Driven by chaos and boundless expression, House Of Protection is a haven for anyone who embraces spontaneity.
The latest project from Stephen Harrison and Aric Improta, the two musicians were drawn to sonic extremes long before their shared tenure in Fever 333. Spending long drives discussing their favourite bands, career aspirations, and their shared appreciation for artists unafraid to try something new, years of tour bus chats unknowingly laid the foundation for a new beginning. Tired of pushing against creative barriers, upon their joint departure from their former project they set out to recapture the innocent joy of their earliest musical experiences, forging a project built on the desire to create a safe space for all ideas – no matter how unconventional.
Tearing up the blueprint and thriving in the margins, the duo’s embrace of risks has led them to House Of Protection. Blending hardcore, electronica, and punk in abrasive yet beautiful style, their opening statement comes in the form of experimental debut EP ‘Galore’. A six-song introduction to their vision created alongside close friends Jordan Fish (Bring Me The Horizon) and Nick DePirro (Night Verses), the duo are coming out swinging.
To find out more about the project’s inception and the duo’s future plans, Rock Sound sat down with Stephen and Aric…
ROCK SOUND: You’ve been in other musical projects before, both separately and together, but what sparked the idea to collaborate on something new?
STEPHEN: “We talked about doing a heavy project together when we were in Fever 333, and that was our initial idea. We wanted to do something chaotic, and then when the time came, we got together and talked about our influences and what we wanted this project to feel like. It wasn’t really about what it sounded like, we just wanted to create a vibe.”
ARIC: “Steve and I always talk about the things that we love in music, and a lot of it focuses on the energy of something more than the actual details of it. A lot of the music we were around was starting to get darker. There’s nothing wrong with that, and we love black metal and doom metal, but we wanted to find a balance between ethereal, electronic music from the 90s and the raw energy that we’re used to creating. We are generally energetic people, and we knew that from the five years that we shared the stage.
We knew how we wanted it to feel, but we were trying to avoid so many cliches. When we were playing festivals with all these bands that we love and admire, at times, we’d see a lot of it pulling in the same direction. We just got in a room together and made a beat, which ended up becoming ‘It’s Supposed To Hurt’. Once we had that, we started freestyling, but I didn’t know I was going to sing in this project. We had both never really done vocals before, so we decided to go for it.”
RS: House Of Protection is something completely different from what either of you have done before, especially vocally. What made you decide to take that step at this point in your career?
STEPHEN: “I’ve always been the guitar guy, but I never thought I’d be a guitar player. I’ve played guitar my whole life, but when I joined The Chariot, I was tossed into that role. I had never played on stage prior to that band, but playing guitar became my life. I made it work, but then after Fever 333 I was faced with a decision. Do you wait around for another band to need you, or do you try something else?
For the first time in my life, I had to really bet on myself, and that’s something Aric helped me with a lot. It’s not about perfection, you just have to be authentically yourself, and find your voice. You have to release that comparison to other singers, and with time you feel more comfortable taking that step and betting on yourself. Deciding you want to sing in your mid 30s is a big thing, and I’m doing this new thing whilst other vocalists have been doing this since they were 12 years old. It’s daunting, but it’s fun, and all our favourite singers are the unconventional types.”
ARIC: “We love bands like Smashing Pumpkins, and I didn’t even think about Billy Corgan having a unique voice until I was in my 20s. When you’re a kid hearing ‘Tonight, Tonight’ on the radio, you just like the song. When you’re in the industry, you’re so used to being fed data and album sales figures that you start to get caught up in this world that has nothing to do with art. When you look at visual art, you have the Mona Lisa, and you have Jackson Pollock works. The latter is just splattered paint, but both have such a high value in the art world. There’s this sense of what a ‘good’ singer is, and we’ve been fortunate enough to tour with amazing vocalists, but that doesn’t mean that’s what we should try to do if it’s not natural to us.
I’ll never forget seeing an interview with Les Claypool from Primus. He said he never thought about himself as a singer, he thought about himself as a narrator. He was narrating what the music sounded like. Later, I saw an interview with Chino Moreno from Deftones, saying that Primus were the reason he thought he could sing. When you look at the lineage of these artists that have had such a creative impact, they had to make something new out of their limitations. To me, that’s way more interesting. We’re both very grateful that we’re doing this for the first time together.”
RS: Before you headed into the studio you made a playlist that collated your influences, not necessarily with much of a theme genre-wise, but artists that created a certain feeling…
ARIC: “We made a playlist of huge songs with terrible singers! There were over 50 songs on this playlist, so if they figured it out, we could figure something out. They were all songs that we love, so I don’t say terrible singers in an insulting way, they’re just unconventional vocalists. There was so much range in that list, so it felt like a pretty good guideline. Often, our first attempt would be a little obvious, so we’d have to step back and see what our other options were. When you look at sonic influences that have nothing to do with the genre you’re creating, you land on things that are pleasant surprises. It’s the best feeling, and that’s probably one of the biggest payoffs from the writing process of our first EP. It’s much more fun to discover something you didn’t expect than just to simply pull off something you already knew you could do.”
RS: Coming into this project then, was there a sense of limitlessness?
ARIC: “Our biggest limitation was just what we can do with our voices. When that’s the only limitation, everything we decorate around it has no limit. That’s the anchor, so you build it on that.”
STEPHEN: “Honestly though, I think having some walls is good.”
ARIC: “True, especially with modern technology. Nowadays, it’s easy to accidentally write a techno song, and whilst that might be cool, it’s not us. We spent a lot of time thinking about performing live and how we’re going to play these songs too. Those are the biggest things that we keep in mind when we get a little too wild with the composition.”
RS: There’s a sense of rebirth to this project, a blank slate of sorts. Did you approach it with the mentality of starting over?
STEPHEN: “Absolutely, we’re just stepping into whatever we want this to be. There’s no expectation. Going from Night Verses and The Chariot to Fever 333 was a big genre leap for us, so I reckon people expect House Of Protection to be a wild leap too. I think a lot of people thought it would be a heavy thing though.”
ARIC: “We might still do that, maybe with a different band.”
STEPHEN: “It’s crazy going into something and being like, ‘What do we want?’ This is whatever we want it to be.”
ARIC: “With Steve and I, a lot of the inspiration is visual too. We’ll have a riff, and we’ll be like, ‘This feels like driving at night with your favourite person in the world’. We come to an agreement on what that sound scores, and that informs where the lyrics go. Sometimes we just freestyle, but nine times out of ten, it’s about where a sound belongs in our life. To me, that seems natural, and we’d have these conversations in Fever 333 all the time when we’d listen to a song on a long drive. We’d talk about what it reminded us of and what nostalgia points it hit. Navigating songs in a visual sense leads us in different directions, and we’re focused on how we can decorate whatever scene we’re in.”
RS: As the first few tracks came together, was it a reminder of what the creative process is supposed to be like? That feeling of making music as kids, before you get into the mess of the industry and the expectations of it all…
STEPHEN: “It really does feel like my first band because I’ve never started a band before. The bands that people know me from like Cancer Bats and Fever 333, I just joined. House Of Protection is a band I’ve started with Aric, and that’s special. Sitting and talking about influences and outlining our sound, I had never really done that before. It’s exciting because there is no label yet, there is no manager yet, and we’re just a blank slate.”
ARIC: “Honestly, it’s fucked up, because that’s what it should be. You should be with your friends and just make what sounds good. In several scenarios though, we were put in situations where so many people were involved. It wasn’t about what we liked; it was about a lot of other things. Our favourite bands just seem to be friends in a room, and the chemistry makes sense. They had to forge their way through their differences and find something that translates to the rest of the world, and that’s what makes bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Deftones irreplaceable.
I’ve made music four to five days a week for the last 20 years, and when we wrote ‘It’s Supposed To Hurt’ I had goosebumps. It felt like when I was in seventh grade and first played a riff, but the best part is that your taste as a 30-year-old is much better than your taste as a 12-year-old! I remember coming home from that first writing session feeling ecstatic. After quitting Fever 333, we didn’t know how long it would take to figure out what we were going to sound like, but we got it on day one. That was such a relief and a catalyst for our momentum to continue.”
RS: You worked with Jordan Fish on this EP. After having those discussions about what you wanted this project to be and what you wanted to accomplish, what drew you towards him?
STEPHEN: “Honestly, Jordan is my best friend. I love him so much, and I’ve written with him in the past. I was dancing with the idea of doing solo stuff, and he and I wrote some songs together. I knew how efficient he was, and how good he was at catching a vibe. With him being in a transitional period after Bring Me, it made sense.”
ARIC: “It almost mirrored our experience, as far as the stage in our careers, and this was the first thing he did after knowing that he was moving on. For the EP, we all just met up to see what happened, but we knew that we only wanted to work with our friends. We didn’t want some stranger to help us find our vision. Even though this is a two piece, it feels like a band, and Jordan brought something that we didn’t expect. We had ‘It’s Supposed To Hurt’ and some demos, then the rest of the EP got done in five days. We were like, ‘Damn, okay, this works. Let’s keep doing this’.”
RS: With the fearlessness of this project, and how open and free the music feels, are you hoping that feeling transfers to the crowds when you play these songs live?
STEPHEN: “That’s one of the forefront vibes of this project. We want you to feel like you can mosh, dance, and express yourself however you see fit. You can dress for our shows like you’re going to an EDM fest, or a masquerade. We want this to be colourful, and we want it to be not only whatever we want it to be, but whatever you want it to be. We want everyone to mesh and exist together in this space. We have songs that are mosh-y, we have songs that are dance-y, and we have songs that are just a chill vibe. Anybody can come to our shows and not feel out of place.”
ARIC: “The band’s name came from this idea of having a place where all our creative ideas were saved. In the gap between us playing our last show with Fever 333 and starting this project, I went to Portugal for six days to get married. In that time, I finished Massive Attack’s biography ‘Out Of The Comfort Zone’. They were talking about how when they left their DJ conglomerate and started Massive Attack, they didn’t have a lot of experience. They had to find their voice, and that inspired us.
We want to create this thing where any idea is safe to find its place, and that’s the entire goal of the live show too. We want to jump around and feel like we’re sixteen again listening to our favourite records, but honestly we can do that in our own practice space. If we’re going to bring this to a group of people, we want them to feel that energy too.”
House Of Protection’s debut EP ‘Galore’ is out on September 13.