18 JANUARY 9-15, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | label got back to us and said, ‘Mark wants to do this song. He doesn’t want you to re- record it. He wants to do it exactly as it is.’” The band used a drum machine instead of live drums; Marcy was too sick to record. But the collaborations soon became hampered by another illness: Lanegan contracted COVID in 2021, just as he was about to record his vocals on the track. “Mark never recovered,” Richier says. “About a year later, we got word from the label that Mark had given the songs back to all the bands. We never heard what he’d been planning to sing on it, and he never gave us his title for the song. And then a month after that, we got word that he’d passed.” Lanegan died on February 22, 2022, just two days shy of the fi rst anniversary of Marcy’s death. “After that,” Richier says, “we didn’t know what we were going to do. We just knew that if we were going to go on without Nate, we were going to have to start this band from the ground up again.” Palehorse/Palerider began as many great bands do: A bunch of thirty-something punks pause and ponder how their music might evolve beyond the three-chord venom of their youth. For Richier, that early band was the Volts. Although he also served time in two of Den- ver’s most renowned garage-rock groups, the Down-N-Outs and the Omens, the Volts was the outfi t that really showed Richier’s deep punk aggression; from 1999 to 2002, the quartet became notorious as one of the city’s most savage live bands. Around the same time that Richier was destroying stages in the Volts, Atkinson was playing in a far different but no less menacing band, the Hellmen. The group stood out like a mangled thumb in the late ’90s. Brooding, primal and almost Nick Cave-ish, Atkinson and crew brought a cerebral and theatrical edge to the local scene. “When I started doing what eventually turned into Palehorse/Palerider, it was just a recording project with my friend Brett Anderson,” Richier recalls. “It was 2013, and everything I had done before was more or less one-two-three-four rock and roll. I felt like I was always getting looped into the same types of bands. But it wasn’t really inspiring to me. Not that I don’t still listen to punk, but as a musician, I wanted to do something different. I thought it would be cool to try something that I’d never done before.” With Anderson on vocals, the duo tin- kered with bedroom recordings that were reminiscent of Depeche Mode and other dark synth-pop acts from their childhoods. Anderson’s voice was ideal for that style, but Richier soon found it too sharp of a departure from his louder roots. “I wanted to get some other folks in- volved, to make it more of an actual band,” Richier says. “That’s when we got Dave and Nate involved. We did that for about a year and a half, with Brett as the lead singer.” The group was called Hiraeth, and it only lasted long enough to play a handful of local shows. “I think musically, Brett just wanted to do something different,” Richier remembers. “We started out more post-punky, and he wanted to go in more of a pop direction. The rest of us wanted to go in a heavier direction, which kind of led to the bottom falling out.” Anderson left Hiraeth in 2016, and the remaining trio decided to scrap everything and regroup as Palehorse/Palerider. Rather than fi nd a substitute for Anderson, Richier made the reluctant choice to take over lead vocals himself. “I’m a guitar player. I am not a singer,” Richier says. “Brett was very much a singer. He has an amazing voice. But that’s just not my forte. I’m a singer by default. We never replaced Brett, because we realized it was so much easier to juggle schedules and songwriting with three people instead of four. Moving into a heavier direction helped, too. It’s made my lyrics and vocals not as much of an emphasis. It’s not what people typically latch on to when they hear our music, which is just fi ne with me.” Much of that approach was inspired by one of Richier’s favorite bands, My Bloody Valentine, whose leader, Kevin Shields, is a master of fi ltering, layering and burying vocals until they become part of the instru- mentation itself. “I remember the fi rst time I listened to Love- less,” Richier says, citing My Bloody Valentine’s acclaimed 1991 album, which is still the gold standard of the shoegaze genre. “I was on a Boy Scout camping trip, and one of the guys in my troop had just gotten Loveless. He was always listening to cool shit like Concrete Blonde and New Order, and he was like, ‘You should check this band My Bloody Valentine out.’ “So I put the tape in my Walkman, and I listened to it for a couple seconds, and I was like, ‘Dude, this tape is fucking broken.’ And my friend said, ‘Oh, it’s supposed to sound like that.’ That just seemed so fucking crazy to me. It wasn’t an epiphany, but it always kind of stuck in my brain.” Richier, Atkinson and Marcy also gravi- tated toward the infl uence of more recent bands like Red Sparowes and Jesu, both of which utilize dizzying dynamics, dreamy mel- ody and brutal heaviness in equal measure. “We just wanted to make an effort to do something a little different and oddball, and the heavy music community here in Denver, like Green Druid, just kind of embraced us,” Richier says. “And, of course, that started infl uencing how we were writing. But really, we’ve been able to play with all kinds of local bands. We’ve played with heavy bands like Khemmis and In the Company of Serpents, but we’ve also played with Wovenhand and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. You know, it fi ts.” Palehorse/Palerider was a little less sure of itself in March 2023, when the band played its fi rst show after Marcy’s death and Sims’s conscription. The bill at the hi-dive included old friends Git Some and Ghosts of Glaciers. Familiar territory and faces, though, weren’t enough to completely dispel the palpable absence of Marcy on stage. Says Richier, “We didn’t want to put too much pressure on ourselves or on Ryan, but it’s been a lot of stumbling and falling and picking ourselves back up. I’m just not a very confi dent songwriter, and I’m sure that’s part of the extremely introverted personality that I am. Plus, the fi rst batch of songs we wrote with Ryan are a little lighter, in a way. A little brighter. My vocals are more up front, too.” Adds Atkinson with a laugh, “Yes, we still want to be My Bloody Valentine, of course. But maybe we don’t always have to sound so blatantly loud and large.” The new single, “Don’t Leave Me Be- hind,” refl ects the band’s newfound restraint. Alternating between delicate loops and cav- ernous riffs, the song doesn’t depart from Palehorse/Palerider’s previous style so much as refi ne it. “Don’t Leave Me Behind” will be followed on January 24 by another single titled “Lobotomy Domine,” a nod to both the Ramones and Pink Floyd, as well as an EP called Waves 1 on February 7. After a follow-up EP, Waves II, comes out later this year, both releases will be combined onto a vinyl LP before the end of 2025. And although the band’s Mark Lanegan col- laboration tragically never came to fruition, Magnetic Eye Records has asked Palehorse/ Palerider to record a cover of “The Down- ward Spiral” for an upcoming Nine Inch Nails tribute compilation. For a band that’s been silent, recording-wise, for the past fi ve years, it’s a fl urry of pent-up productivity that fi nally has a chance to be unleashed. Along with a fl urry of pent-up emotion. “It’s been a little bit of therapy, a little bit of processing and expressing things that I think we sometimes have diffi culty expressing,” says Richier of the band’s resurrection. “I think Nate would be all for what we’re doing now, even though it is a little bit different. But I’m trying not to put myself in the situation where I’m like, ‘Oh, what would Nate think of this?’ “I loved Nate to death,” he adds, “and his infl uence will defi nitely always be heard. Nate, Dave and I did have lengthy conversa- tions about this before he passed, and I guess at the end of the day, I think we’d be doing him a disservice if we didn’t let go and try to make something even more beautiful.” Email the author at [email protected]. Palehorse/Palerider is releasing its fi rst new music in fi ve years. Palehorse/Palerider balances beauty and heaviness. Music continued from page 17 LK CISCO LK CISCO
