Mississippi-based group and Carved from Stone Records artist Empty Atlas, released their most recent album "Kairos" in June 2020. We asked vocalist/guitarist Micah Smith to tell us about each track. Check out his commentary on the album below.

Sometimes, bands attempt to do too much when they expand sonically. But, every note on this record feels intentional and well-placed. The mix is smooth, and the songs ebb and flow with the ease and expertise of a band that has been playing together for years. If you’re looking for an arena rock record that still feels intimate and personal, look no further than Empty Atlas’s new masterpiece Kairos.

Maximal

To me, this is the song that most clearly expresses the heart of this album. It’s about the choice to sacrifice anything to reach a goal and how that can ultimately hold you back. We’d already written most of the songs on the album when I brought this idea to the guys, but literally on our first time playing it together just to see what happened creatively, it just clicked. And “Minimal” came together just a couple days after that, really telling us, “We’ve got an album now.”

Codebreaker

This is one that just started with writing the title down in the Notes app on my phone. My wife is a software developer and I was thinking of how code sort of sets these parameters for how a system works. Everything else then follows that system. But in the world, as ambitious people, we sort of say, “I see your system. I hear you saying all the reasons this won’t work. I’m going to try it anyway.” I think this song has so many cool moments, especially with the instrumental at the end. Bobby, Alex and Brennan are all just doing such cool things with their parts there, and it’s become one of our favorite moments of the album.

Florence

This is a unique one on the album because it started with that main guitar riff, which our bassist Alex wrote while in Florence, Alabama. He just had this little phone demo with it called “Florence” as a placeholder, and the name stuck. Like a lot of the songs on the album, this one is partially about being told all the reasons not to try, and just fully believing, “If I do it my way and put my heart into it, the door’s going to open. Just watch.” I love this one lyrically, too, because there’s wordplay on almost every line. Hopefully it’s also catchy and fun to listen to for everyone, but I wanted to really speak to something with this and do some unique things with the lyrics.

Carcosa

This is one of the few that, pretty much from my first demo, we knew exactly what this would sound like as a band. It’s based on an epic poem where the character speaks of this once beautiful city, Carcosa, in the past tense. Something happened that just decimated it, and he never can go back there. And that’s what failure can feel like. You don’t want to think on the places that hold bad memories or the instances where things didn’t work out. But those are often the things you can learn the most from.

We were super lucky to get Philip Lassiter, who was the horns leader for Prince. He just nailed the whole ending brass section, and it’s so cool. Also, just to praise Alex on this, he had the idea of layering in a pitched-up vocal part that is super interesting and gives the verses this sort of strange, ethereal feeling that I love.

Ouroboros

This is the “money parts everywhere” song, to me. Brennan does so many cool things on guitar, Bobby plays these really interesting drum parts throughout, and Alex gives it a ton of soul on bass. I wanted it to have this sort of slithering, intensifying musical quality because the Ouroboros, in mythology, is a snake eating its own tail. And the sort of heart of that idea in the song is, trying to break from bad patterns is a rough experience. You need people who will speak to you honestly out of love and tell you, “Something has to change.” That’s what this song is to me.

Birthday

I wrote this one coming up on my own birthday, actually, and it kind of came out as a fictional narrative, talking to someone at a birthday party, where they’ve got people, music, cake, conversation, and it all just feels old to them. This is sort of a response song to that: “You only have so much time here. Appreciate what you have and do some good with it.” I don’t mean it as something preachy, though. I’m singing to myself every time we play it. It’s kind of a heavy concept, but I also think it’s just a fun song. Bobby and Alex have some awesome groove moments, and all of Brennan’s lead parts have this cool singable quality.

Famous Friends

This is one that I just had a crappy GarageBand demo of and I brought it to the guys like, “I think this is something. Is it something?” And within an hour on it, we all were like, “Well, this is on the record.” It’s super dynamic and sweeping and theatrical like a lot of our favorite rock songs, but Alex kept it grounded with this really ballad-y keys part and atmospheric production elements so that the big parts feel even more massive.

This song is about someone watching a friend interact with a new crowd and act like they’re somebody else to sort of fit this mold. With the fame element, it’s sort of larger than life, but it touches on something I think everyone has experienced, just as friends sort of drift apart. It’s sad, but I also think it ends on this tinge of hope: You’re still you. I know it. It’s not too late.

Sway

This is another really narrative based song and has a bit of a darker, straight-up rock and roll sound while also still very much being an Empty Atlas song. It’s about someone calling an old friend who has moved away to make it big, basically to say, “Hey, look. People back home know you aren’t blowing up like you want to pretend. I’m not calling to rub it in your face; I’m calling to be a friend in a tough time.”

It did create a challenge musically because I had these rough-and-tumble open chords in the verses that are intentionally a little loose, and I’m asking Brennan, who is such a music theory guy, to just roll with it. At first, he was like, “Well, that chord is weird because it has this note in it, which shouldn’t be there.” And to his credit, he just sat with the song for a minute and goes, “But it sounds cool. And if it sounds right, then it is right.”

Valleys

We almost didn’t have this on the record, actually. I love the band Frightened Rabbit and wrote this song inspired by their lead singer Scott Hutchison. He always wrote really honestly about his struggles with depression, and this came from, “Man, I wish you could see how much your music changes lives and feel the same joy and comfort that you bring to others.” That was probably a year before he died. When that happened, I would play this song and play Frightened Rabbit tunes, just to sort of help me cope. I told the guys about it and what it meant to me, and said, “I think I need to record this.”

And them just being awesome friends, they immediately said, “We’ll make it happen.” We really hope it can mean something to someone else out there who is struggling and just remind them that joy isn’t just something you get to have on your best days and you aren’t your failures.

Minimal

Like the name suggests, this song is really a close to the story we started in “Maximal.” It also is super closely connected to our first full-length album, “Hestia,” with the theme of home. It’s about the toll that comes with sacrificing everything to pursue one goal - it may not be there once you’re done. We also really wanted this song to flow nicely from “Valleys” and nicely into “Maximal,” so that it feels both final and like the start of something new. There’s a line in “Maximal”: “But I never set the goal, so it’s always out of reach.” We wanted to create that feeling as the album ends and begins again, and we’re really proud of how it came together.

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