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Album Track By Track: Dive Behind The Lore + Scenes of The Gloom In The Corner's 'Royal Discordance'
- Tiana Speter
- 7 hours ago
- 20 min read
Friday 27 February, 2026. The stage is set. The brand new era of Melbourne's The Gloom In The Corner is here.
Releasing their third studio album Royal Discordance today, alongside the band's trademark theatricality and sprawling storytelling is a collection of 12 tracks that showcases the Gloom's growth, razor-sharp focus and their own emergence into wholeheartedly being comfortable in their own sonic skins.
A dizzying love letter to the likes of My Chemical Romance, anime and gun fu classics, amongst many other influences, The Gloom In The Corner go harder than ever before on their latest outing; and the end result is an exhilarating ride from start to finish.
As always, the narratives throughout Royal Discordance are not accidental or random, with the album's events picking up immediately off the back off their 2022 full-length Trinity. But Royal Discordance emerges with a figurative (and narrative) crown, becoming its own absorbing entity with some beautifully chaotic twists and turns.
Ahead of the album's release, The Soundcheck spent some time with Gloom's vocalist Mikey Arthur, resulting in an in-depth and comprehensive coverage of every track on the brand new album, covering behind the scenes, lore and more.
For long-time fans and/or lore nerds ready to dive into the next chapter of the Gloom Cinematic Universe, beware: here, there be spoilers (BIG spoilers). If you haven't listened to the album yet or you're not ready for some big storyline reveals that take place on the album...definitely stop reading now.
For everyone else, here is the ultimate guide to The Gloom In The Corner's Royal Discordance as told by the lord of the lore himself: Mikey Arthur. Strap in and enjoy the show...
The Problem with Apocalyptic Tyranny
Story-wise, this song comes directly off the end of Hail To The King. We make that very evident with the nuclear siren and the riff, as well as the choir thing that fills in. It serves as a part two to Hail To The King, but we also didn't want to make it eight minutes long; that would be a bit of a disservice. It pretty much sets the scene for the balance between the chaoticness of the album, but also some of the streamlined elements. I think it's one of the two songs on the record that are the most like Trinity [2022]. At the end of Hail To The King, the Evil King Baphicho comes in and kind of establishes his dominance over the realm, splits up the characters, sends them on their merry way, or running for the hills you could say.
This song went through a lot of iterations musically. The lyrics were pretty much the same, but we went through a decent amount of changes by the time we got to the end of it. Originally it was going to be a very, very anti-religious song. The original full title for this song was “The Problem with Apocalyptic Tyranny in a Catholic Dominated World”, just to put it into perspective. But then as I developed the story more, it just didn't make sense, at least from a character's perspective. Yes, he's defying God's image and everything like that, but some of the subjects that we tackled in that song made us realise: "it's kind of pushing it a little bit too far off the norm." So that’s The Problem with Apocalyptic Tyranny. It's also one of the two sendoff songs for Trinity, as I like to call it, before we go into the main sound of Royal Discordance.
You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now)
This one's story-wise set six months after The Problem with Apocalyptic Tyranny, and it begins with Clara [Carne] forming the resistance against the King and kind of coming into her own. In Apocalyptic Tyranny, Sherlock [Bones] loses a lot of his powers to the King, so he's just off sulking, and doing his own thing. So it inspires Clara to be the one to rise up against King Baphicho. She's always kind of been the side character for a lot of the time; she's always been left out of the limelight, which is kind of a reflection on the rest of the story too. This is about how she finds her way as the main character now.
The song itself is also very much about embracing individuality, and understanding that “not everybody is going to like you and that's totally okay”. I guess it's also kind of like my personal reflection on how we're seen by some of our peers in the music industry, or people that just aren't into Gloom, and some of the ways that we've been treated. Not that we've been treated extremely badly or anything like that; I like to think we've actually had a pretty good run despite the fact that we're pretty left of centre. But we’ve also had some bad experiences too, and that’s always made me second guess how we should be operating as a band and the way that we write music, that kind of thing. It took me a long time to appreciate the reality: "hey, we’re going to be our own thing. We are going to be a little bit left of centre compared to everybody else”. So that's primarily You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now). And it's a pretty bold statement in itself.
Painkiller Soliloquy
Coming off the back of You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now), this is the complete opposite. I've always found it really funny having these two songs back to back, because originally Short Range Teleportation (A Guide To Guerrilla Warfare) and You Didn’t Like Me Then were in each other's place until we swapped them around. With that, you're either going into Painkiller Soliloquy or You Didn’t Like Me Then, or You Didn’t Like Me Then into Painkiller. And I always found it really funny that, especially with You Didn’t Like Me Then being the second track now, Painkiller’s opening line is: “I look in the mirror and hate what I see”, coming off the back of a song that's meant to be so spiritually uplifting and about accepting of who you are!
In the story, this is where Jay gets introduced. He's forced to work under the King due to shenanigans that happen in Trinity, and he very much doesn't like it. Jay as a character has always tried to be like the cop that says ACAB. And working under the King in this special division that he's put in is very much the opposite of what he wants to do and who he wants to be. That kind of sends him into a bit of a spiral, and it doesn't exactly help that a lot of his peers in this division are very much aware of this and always constantly try to undermine him or find ways to knock him off the board. To put it into perspective, the King pretty much just keeps him around as a trophy piece, more or less, and uses him for the purpose of a “fuck you” Clara and her allies.
In that same vein, it's coming off the back of that bad side of what I've felt with the music industry as well, where you have people that do try to befriend you for devious means or this, that, and the other, or try to get you knocked off the board for those various means. If You Didn’t Like Me Then (You Won’t Like Me Now) is my flamboyant way of saying, "hey man, if you don't like me, that's okay”, then Painkiller is saying: “I will fucking kill you. Give it a crack, I swear to god.”
A lot of the instrumental writing came off the back of taking influence from characters like Max Payne and things like that. There are quite literally lines from Max Payne 3 and the first Max Payne in this song. And it’s kind of reflective of what Jay's doing, drug-wise, alcohol abuse-wise, all the dumb shit. It’s almost all coming from that inebriating anger, I guess.
Short Range Teleportation (A Guide To Guerrilla Warfare)
Besides Angel’s Wrath Whiskey, this was probably the first song written for the album because it was written around the same time as Trinity. The other first one written was Love I: A Quaver Through the Pale, but that's because I wrote it ages ago. But Short Range was one of the ones written around Trinity and it was effectively me saying, "hey, what if Black Tongue had an orchestra behind it?”. Funnily enough, it’s also probably my least favourite song on the album. And it's not because I don't like it, I just don't have an emotional connection to the instrumental like I do the rest of the songs. It wasn’t written with the initial brief we made for Royal Discordance, hence why there’s a drastic sonic shift between it and the remaining songs.
That being said though, there were a lot of influences from the real world throughout this album, and what also influenced this track very much was guerrilla warfare, effectively what was happening in Ukraine at the time when I wrote this. That was probably the first time that I also realised, "oh, this is what's influencing this”. That's where that kind of sonic, foreboding and lingering horror of war comes from with this track, especially in the lyrics and the underlying sampling done that breaks up the song.
From a storytelling perspective, it's Clara establishing that she can do what everybody else is doing and better; and she has that ability to short range teleport. And it's her by herself going up against a battalion of Baphicho’s soldiers and absolutely mincing them.
Nope (Hollow Point Elysium)
At this point in the story, there's a little story section that was left out of the album in between Short Range Teleportation and Nope, where Clara and Sherlock meet up with one of the other older characters. They've retrofitted this device [Pandora’s Box – which can be seen in the music for “Pandora’s Box” from the Trinity music videos] that can take down the King. Jay finds out about it and kind of accidentally gatecrashes the party. Nope in its ethos is about Jay fighting off all of Clara's forces and then actually fighting Clara herself at the end. And that's why there's that little tidbit in the music video where Sherlock tries running at him and he just kind of domes him (don’t worry – “‘tis but a fleshwound”).
Nope was one of the second last songs written for the record. There was originally another song there that I just couldn't put lyrics to; no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't do it. And so I rewrote this two weeks before we went to the States. I sent it through, said to the guys, "hey, is this cool? Does this work for everybody?".
The main influence behind it, which is evident in the lyrics, is all those 80s action movies, and Max Payne and all the video games I grew up playing. And John Wick as well. I think what influenced it sonically was watching John Woo films, and all those gun fu films. They were also called “bullet ballet” films because you look at them and everything's choreographed pretty much like a dance sequence or a ballet sequence. And so sonically, I wanted this song to reflect an old Russian ballet kind of theme. And that's where the influence, sonically, came from. It's very straightforward, it follows itself to a degree like a dancer would, but that's entirely the intention behind it, so you can follow along really easily.
Angel’s Wrath Whiskey
Story-wise, this is where Rachel comes in finally. She hears about this meeting as well and comes in to save Clara and stop Jay before he does anything stupid that he doesn't really want to do. But at the same time, with the way that he broke up with her at the end of Trinity, she kind of wants to dish it back a little bit after she's been through all this bullshit that's primarily his fault. I think that a lot of people don't understand that as well, a few people have asked me: "oh, why is she so angry at Jay? We know that he broke up with her at the end of Trinity, but it doesn’t seem like he’s done that much more to her than that compared to some of the other things she’s been through” (ie; the story of The Jericho Protocol and her songs on Trinity).
And I'm like, "Well, the reason why everything is happening in the Gloom Lore is because of him – like her initial death in Fear Me, to her losing her mind in The Jericho Protocol, to all the stuff she goes through in Trinity, only to be rejected in the end”. On top of that, when he did break up with her and Sherlock had his little reign at the start of Hail To The King, he sided with him. That pissed her off even more. And then him cowardly not doing anything about working under Baphicho in this record also pissed her off. So, she has quite a bit to be pissed off at him about. And she just wants to dish it back quite a bit. So that's where Angel’s comes in and they have their fight; and she just absolutely wallops the shit out of him. Go, queen!
This was one of the first songs written for the record and it very much has that My Chemical Romance influence. This song was also the way that I set the precedent for the way I wanted this record to go. And I struggled really hard because we had a few songs written around this that could go in various directions. And we were like, “which way do we want to take this?”. And I'm glad that I landed on the Angel’s Wrath side of things because I feel like it paid off better. It was a pretty straightforward song to write, it just took a while to get it there. It’s one of my favourites on the record for sure.
Shadow Rhapsody II
Shadow Rhapsody II is technically a part two to our song When I Walk, My Regret Follows Like Shadows off of our album Fear Me [2016]. We have a little callback section in the back half to that song as well. People who know that song, the longtime fans, will recognise that immediately. It's one of the few times in this record that I do the throwback motif thing, besides the stuff from Trinity. I kind of made it a rule after Trinity, especially for the older stuff, there was a whole heap in that record. Now, I want to use it very sparingly.
This song took a while to write and to get the idea. I knew I wanted to do a part two to When I Walk, but that song in itself is such a chaotic mess. A lot of its influence actually came from back in lockdown times. I completely rewrote Fear Me and gave them all different song titles and things like that. And the rewrite of When I Walk was called Shadow Rhapsody, thus the name of this one.
Sonically, this is Jay realising that he's fucked up quite a bit with Rachel. They re-meet and reconcile with each other a little bit. He manages to get away from the King, and comes over and sides with Clara and Sherlock. He’s not trying to play both sides, but he’s trying to get across the line, I think, especially after reconciling with Rachel. This song was a fun one. It was fun piecing everything together, it just took like a long time. We also had a ghost writer for this one, we had Cody Mackenzie who is from a dark pop duo called Die Empty over in Nashville. And he works very closely with our producer, Jon [Jonathan Delese]; they have a clothing brand together too. He was awesome to work with, very accepting of the ideas and everything. It just needed a little bit of his flair to change stuff up.
Assassination Run
We’ve had all the slow stuff, now we’re going to bring the pace up a little bit. Assassination Run was a fun one. Because we have heavier stuff with The Problem With Apocalyptic Tyranny and Short Range Teleportation, and a little bit in Painkiller Soliloquy too, I wanted another balls-to-the-wall heavy song, something like what Bleed You Out was. I jokingly used to refer to this as Mud II or Bleed You Out II from Flesh & Bones [2019] and Fear Me, because there are callbacks to both of them in this song. But I also think Assassination Run is its own thing.
The writing for this one took a while because I haven't really written like that in a while, especially in the middle of trying to do all the structured My Chem-y kind of stuff. I was like, "oh fuck, we have to do a heavy song. Shit, what do I do? Shit, what do I do?!”. Essentially this song's a little bit of a side quest for the album where Sherlock goes off and goes on a little revenge killing spree for some of the people who have fucked him over during the course of this record on the sidelines. And I wanted to bring back that ferocity that we had with Flesh & Bones and Fear Me. That's why there's very little to no orchestra in it because we didn't have that much of it back then. Even Paul [Musolino, bassist] said to me, “please don't put any more orchestra than what's currently in there for that little section”. I'm like, "I wasn't going to, don’t worry”. And being the first introduction to the new album for people, especially after The Jericho Protocol, we wanted to remind people that we can still sonically kick the shit out of you.
This one’s a lot of fun, I think Assassination Run and Nope (Hollow Point Elysium) are probably my favourites to play live. It’s just such a fun song to do, I hope we keep it around in the set for quite a long time.
That’s Life (Carry Me Home)
That’s Life (Carry me Home) was the last song written for the record. Originally, there was a very, very slow song in there, but I didn't want to fuck up the pacing. It was originally in the same vein as Shadow Rhapsody that had a big finisher. But we were in the studio and realised that was probably a bad idea to have a song like that and fuck up the pacing of the record, especially after having Shadow Rhapsody, and then going Army of Darkness, then into Love I and Love II. It just wasn't going to work. So we rewrote it to be this big anthemic My Chem-y 2000s throwback kind of song. A few people said it’s a bit like Enter Shakari with the clapping. That honestly didn’t click for me until someone actually said that. But this song is a lot of fun.
It was cool to piece everything together. There was originally a much more solemn chorus in that song too. And then I got there and I went, "nah, the rest of the song is so upbeat and happy. We need a catchy chorus for it”. Now, it's one of my favourite songs on the record.
From a storytelling perspective, it’s the night before the big battle and everyone is having a last celebratory drink before we get into that final three track run. There's not much more to say story-wise besides that it's just them getting fucking obliterated before the battle. For me, it’s also the last semblance of hope that you get in the record before we come to the end. And I very much wanted that to be the case. I think people have clocked onto that, the people who have listened to the record already too, because once we get into Army of Darkness: it's all downhill from here.
Army of Darkness
Army of Darkness is one of my favourite movies of all time, and I’ve always got to have an Evil Dead reference in our albums. I think the recurring motif in this Apocalypse Arc is that we have a recurring reference to Evil Dead or Army of Darkness in some way. The funny thing about this song is that I wrote this song more towards the start when we were still trying to figure out what we were doing sonically with this record. And it was just after I'd listened to a shitload of Gojira, which is evident. I sat on this song for a little bit and went, "no, I really don't like this song." I started writing different versions of this song and nothing after that kind of hit, which was really funny because a lot of the various versions, or influences from the various versions that came after I wrote, actually influenced a lot of That’s Life (Carry Me Home). So it came back around full circle.
It must have been halfway through 2024, and I wrote the initial version of this song in May 2023, I want to say? So in June or July of 2024, I was still struggling with what to do with Army of Darkness, and I was like, "let me just check on this old version that I had real quick." I went back and went, "oh, this version slaps. Why did I scrap this? Okay, we're putting this one back in the record”. I was like, “I fucked up, it was there the whole time!”. I think what was not doing it for me was what was going on with the chorus in the initial versions. This was one of the songs as well that was still having the influence from Trinity, where I was very much doing it from a story-based telling. I look at this song a little bit as the Gravity of this record, not just because of the 3/4 time and whatnot, but sonically it felt very much along the same lines as that song, just a little bit darker and a little bit heavier.
I always knew that this was going to be the big battle song, especially when I re-listened to it. It's so medieval sounding and so dark, and that breakdown at the end as the fight, as the main battle kind of thing…it'd be remiss not to do this. It'd be stupid. I'd tried putting that breakdown in a couple of the other various versions of this song and it just didn’t hit the same. So sonically, this is the big battle song. I very cheekily put sampling of the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones in this song too. It’s in that buildup section right before the last breakdown. It’s a mixture of that and DnD ambient sounds of a battle. I mirrored the two, so I’m not completely getting copyright infringed.
On the topic, even that episode of Game of Thrones was a huge influence for this song. Army of Darkness is this big battle song, everybody gets fucked up at the end of it because Clara realises that they're losing. She drops a paranormal EMP device into the battlefield and that's what fucks everybody over. It's like resetting the battle at the end of a Call of Duty match when they drop the nuke. And at the end of all of that, that's where it teeters off and this is where we get into Love I.
Love I: A Quaver Through the Pale
Simply put: this is Clara’s death song, if most people haven't kind of caught on by this stage. I've kind of been alluding to it a little bit over the course of the interview process and people have asked me questions in the Discord and whatnot as to who's going to die on this album. And: it is Clara. I’d like to preface this as well, even though I did decide to make this Clara’s record, she was always going to die. This song was written in 2018/2019, and it was during the initial story-writing version of this album where I went off and started killing a whole heap of characters leading up to the big finale so that only one or two would remain. Since then, the story has drastically changed, but one thing that was kept was Clara's death. And that's mainly because I wanted to keep this song, I really do love this song. There's a reason I kept it around and wanted to use it. In fact, a lot of the backbone for this story was written off the back of this song. It’s actually left with a bit of a twist that's going to piss off the lore people too, which I absolutely love (sorry to the Discordians reading this, especially you Con).
The good news is that they defeat the King with this device; Clara and Rachel defeat the king, it’s a girl-boss power move kind of thing, but it comes as a double edged sword. The thing that people need to understand is that over the course of Trinity, Rachel has grown quite a distrust towards Clara, just because of the way that she has treated her over the course of Trinity, and (to a much less extent) this album. Even though they're working together, a lot of the way that Clara treats her is pretty bad; she demeaned and belittled her, hurt her physically (both accidentally and purposely) in the (unreleased) novella adaptations of Trinity. Not only that, Clara’s whole introduction into the story was becoming the paramour of the demon that killed her and possessed her boyfriend. Everyone is bad to each other in this story, to be fair; none of them are good people for the most part. The exception for that is Clara, but that’s really only the course of this record’s story.
They use this device which captures all of King Baphicho's power in it, including powers from different types of realms. Essentially, the last of the Heavenly Realms forces come in at this stage and they're like, “we want to use that device to restore the Earth and restore the Dimensions”, and all that shit. Clara goes, “okay, well, what does that look like?”. And essentially it’d just be another sort of tyrannical reign that would arguably be worse than what the King had just put most of the world through.
So, Clara decides, "I don't want that to happen. I'm going to keep the Device for myself and hide it away so that nobody can ever get it”. Rachel doesn’t think Clara should have all of that power, and pressures her to hand it over. Clara, being the braveheart she’s become, replies, “I don't want to give it to you because you still technically work under the Heavenly Realm as well. I don't trust you guys with it.”.
So Rachel kills Clara over it in a big, gut-wrenching twist that, at least in the story, gets everybody because they weren't expecting it.
I think what people need to understand as well is that Rachel is a little bit all over the shop mentally still. We look at the events of Jericho, we look at the events of Trinity; and even though she has come into her own, her thinking processes are…I don't want to stay they’re out of place, but she does now have this holier-than-thou attitude and she's not willing to be fucked over by anybody ever again because of what she's been through. And if that means that she has to kill someone that she somewhat considers an ally over it, then she is going to do that. What the other twist is: she turns around and uses Pandora’s Device on herself and unleashes a fury of power never quite seen before in the Gloom Universe, instead of handing it over to the Heavenly Realm. She leaves with the Device, leaving Clara to bleed out and be held by her loved ones as she dies. She has become some kind of Grim Reaper… like the ultimate Grim Reaper taking that Device and killing Clara over it. And it sets up a big thing for what comes next in the universe.
But ultimately: this song is Clara's death song. It was always going to be Clara's death song. I always knew that this was going to be the way that it goes, unfortunately for a lot of people. I saw a lot of people clapping back recently for the way that Stranger Things ended and the way that they killed off Eleven. It’s like, “the female figure that's gone through the most trauma has been killed off by sacrificing herself”, that kind of thing. I'm kind of not scared about how people are going to take Clara's death because Clara has been traumatised, but she's also very much been her own person for most of it, especially over the course of this record. The person that's doing the killing here is Rachel. And it's not like Clara's sacrificing herself really for it. Rachel just straight up kills her over past events and isses, more or less, under the need of not wanting to be fucked over again.
I’m interested to see how people take it. I know a lot of the lore nerds are going to be really, really upset. And even I’m deeply upset, I was like, “fuck, I’ve written myself into a corner”.
Love II: A Walk Amongst the Poppy Fields
Clara's death was always going to happen in Love I, but I didn't want that to be the final send off for the record. If I'm going to kill off one of my favorite characters, then I need to send her off in the right way; in the Gloom way. If we ended it on Love I, it would be very, very sad and it would leave a lot unsaid as well for her character. So that's where Love II comes in. From a story based perspective, Clara wrote Sherlock a letter before the night of that big battle to be opened in the event of her demise, should she die. And that's what Love II – it’s essentially her last goodbye/farewell kind of thing to both the audience and to Sherlock in particular. And that's why we brought back the line from Villain, which was her first ever song that she was part of in the Gloom universe.
Sonically, Love I is very melancholic the entire time. It's probably the saddest song that we have, whereas for Part II I wanted to take bits from Love I but make it its own entity. Lyrically and sonically I wanted to make it a little bit more uplifting. And for Clara it’s her saying: "hey, sorry that this has happened, but just because I'm gone doesn't mean that you have to stop moving. While it's the end of my chapter, don't stop just because of me”. And that's to both Sherlock and to the audience. As I said, a lot of the lore nerds are going to be really upset. But I think we did a good job of sending her off. It took a little while to get this one right as well. And by the end of it, even though some people are going to be sad, they’ll hopefully understand.
ROYAL DISCORDANCE - OUT NOW VIA SHARPTONE RECORDS
BY TIANA SPETER
