Editor’s Note: For a related article, see the One Track Mind feature from Pulp.
Kat Steih & The Ferals confront evil forces and conquer the dark side on Feral Geometry.
The Ann Arbor, Michigan, band sings about courage and resistance while exploring different life struggles on its new art-rock EP.
“To me, the songs are about forces in life that can hijack our brains: despair, denial, addiction, and compulsion,” wrote Kat Steih, the band’s vocalist and songwriter, in an email interview.
“What is interesting and new in this record is that the singer in each song is a voice outside of the hijacking force—a voice that is offering a bigger perspective.”
Steih shares that perspective through confident vocals and evocative lyrics across Feral Geometry’s four tracks, which are backed by spirited instrumentation from bandmates Alex Anest (guitar), Bob Zammit (drums), and Marlo Williams (bass).
“The real creative process of this EP was the long period of The Ferals living with these songs, even though the writing took place across a whole decade,” wrote Steih, who’s releasing Feral Geometry on November 5.
“We’ve been playing them in our concerts since right after our first EP came out, so for three years. Arrangements got tighter, more detailed, and the stories of the songs started blending into a new bigger outline.”
As the band crafted the songs for Feral Geometry, they also explored a variety of genres, ranging from pop punk and doom metal to experimental rock and punk rock.
“So even though some of these songs are more than 10 years old, the record itself feels very current to me,” Steih wrote. “The songs had to travel through all these different versions of me, different collaborators, and finally this particular band before they could become Feral Geometry.”
To learn more, I recently did an email interview with Steih and Zammit ahead of a November 5 EP release show at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti.
