We are pleased to report that Liam now feels able to return to rehearsals and we will be back in Unit One on Sunday to resume regular rehearsal sessions. He has been suffering from a trapped sciatic nerve and subsequent muscle-related issues in his back. He had recorded, and played the last two gigs in serious pain, and had requested some time off to recover. We’ll be working on our set for the Brewhouse show this weekend.
Since the release of our album back in September, we have been keeping a close eye on where our album is being streamed. We still don’t have all the data from all the stored but so far the results are:
Total Streams: 42,067
Total Sales (digital and physical): 203
YouTube continues to be the place where the album is most streamed, with Spotify in second, but some distance behind. Free streams on Bandcamp are just over 3k now, converting into 82 purchases.
The growing trend still shows the audience moving away from physical media and paid-for downloads and towards streaming services which is in line with industry reports on music sales. However, to have had over 42k streams since the album release so far is an impressive number for a band our size and we can only hope this continues going forward.
Our new album has broken ten thousand plays over at NWOTHM Full Albums! The new album has easily been our most successful for streaming on release as not only has NWOTHM Full albums been a success but all three single releases generated thousands of plays before the release of the album, with the single A Slave to The Grind being played over 10,099 times alone!
For those who prefer CD’s, we’re continuing to honour the pre-order prices until the finished product is shipped. You can order from here.
We will be returning to Ipswich in May alongside Heathen Kings and Uridium at The Smokehouse next month on May 13th. The band has played alongside Uridium before at the B2, Norwich however this is the first time they will be playing alongside Heathen Kings, although they have gigged with Andy Clarke and Alex Body as Habu, and Andy also formerly fronted the band Atorc. The Smokehouse is a popular venue amongst the Ipswich scene and we are looking forward to playing there again next month. Tickets will only be available on the door. More information here.
Kaine will be returning to rehearsals this weekend at Unit One. The focus will be the Patreon EP (21′) and a soon to be announced show in February. The band took a break over the festive period to recharge ahead of the new album release and the new year. A number of shows have been planned for 2022, Covid restrictions allowing, which will also be announced soon.
Kaine’s 4th album Reforge The Steel has broken 19k plays on NWOTHM Full Albums recently/ NWOTHM Full Albums is a YouTube channel that uploads all albums in the genre and has over 100k subscribers.
If you are yet to check out the album on the channel you can do so here. Please subscribe to the channel, like the video and include a comment to help the album perform better within the algorithm.
You can order the new version of the album on a collections edition CD here. It includes a light remix, additional backing vocals and a number of bonus tracks not available on the original album. The CD is enclosed in a Super Jewel Case and includes a full colour booklet.
We’ve recently experienced a spike in people being able to see and interact with our posts across social media so we thought it would be a good time to remind people about our new album Reforge The Steel and where you can by the CD and listen to the new album.
Bandcamp [CD and Digital Download]
Kaine will release their new album Reforge The Steel this Friday via Bandcamp. The album art has been enhanced (again done by Kaine’s long serving artist Silencer 8) and updated for the release (above).
The band began recording in November 2018 (just 9 months after the release of A Crisis of Faith) and recording was concluded in June of this year. The album was finally mixed and mastered last month and is now ready for full release. Reforge The Steel was again produced by Carl B of Pointy Halo Productions alongside Sheldon Jolly, the same team who worked on A Crisis of Faith.
The bulk of the material was written between April and October of last year with many songs being staples of the bands current sets, two live versions of the album tracks will soon be available, the first being Kaine X Live 2019 (already available to purchase, just awaiting mastering) and Reforge The Steel live which will be recorded next month at the B2 Norwich (tickets available from here).
An additional live EP of the songs will be made exclusively available to bandcamp members next week. Members will also get 10% off the CD and additional merch for the album – to join as a member click here.
It’s the first release to feature the line-up of Rage Sadler (guitars and vocals), Liam Etheridge (drums), Toby Woods (lead guitar) and Isaac Healy (bass).
Yesterday I wrote about how the album was promoted and how it performed in terms of sales. Today I thought I’d take a look back on the background of the album and how it was written.
The album has its origins in August 2015 when a year after The Waystone, Dan Mailer (bass and vocals) decided to move on from the band and we recruited Drop Dead Fred bassist Stevo Ellis to join the band. At this point in time the band was still a five piece and we had been writing music for a follow up album to the Waystone, we released one of tracks as a single as a taster for the new record which was Justice, Injustice however when Dan left the band this was all scrapped. We remained as a five piece until the end of 2015 and in that period, we had brought Voice in Hell into the live set, as well as started to write songs such as Afterlife, Fall of Jericho and A Night Meets Death. I had written Voice in Hell, Chris had written Afterlife and Fall of Jericho and A Night Meets Death were Stevo’s work. We had taken most of January off to begin writing the next album in full when Anthony decided to leave the band also for personal reasons.
Going into 2016 we decided to remain as a four piece and to work solely on new material, which is what we did for the next year and a bit. We put hours into rehearse and refine every little detail of everything we wrote because we knew how important this release would be for us, being our third album and it being a brand-new line-up. Much of the rehearsals were done at Pioneer Music in Colchester, with some also work being done at Unit One.
We demoed the songs, would practice the songs, play them live, alter and so on until we were happy. Saxon brought the song Heaven’s Abandonment to the table, while Stevo added to it with the intro, Chris wrote Afterlife and The Mind is Willing, which saw him perform lead vocals for both for the first time. Stevo wrote A Night Meets Death with Saxons input, Fall of Jericho and of course “Stephens Song” which was a n old Drop Dead Fred song which Stevo and Chris had done in that band together before being ejected from that band, which we turned into Frailty of the Blade. My contributions were Voice in Hell, Crisis of Faith, Alone, Behind the Preacher’s Eyes. I wrote all the lyrics bar those for Afterlife and The Mind is Willing, however Stevo helped me with some of the melodies for A Night Meets Death. Of course, we all had a degree of input on all of the material written but the original ideas came from essentially one of us having the bulk of an idea and taking it to the band and working it from there.
The ambition really was to write the best album we could and try and push it to the moon and back once it was released, and try and improve upon what had happened in the past, we gave ourselves the time to write and flesh ideas out whereas on The Waystone we were pressured by a label to do things much quicker than we would have liked.
Rolling into 2017 we were ready to record the album, having already played all of it live as heard on our A Crisis of Faith Live album, which was recorded before the album was even released. In terms of finding somewhere to record, Stevo had performed bass on the Twisted Illusion album Insight to a Mind with a Million Faces album and had recorded at Pointy Halo with Carl Brewer based out of Red Wall Studios in Greater Manchester and suggested we use him. We listened to his work and agreed that he would be ideal for the new release, in order to give us a much more modern sound to fit the new band as well as move away from being stuck in that old school bracket production wise, as well as musically speaking we wanted to move away from more of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal influenced stuff and stamp our own sound on the album as much as we could while keeping true to our music roots and I think we did deliver that, and given much of the NWOTM online scene loathed the album, the evidence was clear we had achieved that distance.
We recorded over the course of several months in 2017 after demoing the album in full, we did release the demos as a special one-off Ghost Edition which sold out in under an hour. Once in the studio and after the bulk of the recording had been done we spent a lot of time mixing it with Carl and Sheldon, adding in orchestral elements, making a lot of effort to ensure the vocals were strong, that the instruments sounded to as we wanted which is why we didn’t release the album until February of 2018, because we really spent the time on it. Chris in particular took a lead role in all of this, putting those elements together as well as the orchestrations, hidden tracks and even the track listing.
Ultimately the release was a team effort and I really hope this shows throughout the album.