Void Of Vision Take Us Track-By-Track On Their New Album

Naarm/Melbourne heavy heroes Void Of Vision are about to usher in a new era with the arrival of their fourth studio album, What I’ll Leave Behind, a harrowing reflection of trauma, existential crises and recovery inspired by frontman Jack Bergin’s battle with a life-altering health issue.

Ahead of VOV’s LP release on Friday, 20th September, a headline show in honour of recent cut ‘Blood For Blood’ at Melbourne’s Bergy Bandroom this Sunday (15th) and a support slot warming up arenas for the mighty Parkway Drive later this month, Bergin sat down with Music Feeds to give us an exclusive track-by-track of What I’ll Leave Behind. Get the full lowdown below.

Void of Vision – ‘Blood For Blood’

1. ‘Oblivion‘

‘Oblivion’ is about the moment when everything falls apart. I think in order to create change, a lot of people do need that kind of moment to strengthen them. And ‘Oblivion’, for me, is about the first experience with the brain bleed, everything coming apart and me kind of lying in these machines for an entire day just with nothing but my thoughts and thinking, “okay, if this was to end right now, my life – is this how I’d be happy to send it off? Would I be proud of what I’ve done? Would I be proud of what I’m doing?”. It just all unfolds in that moment and I’ve never experienced that perspective before. ‘Oblivion’ is a frame of mind that kind of makes me realise, “is this really where I want to be in my life?”. And if not, then why the fuck am I not making a change for it? I also think that’s the catalyst for the rest of the album and I can’t think of a better way to open it up than just with the first provoking thought to create that conversation. And to make sure that I create difficult conversations within my own life, make those changes that I was probably really overdue to be making. It was just a nice way to kick off the album. There’s definitely a lot of existentialism tied up in it, but it’s ultimately the catalyst for the rest of the album.

2. ‘Blood For Blood‘

What provoked this song was just the state of the music industry for myself and my peers at the time when we were writing it. We were all seeing some of our close friends commit suicide, and there was a lot of stigma around mental health and having those difficult conversations. This all was leading to a lot of burnout in general, and leading to those darker moments. I knew deep down in a sense our lifestyle really hasn’t encouraged a healthy environment for mental health. And a lot of us take on these choices at 18 years old or younger to kind of jump into this world when we are just not mentally developed at all. We’re still fucking kids! And you jump into this world where you’re served alcohol and drugs on a silver platter. It’s not something you really think about in context until you’re much older or until it’s too late. And in a sense it’s just really infuriating, we put so much into the band, and it felt like a lot of the time some people feel like it’s not enough. I think it’s really depressing to be in this environment where you just feel like you’re not enough because so many people do look up to you. But the sad reality is, I don’t think that positive feedback is expressed enough until someone is gone. And that’s the darkest part of it all, and one that I feel like people really just don’t fucking think about it. It is a harsh reality and I know people don’t want to admit it, but a lot of legacies wouldn’t have been created unfortunately if it weren’t for them passing. It’s just so fucking sad. With this song, I was just mad at the community in a sense deep down. And it’s definitely an irrational track in terms of blowing things out of proportion, but I think a lot of these thoughts relating to that are often, for myself, the most honest. It’s the maddest I get on this record with any circumstance that’s surrounding me. And I just didn’t want to think of anyone that I’m close with right now being in that position. I know we have the support from Support Act and Beyond Blue always available, but I think deep down, our friends really just don’t step up to the plate until it’s there. And it’s a sad reality that we all have to face. At the end of the day, we’re all only human, it’s just how our brain works. Sometimes it’s a busy fucking world, and unfortunately that’s just how it is. I’m definitely guilty of it myself in a sense at times, but I do think it is just an unfortunate sort of thing that ties up with being a musician. And it makes me mad that sort of thing exists.

3. ‘Supernova‘

‘Supernova’ is in the same vein as ‘Oblivion’, but more so in the sense of just realising when it’s the right time to call something. Nothing lasts forever in life and we are all just passing by. A lot of people you see passing by are doing the same thing forever. And that’s all well and good, but I think everything does come to an end, and I think it’s important sometimes to realise that something has ended. You see a lot of people living in these unhealthy situations, still doing something that they should have probably wrapped up a lot earlier, and they’re holding onto something that should have been let go of a long time ago. We all know that feeling, but it’s hard to recognize it without having those difficult conversations with yourself that I mentioned earlier. ‘Supernova’ is about calling it at the right time to encourage the next step to be taken, to have your return to just start fresh, start anew onto bigger and better things. Or even just to develop yourself. And whether it be a band or a relationship or a job – it is just finding that time to be honest with yourself and with who you are with, and just making that decision to move on to the next thing. I feel like it’s not an easy conversation to have with yourself, and that’s what I wanted to provoke with ‘Supernova’. The thought that it needs to happen sometimes and you need to make that happen yourself.

4. ‘Neurotic‘

I think we’re all a little neurotic, and this song funnily enough is just about nothing at all to be completely honest. One for the Seinfeld fans, the whole idea that they make a TV show about nothing…if anything, ‘Neurotic’ embodies Seinfeld in a sense because you think about how neurotic all of those characters are. I feel like we all can relate to that to a certain extent sometimes! And this is truly a song about nothing – and that is all it will ever be. It’s literally just little neurotic mantras being beaten out in there. I think it’s a healthy thing sometimes to just scream at a fucking wall and just be able to say these things at the top of your lungs. That’s actually what the main hook is, “I’m just like you”. And I think we are all the same in that vein where we are all a little bit neurotic and we just need that little anthem sometimes. It doesn’t need to be about anything. It just needs to be us yelling about fucking nothing, that’s sometimes all you need to do in life.

5. ‘Gamma Knife‘

‘Gamma Knife’ basically reflects the moment when I had that first seizure, back when I had no idea what my health issues were. I had no idea what was going on, I just woke up in the back of an ambulance. And that whole night, all I’ve heard since was other people telling me what happened. For the first time in my life it was very odd to not have…I mean, when you have a night where you’ve been so drunk that you can’t remember what happened, you still have at least something in your mind, you have a feeling or a vague memory of parts of it. But for the first time in my life, I had zero clue of where I was or what was happening. I think it’s familiarity that makes people feel more comfortable, and I was trying to kind of piece together everything in my head. And I feel like I don’t have that experience in the back of my mind, but I can sort of at least feel comfort in putting this song together speaking to what could have happened in that moment. What this chorus reflects is how it would make everyone else feel in that moment after hearing what everyone else said had happened. And at the time that the gamma knife surgery was mentioned, I had no fucking idea what it was, and there was this whole fear around: what the fuck is this contraption that’s going to be attached on my head and all this radiotherapy that’s going to be done? It’s a really scary thing to hear for the first time and knowing all of that was ahead of me. The album cover is also what I guess I imagined the gamma knife contraption looked like when I first heard about it. This nightmarish kind of Saw trap going on my fucking head. I just wanted to leave something for myself to comfort myself, and this song was ultimately combining that morning after the seizure and the idea of hearing all of that for the first time when I woke up.

6. ‘Beautiful Things‘

‘Beautiful Things’ very much embraces the whole concept behind What I’ll Leave Behind as a whole. ‘Beautiful Things’ captures: “when I’m gone, what is going to be there?”. That’s the whole ethos behind this album: “what if this is it?”. You want to leave your mark and, yeah, I might die, but there’s still a part of my soul here. I just wanted to really bring it down to earth in this song where it’s almost spoken word in a sense. I think originally there was going to be some really fucked up MRI or some noises of the hospital room reflecting what I’m going through in the background. But our producer Sam [Bassal] was like, “this is the thing that you want to leave behind, just picture this being played at your funeral” – which is a crazy way to think about it! When I die, what’s the last thing I want people to hear? And so, we ended it with a very peaceful kind of note and it turned into a very beautiful sounding track, which is where the name also stemmed from. We just literally left the mic on and you can hear the birds outside, you can hear everything just in the background. It’s very serene and just a settled, “at peace” kind of song. Originally it was going to be the album closer, but we thought it was a nice little breather in the middle of such a topical album. It definitely serves its purpose there.

7. ‘Empty‘

‘Empty’ was one of the first songs written for the album, and it definitely reflects where I was at that time. We were mid-tour, it was our first Australian tour back after I had all the brain issues – and I was just a fish out of water, I had no idea what to expect and no idea what was going on half the time. We were playing the biggest shows we’d ever played. We’re selling out venues for the first time, and I’m up there under this guise where I’m not talking and we’re doing a play on production for the first time. It was a very interesting experience to be a part of that and to not really be present, not being there in the moment to understand what’s going on. And ‘Empty’…that’s how I felt. It was very bizarre. This is the first time too where I was really grappling with my sense of body dysmorphia. After all the alopecia stuff happened, I really didn’t click into it right away. That’s when I started playing with the makeup ideas and all these stage personas and stuff like, “fuck, I am really not comfortable with what I look like”. So I had to hide it behind all of this, and it was a really tricky thing to come to terms with in my head. Since then I’ve become a lot more comfortable with it. But I just felt like absolute dog shit on that tour and it was hard to express my feelings. So the first words that came out in the studio was the chorus for ‘Empty’, we just wrote it down and ran with that and wrote the song around it. It’s as honest as it gets for this record, that was just a very, very weird dark time where I didn’t feel fucking great at all. But it was a very important part of this record in terms of the direction we took and the vocal stylings. I was also really happy to have it as a leading single because it represented the album so perfectly.

8. ‘Midnight Sweat‘

‘Midnight Sweat’ is another kind of “from the outside in” kind of track. Basically, it’s referring to every night after I had those first seizures. They were nocturnal seizures and it would only happen while I was asleep. I would be waking up, I had no say over anything, I couldn’t have anyone come in and prevent it – it would just be when I was asleep and it’s like all these horror movies we grew up with, the whole fear of sleeping again because there is this threatening aura, like A Nightmare on Elm Street type beat. It’s a very interesting concept to dodge insomnia and then nocturnal seizures because one thing leads to another. And it was a very, very rough time to just be terrified to go to sleep. I would then wonder if I had been alone that first night, which by chance I wasn’t. But I would’ve just woken up and who knows what would’ve happened if there was no one there to call the ambulance. It’s a very scary thought. I was really, really thinking about how this song kind of affected everyone that I was with at the time that followed too. Obviously I had to go on tour and had to be around people all the time and you obviously have to fucking sleep. So it was just a huge combination of those fears. And then you’re combining it all with this seizure medication and it’s just a fucking slog. But it’s nice that that era has passed now.

9. ‘Decades‘

For ‘Decades’, lyrically it was probably the only song that I had in the bank written already for this record. It was written as we hit ten years as a band, and I think the question remains like, “wow, we’ve hit 10 years. Is there going to be another ten years?”. And the weird realisation that there’s probably not kind of arises as well. It’s an odd concept because as a musician and as an artist, you obviously grapple with the sustainable future idea and you’re trying to make it work and you’re trying to make a living off it. We do understand that it’s not there for us. And that begs the question, “is there much longer in the tank for this?”, and you’re obviously asking yourself a lot of these questions alongside that. I think that’s an important thing to put on a record like What I’ll Leave Behind, because our ethos is: picture this as your last album. If this is it, then you’re putting everything out there. I think this is just the general frustration for bands that have been around for quite some time to face, and it is part of having that difficult conversation perhaps of: is it time to call a stop to this? We’ve been around for so long and we’ve done great things. We’ve done beautiful things. Is this perhaps the time to call it and end on a high? There were a lot of those thought processes going into this record. And I think it’s important to give yourself those conversations, because there could be bigger things and better things on the horizon, but you don’t really understand until you actually call it. And it’s a healthy chance for reflection as well. You realise ten years have passed just like that, it’s just like, “what does the next ten years hold and where is my life going?”. This is another one of those kinds of songs asking those questions to some extent. But it’s mostly just a reflection on this band at ten years. It’s been a slog, but we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a slog. And I’m very appreciative of that.

10. ‘Angel Of Darkness‘

‘Angel’ was obviously released a fair bit prior to this record. It’s been in the tank for a while now, but I think now people can understand it and the purpose that it was released for. The Angel Of Darkness is basically this character that we made up for myself so that I could take a back seat, and so I could disappear off the internet and from real life for a while. It was this little creation that I made that could let me take that back seat and it was kind of driving VOV for a while. We made it the face of everything that was going on around us. I think ‘Angel Of Darkness’ really represents that negative thought in the back of your head that I’ve been talking about this whole time, all the existentialism and the hard conversations. The Angel was a character that I cooked up after all the medical stuff thinking, “how are we going to do this headline tour, how can I take it easy at the same time?”. I was having to come off stage and do blood pressure tests during the fucking set, and I wasn’t talking in between songs. We wanted to artistically make it look cool. And I think nobody batted a fucking eyelid, so it went off without a hitch. But this song was obviously the most experimental thing we’ve ever done in terms of including the poppier elements. And that was another thing, we treated it as if, “fuck – all right, maybe if the health thing went bad and if we were to release one last thing, let’s go out releasing something we’ve never released before!”. So we put out the most grandiose version of ourselves, put it all into a big video and into a big kind of pop arena song. We tried to make it just seem like the biggest version of Void Of Vision that you could possibly imagine. And it was a nice little fun nod to kind of keep going too. I had no idea how I was going to get through those three to four months of touring by just overdoing myself every night. But because of this, I was able to take a back seat and have an excuse, if you will, to kind of do that. It’s probably one of my favourite things that we’ve ever done, just because it felt very Bowie-esque in a sense having that character. It’s all very poetic, and it feels cool we made the most out of a shit situation like that. I think that’s what I’m enjoying the most about this record coming out, people learning about what was going on and realising: “oh my god, that’s really cool and that makes a lot of sense now”. And I felt there couldn’t be a more fitting way to finish the album than with the idea of that character still looming over the head of it all. Just that Angel Of Darkness still existing somewhere.

Void Of Vision Australian Tour Dates

Sunday, 15th September – The Bergy Bandroom, Melbourne, VIC

Supporting Parkway Drive:

Wednesday, 18th September – Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, QLD – NEW SHOW
Friday, 20th September – Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane QLD – SOLD OUT
Saturday, 21st September – Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney NSW
Sunday, 22nd September – John Cain Arena, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
Tuesday, 24th September – John Cain Arena, Melbourne VIC – NEW SHOW
Friday September 27th – AEC Arena, Adelaide SA
Sunday September 29th – HBF Stadium, Perth WA – SOLD OUT

Tickets on sale now via ParkwayDriveRock.com