Alt-metal band releases third single ‘Home Alone’ off its album 10 years in the making

Alt-metal band Halik ni Gringo releases its third single “Home Alone” off its upcoming album set to be released later this year.

The band, who previously released two prior singles “Injustice for All” and “Mr. Big Data,” intends to create an atmosphere in which listeners can release their frustrations about current events. “Home Alone” is a musical composition that delves into the life we have unwillingly grown accustomed to for the past couple of years. With what seems to be unwavering circumstances of lockdown comes the unsettling feeling of social isolation.

“You have these conversations in your head , I have those all the time,” explains Halik ni Gringo frontman, Joey Santos. “But they’re especially pronounced during the pandemic, just because there are so many things you have to think about.” To him, the songwriting process was easy as the lyrics flowed naturally, coming right out of his head and into the song.

As we chatted more about music and the band, I wanted to know more about how this pandemic has exactly changed their creative process. On top of having to redirect their platform more into social media due to the inability to perform live, I wanted to understand how their communication with each other has been affected amid the distance. Thankfully, things haven’t really changed so much for them since the 2010s.

“I would write separately. My co-writer Joaquin Acosta would write separately. And then we just send each other ideas online,” Joey says. “So it was a precursor of how things are being done now.”

Halik ni Gringo has been in the industry for quite some time now and has established its identity as a band. This has allowed them to expand their creative capacity, exploring concepts not so commonly done by other artists. Back when the band was doing live gigs pre-pandemic, they came up with an idea on how they wanted to set out further music releases.

Overall, this 2022 Halik ni Gringo album will be along the lines of ‘how content is consumed today, how information is presented, and also just the general overabundance of knowledge, which tends to, I would say, hurt more than help.’

“The upcoming album is a little bit of an inside joke. That joke eventually evolved into this concept for an album that actually took 10 years to make.” Joey further elaborates that their upcoming 10-track album is merely a part of a whole “decade-long album,” which they formalized back in 2017 and will conclude in 2027. “Para siyang Inception. It’s like an album within an album.”

As I mentioned earlier, this 2022 Halik ni Gringo album overall will be along the lines of, in Joey’s words, “how content is consumed today, how information is presented, and also just the general overabundance of knowledge, which tends to, I would say, hurt more than help.” These themes are prevalent in today’s world, and the band has only begun to scratch the surface in highlighting such through the three singles they’ve released by far.

Timely and scarily accurate, “Home Alone” provides a sound for the voices in our heads to be audible as we navigate through this period of discomfort in our lives. Having gone in and out of lockdown, we continuously find ourselves caught in a loop of paranoia and social deprivation. What better way to release our exasperation than through a sonic reflection of our innermost thoughts?

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