BIG|BRAVE’s albums always feel like headstrong exercises in suspense. Heavy riptides of noise alternate quieter, simmer-down moments, uprooting potent surges of visceral energy that leave heads spinning on how to categorize this band. Post-rock, doom rock, avantgarde-noise, alternative metal; your interpretation of the Montreal-based trio depends entirely on your own musical proclivities. Robin Wattie, Mathieu Ball and Loel Campbell themselves, however, pledge no definitive alliance to any specific ‘rock’ or ‘metal’ genre…. and refreshingly so.

Instead BIG|BRAVE music manifests from a state of oblivion; an autonomous space where a single component – often a tectonic guitar riff or druidic vocal take – is nourished like a living organism, evolving from its larvae-like inception to its final flourishing form. It took three whole albums and a lot of patience for BIG|BRAVE to fully establish their formidable sound, and usually, it’s at this stage when bands tend to branch out and shift towards different sonic pastures.

But BIG|BRAVE isn’t most bands, and their new LP A Gaze Among Them, out 10 May on Southern Lord, opts to deconstruct and devolve what they do even further. A Gaze Among Them listens like a constant pulse. Tracks like ‘Muted Shifting Of Space’ and ‘Body Individual’ evoke the imagery of an anatomical process. The blood is flowing, the heart is beating, the lungs are breathing, the eyes are blinking: all these organs do what they do without us consciously controlling them, all by means of a strange chemical reaction we conveniently call ‘life’.

Creating loud, feedback-laden music like BIG|BRAVE tends to attract similarly self-generating forces. And instead of shrugging their shoulders and treat them as convenient chaos, BIG|BRAVE take a big step back to meditate on these little imperfections and use them as building blocks that wholly dictate their music’s direction. Singer/guitarist Robin Wattie recently linked up with Gigwise to further elaborate on BIG|BRAVE’s MO and how the band helped overcome her crippling shyness.

Gigwise: Are there other non-obvious influences to BIG|BRAVE that aren’t necessarily sonically derived?

Robin Wattie: Oh yeah, there are tons. In BIG|BRAVE’s inception, when Mathieu and I first started making music, John Cage’s 4’33 was our base influence. And that’s just a performer sitting at a piano not playing a single note for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. It was the environment the performer was in dictated the performance, so each time it would be different. You can’t recreate the murmurs of people, them shifting in their seats, the acoustics of whichever venue that person’s playing. That was pretty inspiring.

Also, I think Gillian Welch is a very underrated vocalist. Her vocals are so perfect, exactly the sound I want to hear next to the music she creates. And her lyrics are incredible. Her songs are basically these gorgeous, well-written stories and how she plays with words is pretty inspiring. Those are some of my big influences. I know with Mathieu, Tony Conrad is a big inspiration. I don’t listen to him as much as Mathieu, but I really appreciate his work. There’s also this group called Les Filles de Illighadad: I got to see them perform live and it was such a special experience, I nearly cried.

GW: I also read somewhere that you’re a big soul music fan.

RW: Oh yeah, definitely. Wendy Rene is one of my favorite vocalists. Do you know that Wu-Tang Clan song, ‘After The Laughter Comes Tears’? That’s sampled from her. Unfortunately, she passed away without having made a full album. She only had demos and singles, because her record company or her managers – I don’t remember exactly – were putting out demos and single to get feelers out. And apparently, she was supposed to be on that same flight as Otis Redding to play this show. Right at the last moment, she decided not to go because she wanted to be with her family, have more children and be with her husband. Which is super admirable, but in hindsight, also pretty fucked up. I mean, she could’ve died, but luckily she ended up living a happy fulfilled life. She is hands down one of my favorite soul artists.

GW: It’s always interesting to speculate about the ‘woulda-coulda-shoulda's’, so to speak. In your case, you started out as a visual artist, only to take a sharp left turn in music. Can you still recollect what prompted you to deviate from your original course?

RW: BIG|BRAVE was my first band and I had a really hard time during the first few years. Being a naturally shy person, someone who deals with a lot of social anxiety, it was tough to play shows, talk to people, and develop any confidence playing the guitar. But because of what we were doing and what we were creating, the positive reception we would get from friends and strangers alike was pretty motivating. And I always wanted to play in a loud band, ever since I was a kid. I didn’t know what type of music I wanted to play, I only knew that I wanted it to be loud. So it’s a sweet little childhood dream come true.

It sounds so silly, but I’m not kidding: I was such a shy kid. I remember my first time in elementary school: as soon as the teacher started talking to me, I burst out crying. My mitt would fall on the ground, and I would cry. Someone would look at me wrong, and I would cry. It was terrible. I would barely talk. So by forcing myself to play these shows, and forced to talk to people, it really helped me with my confidence. And though I’m pretty confident on guitar, I am nowhere near as accomplished as most guitar players. Because I literally just bang on it to get sounds that I want. [laughs]

GW: Tapping musically into your own instincts can be a more honest extension of yourself, as opposed to using theory or technique as intermediate. Primal screaming with your instrument is often more arresting, at least, in my opinion.

RW: Thank you for saying that! For the first few years of playing music, I was asking myself: how will anyone take me seriously if I don’t even know what I’m doing myself? Now I realize that it doesn’t matter. I work hard and I keep experimenting, and only just now I have this clear concept of what my instrument can do, and what I can get out of it. There’s still so much left to explore. I was encouraged to experiment and it definitely gave me so much more confidence.

GW: As mentioned before, you were initially hanging your hat on visual art. Was that your original means to ‘primal scream’?

RW: Ever since I could hold a crayon, I would draw. My mom told me that this was all I did as a child. I still have some of my old drawings. As I got older, I took up painting. I studied Illustration and Design in college, which was really good for technique and stuff like that. But I found that the instinctual aspect was taken out of me. Because it’s mostly technique-based. It was a three-year program but I only did it for a year before I dropped out.

So then I went back to school, doing Fine Arts, Painting & Drawing at the University in Montreal. And that spoke to me more, because it revolved around instincts. A lot of the classes catered to what you wanted to explore conceptually. There was one particular class where we had to use our full body to draw; huge illustrations that took up an entire wall. It was all about big gestures. It played into my desire to instinctively express whatever I needed to express. But now I realize it’s just a fun thing for me to explore, not something I wanted to pursue as a career.

GW: Have you discovered the root of your own shyness by now?

RW: I think it was fear. I moved to Montreal from Alberta as a kid. And Alberta has predominantly English-speaking citizens. My mother tongue is English, so as a four-year-old, moving from my home – which was a safe place – to Montreal was very strange. My mom met my stepdad, who is from Montreal, and it was a completely different place. I had no friends, plus there’s this new language I didn’t understand. And I was thrown into a school where they only speak French. Those things definitely contributed to me being very withdrawn and reserved, because I think I was coping. I think I was just scared; children are like sponges.

And behavior carries over: my mom is also a very shy person. I thought I had social anxiety, but getting to know my mom as an adult, she was plagued with it. It’s painful for her. So I think I picked up on that without realizing. I was bullied as well in elementary school, and part of high school. Kids can be so mean. [laughs] I remember being so happy for any kind of holiday because I would have time away from school. During the first day going back to school, I would cry so hard. To avoid being bullied, all my energy would be directed towards not getting beat up, not provoking these people. To hide and go home where I would feel safe. I wasn’t concerned with getting good grades, I have no idea how the fuck I even passed!

GW: Let’s talk about the new album A Gaze Among Them. The illustration you made for the album artwork is a small flame. Was that something you deliberately made with this record in mind, or something you had lying around that happened to fit?

RW: It was made specifically for the record. Mathieu has been requesting me to do the art for every BIG|BRAVE album, but I wasn’t producing things that made sense for Au De La and Ardor. Mathieu took this gorgeous photo for Au De La, while Ardor has this painting by his late mom’s friend. Those visuals made sense for the music we were making at the time, but with A Gaze Among Them, something shifted for me. For both of us actually. Creating music is one thing, but getting it out there in the world is the really hard part.

Making A Gaze Among Them was really hard for both Mathieu and myself; we worked really hard for four months, we pushed ourselves to create something that sounds like BIG|BRAVE, which is its own beast. And we wanted to follow that beast. But we didn’t want to do something that was done on previous albums, or what already comes easy to us. And because of the hard work we put into it, we were coming to a different level in our abilities as songwriters and musicians. From the get-go, when we starting to write this album, I told Mathieu I wanted a white light and I wanted color. I told him exactly what I envisioned, and that’s what I ended up producing. It represents this other level BIG|BRAVE is trying to reach: it’s a light background, there is constant movement, and it’s very simple. But I don’t know if that makes any sense.

GW: I think it does. It looks to me like a bonfire, something people usually gather around to converse and reflect. You just said it yourself, that BIG|BRAVE is its own beast. You can either instigate and spread fire, or simply make sure it sustains itself to serve a singular purpose. That last bit arguably takes a lot more work.

RW: That’s exactly how I see it. And that’s part of the approach when I write with Mathieu. Every new thing we come up with, a small riff or a vocal line, I always take some time to reflect to see where it goes. And to reflect on whether or not it makes sense or embodies for BIG|BRAVE from a sonic standpoint.

GW: How do you lean into this band as a vocalist: do you have to listen to the recordings extensively, or just tap into it immediately as it’s played, more improv-like?

RW: It happens almost immediately. The lyrics always come last. The melody and the sound come very soon after the first parts are being developed. BIG|BRAVE always works in parts, we find something that resonates with us and just repeat it over and over again. See where it goes, and a lot of times, we take it apart and rebuild it several times over. Meanwhile, I’m humming or singing or screaming along, with no words, basically using the voice as an instrument to add to the songs. Like you said, there’s this repetitive heartbeat going on throughout the entire album. We’re playing one chord, and to write a melody on a single chord that feels like it’s going somewhere interesting is super challenging. It’s something we worked particularly hard on with A Gaze Among Them.

GW: It’s impossible to even categorize BIG|BRAVE as a rock band, even though you use the basic rock instrumentation. Each record offers that steep challenge of pushing these conventions to well, unconventional places. What have you done on this album to place these sonically familiar instruments into a fresh context?

RW: Well, one example is ‘Sibling’, which was borne out of the fact that I have these short, stubby fingers. Mathieu and I were in the jam space and he was like: ‘do you have anything’. And I told him I was going to figure something out on the fly. And as I was just goofing around on the guitar. I would put my fingers on the top of the neck to mute them. I didn’t pull off, I just took them off, and that in itself made a very interesting sound. So ‘Sibling’ basically happened because I have fat fingers. [laughs] So sometimes it’s quite accidental! Other times it’s a concentrated effort, just taking a lot of time and patience being in the jam space for hours on end. What I said earlier about taking a guitar riff and taking it apart again; it’s really easy to just keep adding new parts to fill up space. It’s a lot harder to do a single thing once and still fill up that space.

BIG|BRAVE’s A Gaze Among Them is out 10 May on Southern Lord.