"Pain Remains I: Dancing Like Flames"

When I first clicked on “Pain Remains Part I: Dancing Like Flames”, I didn’t expect such an outpouring of grief in the YouTube comments.

I had previously dismissed Lorna Shore as a simple “deathcore band” – not worthy of any real attention. 

I was wrong.

In recent weeks, I became obsessed with the Pain Remains album. And the band behind it. 

Lorna Shore was doing something different to project so much emotion into such extreme music. 

I wanted to know what it was.

The first time Will Ramos heard Lamb of God and Whitechapel they sounded “too heavy”. 

It took the front man of Lorna Shore a while to get into the more “extreme” side of metal.

But eventually his taste began to shift. 

He became fixated on the band Infant Annihilator, almost damaging his voice trying to replicate the high-pitched, fry screams.

But he kept pushing through. 

His Puerto Rican mother was the first victim of his new obsession. 

One day, while Will was in the shower, she knocked on the bathroom door of their New Jersey house.

She was – justifiably – concerned by the inhuman voices coming from inside.

For years, it went nowhere for Ramos.

Secrets Don't Sleep. Monument of a Memory. A Wake in Providence. Flawed Saviour. 

A slew of bands that were good, just not good enough to break through. 

And after grinding through years of shows in small venues, Ramos was on the verge of quitting:

Then came the call from Lorna Shore, a band that Ramos idolised.

The band had discovered Ramos through a vocal cover he'd uploaded years earlier on YouTube.

They were on the verge of releasing Immortal (2020), but they had just fired their vocalist, CJ McCreery, following abuse allegations from a former partner.

Ramos’s first stint with the band was short-lived. In March 2020, Lorna Shore kicked off their European tour with their new – unknown – frontman. 

Within six shows, Europe was in lockdown.

Venues closed and the tour was cut.

Ramos flew home to New Jersey and waited, along with everyone else, for whatever came next.

De Micco suggested they use the silence to record something with Ramos. 

The result was a 3-song EP: …And I Return to Nothingness.

The lead single, “To the Hellfire”, went viral on TikTok and Spotify. Metal fans couldn’t believe the sounds Lorna Shore’s new singer was making with his voice. Many thought the band was using some kind of studio trickery.

Reaction videos populated YouTube. Vocal coaches posting breakdowns of Ramos’ inhuman sounds. 

The song peaked at number four on the Spotify Viral Chart and Loudwire voted it Song of the Year.

A deathcore band from New Jersey had, by sheer providence, made one of the most-talked-about metal songs in years… 

…in the middle of a pandemic with a stand-in vocalist they'd found on YouTube.

Now they had to follow it.

The pressure that arrived with the Pain Remains album was enormous. 

But they had no choice. 

It was time to go into the studio.

Will Ramos stopped smoking weed for the album’s recording.

He wanted to be “sharper”. And he didn’t want anything to affect his voice.

But he wasn’t ready for the vivid dreams that followed.

Ramos had always been interested in lucid dreaming: building a world inside your own head and moving through it consciously.

Now he was doing it every night.

The worlds he built in his sleep felt so real. 

He'd fall in love with people he could never quite make out. Who faded quickly upon waking.  

Leaving him every morning with a profound sense of grief and loneliness.

Like in Ramos’ dreams, the band built a world to escape to in Pain Remains… and burned it back down as the “real world” reopened.

One story told through three panels. Like a heavy metal triptych – the kind of brutal art Hieronymous Bosch would have made if he’d been born sometime in the late 20th century.

“Part I” is the moment that the constructed world gives the narrator a feeling of connection they've never had in waking life. In his dreams, he constructs someone he loves but can’t quite see:

“Part II” is the moment the dream ends. He wants to disappear. To escape the escape:

“Part III” is the violent conclusion. He burns the whole world down and returns to the reality he fled. 

During the recording, guitarist Adam De Micco locked himself in a room for days.

He had the seed of a song…

“Pain Remains Part II” came first. De Micco hadn't planned on the song developing further than that.

But then producer Josh Schroeder said something that changed the shape of the record.

De Micco had always wanted to write a long, continuous story told across multiple movements. The Faceless had done it. As had The Contortionist. 

Part I came out of writing Part II. The chorus melody De Micco had written for Part II threaded itself through the new material.

De Micco even had a reference point for what he was trying to make.

Tim Burton's bittersweet story of a man who constructs an elaborate dreamworld to make sense of his life before death takes him.

Big Fish.

That's the feeling De Micco was trying to capture in that locked room. 

The first 90 seconds of the song are a masterclass in atmospheric metal. Rain falls as synths slowly fade in. A simple, but ominous, “question and answer” guitar lead rises over the synths, creating a deeper sense of tension. This lead is soon accompanied by chugging, staccato power chords – deep lows emanating from Adam De Micco and Andrew O'Connor’s 7-string Ibanez guitars.

Then the verse begins.

Will Ramos introduces the song’s theme in the opening lines:

He wrote his vocal parts using scat vocals, screaming gibberish over the track until the words and melody revealed themselves.

Austin Archey’s obliterating blast beats drive the song towards the – remarkably melodic, almost anthemic – chorus.

The chorus is built around a dance that never finishes.

The imagery is unambiguously romantic. Two figures move together, close enough to feel the heat, but never close enough to touch (notice the movement in the lyrics from the first person plural “we” to the singular “you”.)

The language is sensual: bodies in motion, drawn toward each other by something neither of them controls.

But it's a dance with no resolution.

The lover is visible, yet permanently out of reach. This is the dream version of someone you can feel but never hold. 

There’s also a sinister, or malevolent, edge to the chorus:

The other person is not oblivious to their appeal. Seduction is a conscious act. One that will always lead nowhere.

Dancing is the art form of “almost”. 

Anticipation made physical – the suggestion of intimacy without the completion of it. Every tango, every slow waltz is, at its core, a negotiation between desire and restraint, a performance of longing that stops just short.

Here’s what makes this section truly extraordinary: that lyrical, romantic imagery is being screamed by one of the most technical, extreme vocalists in modern metal.

That's the paradox at the heart of this song: the tenderness and the violence that occupy the same moment.

But it works because it expresses the reality of grief. 

What is more metal than a devastating dance with someone who isn't there anymore… 

In an unreal world you built to escape an unbearable reality?

The final section of the song addresses the crux of the entire “Pain Remains” trilogy: 

How can someone that seems so real in your dream just be gone when you wake?

What does that vision (that felt so real) remember of you? When you felt that person’s love for you. And who you loved so much.

In your dreams.

Simulation theory – in its most stripped-back form – asks a simple question: how do you know the reality you're experiencing is real? 

The character in “Pain Remains I” retreats into a dreamworld because base reality has become unbearable. Inside the dream, they fall in love with someone who “seems real”. But that person is gone when he wakes up.

Are you the ghost in that scenario? Do you only exist between these lines of “intertwining melodies”?

Grief makes the world feel constructed and hollow. It makes the person you lost feel more present in dreams than the people standing in front of you.

You start to wonder which version of reality is the one you're supposed to be living in.

Will Ramos recently donated his body to science. 

Effectively, at least. To researchers from the University of Utah.

He wanted to challenge the common assumption that extreme metal vocals “damage your voice.”

They put Ramos inside an MRI scanner, threaded an endoscope down his throat and attached electrodes to seven specific muscle sites. 

Their findings are likely to change vocal science for decades to come.

When Ramos screams, the noise doesn’t come from his vocal folds. It comes from structures above them (the false vocal folds and arytenoid cartilages) which oscillate while the true folds stay slightly separated and protected. 

His throat shows zero damage. Even after years of screaming. 

In fact, his vocal tissue is as healthy as someone who has never raised their voice in their life.

The researchers called what he does Primal Vocalization: a form of human communication that predates language. 

Dr. Ingo Titze – executive director of the National Center for Voice and Speech – noted these sounds are physiologically similar to those produced by ravens and crows for millennia. 

Before Ramos makes a sound, his brain pre-configures his throat for the specific note that's coming. 

This means the body prepares for the emotion before the emotion arrives.

This primal release of emotion is the reason strangers now write their dead spouse’s names in the song’s YouTube comments.

Pain Remains.

Indeed.

Horns up 🤘

Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media