About Ash Inside
By Cassey Rourke – Lead Guitar / Vocals
When we started writing Ash Inside, I thought I was just making another record with my friends. But somewhere in the middle of it, I realized we were digging into something deeper, darker, and a lot more personal than any of us had expected. This wasn’t just about songs—it was about memory erosion, love that turned into static, and staring into that kind of emotional void until you start to see yourself disappear in it.
We didn’t go into the studio with a plan. It was just me, Micah, Kellen, Lyra, and Elias in a cabin in the high desert, miles from the nearest light. We set up our gear in what used to be the living room, and for three weeks the only sounds were amps humming, wind rattling the walls, and whatever we could wrestle out of ourselves.
Micah Alton—our drummer and master of noise textures—was the first to say out loud that this album didn’t want to move fast. He started building these slow, tectonic drum parts that felt like they were dragging you down through the earth. It set the tone for the whole record.
Kellen Price, our bassist and synth/drone engineer, is the one who made the space feel infinite. You’d hear his bass notes hang in the air for a full thirty seconds, like they were breathing on their own, or these sub-bass swells that made your ribs vibrate. He made the songs feel like rooms you could walk into and get lost in.
Lyra Voss and Elias Drake… they’re the ghosts of this record. Their backup vocals are sometimes just whispers you can’t quite catch, layered so deep that you feel them more than you hear them. Lyra’s ambient textures and Elias’s noise FX became the fog between the notes—something unsettling that you can’t quite name.
Thematically, Ash Inside is about emotional erosion. It’s about what happens when the things you thought would hold you together start dissolving. Relationships, memories, even your own identity—they all start to blur at the edges until you can’t remember what you needed from them in the first place.
Some songs were written in one take, almost in a trance. “Forgot What I Needed” started as a spoken word piece I did at two in the morning, just mumbling into a mic about feeling hollow. By sunrise, Micah and Kellen had turned it into this wall of layered guitars and buried screams, like the whole track was being swallowed by static.
Others took days of pulling apart and putting back together. “The Light Won’t Stay” was the last one we finished, and I think it broke us a little—in the best way. It’s slow, almost unbearably so, with clean vocals that barely rise above a whisper and deep drones that feel like a funeral march. That song is about acceptance—the point where you stop fighting the void and just sit with it. It felt like the only way the album could end.
There were moments during recording when we’d stop playing, and none of us would speak for five or ten minutes. Not because we were upset, but because we’d all just been somewhere else entirely. I think that’s the real story behind Ash Inside—it’s five people disappearing into a sound until they come back changed.
We didn’t make this record to be comfortable. We made it to feel real. It’s supposed to haunt you a little, to stick in your head like the afterimage of staring into the sun. When I listen back, I still hear pieces of conversations we had, arguments, laughter, and long silences buried under the layers.
Micah always says that this is our most “uncompromising” work. I think he’s right. There are no concessions here—no radio singles, no easy hooks. Just a slow descent into a world we built together, where beauty and decay are the same thing.
If you make it to the end of Ash Inside, you’ll know exactly where we’ve been. And maybe you’ll feel a little of it too.
—Cassey Rourke
Moab, Utah
Lead Guitar / Vocals, Black Sun Mirror
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