Gothik Serpent - Smash the State | Official Music Video

After six years of exploring new sounds and fine tuning my production capabilities with covers of my favorite songs, it was finally time to put these newfound skills to use in the creation of original material. Smash the State is the first Gothik Serpent song since 2018's Usurper, and is the first of seven songs that will form a fourth original album, Antagonist.

This tune began with a drumbeat that Yuichi came up with when I asked him to send me some ideas to write new music to. Unlike my previous material, which was meticulously composed on Guitar Pro first before recording, I wrote Smash the State by jamming along to a loop of Yuichi's drumbeat with the bass, recording the best ideas, then jamming along to bass and drums with the guitar and recording the best ideas. With a foundation of drums, bass and guitars, I then assembled the various parts into the song and layered on synths and vocals. As a result of this method, the song has simpler instrumental parts that gave me more room to experiment with the various synth and guitar tones I've cooked up over the past four years doing covers. Worth mentioning is that, in a first for me, there is no presence of 4/4 time anywhere in the song. After decades of listening to prog, my songwriting is at a point now where I can conceptualize parts in odd meter without realizing it.

Lyrically, the song and upcoming album are greatly influenced by recent events around the world, including my country Singapore, that stirred up memories of the worst elements of the 20th century that I thought we had gotten past in the age of information. It's a story of how, even with modern innovations like social media, smartphones and artificial intelligence that have profoundly enlightened society, the old ways of censorship, tyranny and violent revolution will never fade as people find ways to use newer and newer technology to control and hurt each other, just as they have for all of human history.

Check out original Gothik Serpent music: https://gothikserpent.bandcamp.com/

Kerwin Tsang – Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Synths, Mixing, Video
Yuichi Ikeda – Drums
Olivia Jean Kong – Vocals

Written by Kerwin Tsang and Yuichi Ikeda
Mastered by Tau Bowyer