comments from the folks behind the record about what you see in the video and hear on Haunts.

Check out the “making of” video from Bound for Haunts below!

The Guiding Ethos of Haunts

Discussing the guiding ethos of Haunts, Buchanan explains: “The record is about place – emotionally significant places where formative events happened – and the pull that those places still exert over us. The music is designed to place the listener in each of those contexts. And the album is presented as a series of vignettes in an unbroken, circular composition. The lyrics come from deeply personal experiences in very specific places, mostly family-related, but are hopefully expressed in a way that doesn’t preclude others from seeing their own stories in them. The lyrics call forward and call backward throughout the album.

Importantly, the songs are also peppered with sounds made from actual objects from each actual place – either gathered and brought to the studio or recorded on-location. Some are obvious musical elements, some are sound effects, and some are just tucked away somewhere in the mix such that you’d have to know what you’re listening for – just so we know they’re there.”

Capturing the Sounds of Haunts

Hilbert and Benoit both worked diligently on the production process for Haunts, and the Bound folks have made sure to give them credit, and the same goes for Brad Boatright at Audiosiege, who mastered the record. Hilbert’s production credits include work for The Body and Between the Buried and Me; Benoit, meanwhile, has worked on records from artists including Caspian and Ellie Goulding.

“Recording the new Bound record was quite an intensive process,” Hilbert shares. “Between the complex technical characteristics of the main instruments to making sure we captured all of the nuanced extra sounds, there were always major considerations and balances to strike. We spent long hours for days on end putting all the pieces together to make sure the soul of the songs was coming across. Bryan has an excellent roadmap of the sounds in his head.”

Meanwhile, Benoit observes the following: “Among the challenges of mixing a band that has a big vision like this is finding space for everything and everyone. For example, it can be easy to focus on the songwriter’s perspective to the detriment of the overall picture of an album. So in this case, when you have a lot of excellent players and parts to showcase, it becomes a balancing act of achieving the detail, lushness and density, while still maintaining the rhythmic elements that underpin and propel the music forward in such a dynamic and interesting way.”