NO ENTRY
The fourth album, "the Slender Man one"
You can listen to the album above by selecting a track. Or:
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Three albums in, and we by now have a good idea of what a Sunsetters album sounds like. But No Entry is the strange album. The compositions are fairly normal, if highly polished and punchy, but the sounds are free to stretch their legs, to develop a more defined and ambient narrative, and the concept itself is more grounded this time. No Entry is the portrait of a particular kind of paranoid western man who has isolated himself to obsess over a mysterious journal he found in the woods. As the title indicates, you will find no entry into the actual depths of that mystery here, instead the lyrics wander with the music through a tragic character study, with the horror story only becoming overt by the end. There's a vibe here, underneath an album that took a lot of effort to refine.
To help them tell that story, the Sunsetters were joined by veteran guitarist Ridley Coe, known by her stagename Sally Death, of the (also fictional) experimental metal band Coestts, who predate Sunsetters and were an influence on them. So this is the first Sunsetters release to make use of an instrument that sounds at all different from what we're used to hearing here. Sally's guitar is well-toned, tuned down, and chunky. (I used a different soundfont for her, one that sounds more like a "real" guitar. This album is, in parts, built around that sound.) And in exchange, the Sunsetters lost one of their regulars-- rhythm guitarist Remy Larson went off around this point to do his own thing.
So there's more context to this one compared to previous albums. And, actually, there's even more context than that-- this was the first Sunsetters album to be recorded at Gothic Egg Studio, an old creepy decommissioned military base converted by the record label into a recording studio; and this was in fact the only Sunsetters album to feature Sally Death, for a Reason. But that's getting into the deeper Fiction of the Sunsetters (which starts to shift gears by this point in the discography), a Fiction I will reserve for elsewhere on this website. You're on this page because No Entry is an album you can listen to, with a cool little plot.
Nonfictionally, Lindsay and I began work on this one before the last two albums were done, and I spent a long long time considering the sound this album would have. I spent my own money making sure I had the rights to use the specific soundfont for Sally's guitar, and yeah frankly I don't expect to make that back, but I'm in this for the art!!! We released the album in 2023, and for this Website Release I gave the album a surprisingly thorough polishing.
Further reading:
LYRICS
FICTIONAL INTERVIEW
NONFIC PDF
No Entry Art
A man in a business suit, his face a TV broadcast error, stands imposingly over a messy background. Fellow denizens of the internet will recognize him as the Slender Man.
This art comes from Wiratomkinder, who had surprised me with beautiful art in the past and who I asked to whip up some kind of album cover based on the name "No Entry." They gave me that, many many years ago now, and I always looked forward to making this album so I could try and represent it.
A Sick Story
Quiet intro, building into noise, and foreshadowing "The Man Who Wasn't There" and, ultimately, "Best Regards."
Mood-setting, dark and gradually noisy.
A western country, in 200X. There is a man, who we will call The Guy.
Prophetic to the Blind
Anthemic singalong song, metal guitars with dramatic bass and smooth beat. Builds and builds, then simmers off to transition into the next.
Our first full song this time is almost conventional, driven by melody and counterpoint and one slick beat. This one started as a style experiment with the melody you'll hear later in "Death Of The Author," and it hit the marks I was going for.
The Guy is angry about everything in his life. He sees society as falling backwards into depravity and oppression. He sees himself as a rare preacher of the truth. The Guy has found a journal that he claims proves all of this.
Towers and Citadels
Softer melodic transitional piece.
Was originally gonna be a lot longer and gain a drum beat as it went on, but frankly this works great as a transition.
His rants were sincere, his fear true.
Contract Desk Jockey (Shut Up and Play)
Upbeat rock, with acoustic guitar going nuts over the top, and haunting mellotron bridge.
Lindsay made the chords and chorus, and I gradually added more and more elements to it until it became this bop. A bop about bops.
Because nobody liked to listen to The Guy, he ran out of friends in his adult life. He was able to socially subsist by doing drugs with strangers at local rock concerts, but this was not enough..
Being Watched
Steady synth-heavy doom metal, dwelling in spaces. Introduction of Sally Death guitar.
Lindsay wrote the first minute, I wrote the bulk of the rest, and then we each kept tweaking it. We both like some good slow grooves. The vibes here are chill, with just a hint of creep.
The Guy did have one hobby that granted him peace: camping in the forest. It was during one of these trips that he found the journal, or that the journal was given to him by an unknown man (he never spoke about the circumstances of his finding the journal).
The Boy in the Lighthouse
The Sunsetters do electronica, with sweet drum-and-bass bridge. A lonely song.
A Jordan original. Started as a sort of mellow pop song, and then it grew some electronica elements. Took me a while to figure out the verses, though they ended up being quite simple.
Aside: Once upon a time there was a boy who lived all alone in a lighthouse. He did not know how to leave. He only knew to watch the ships roll past.
Electric Distant
Ambient drum-driven instrumental, filling a space with ambient chords and simple melodies, building into a bouncy climax before ending with guitar chords ringing out.
Another Jordan original, one that has served as the basis for a few different things. I had a specific mood in mind (something 80s synth-driven rock instrumental) and built something that would hit that. The current version is a from-scratch rewrite.
Aside: Weather the isolation, boy.
Colors of Grace
A good old-fashioned metal song, with cool melodies and chugging riffs and heavy drums and a long guitar solo.
It's another venture into the midtempo "Metallica-like." The core song here has been complete for nearly a decade, as it's pretty awesome, but I had to figure out what my standards were re: audio mixing for this project.
Back to the matter at hand. The Guy obsessed over the journal and found connection in it. When he would talk openly about its contents, he would describe it as the diary of a war veteran who fought for his country and was abandoned by his government for it, murdered by police. This was confirmation of everything The Guy believed in and drove him away from any pride or trust in his community. He fears he would be labelled as a traitor for his beliefs.
Follow Me unto the Brink
Dramatic interlude, synth providing the chords for Sally guitar to harmonize over, introducing us to "The Man Who Wasn't There."
Short and sweet, more a piece I did to prepare myself for the following song.
This whole story is made up of unknowns, an unreliable protagonist given an unreliable journal by an unreliable source. Sit with that uncertainty, that sheer ambiguity, because this is a story where none of the facts matter besides the one we're building to.
The Man Who Wasn't There
Dark electronica, new-wave, post-punk, faux-industrial, whatever you want to call it, it's just a dark little bop.
So like nearly a decade ago, I made a style experiment for what the eventual No Entry could sound like. That was a song called "The Cremator." The song itself is.. pretty good! But too simple for my standards of a Sunsetters song, while also being a complete piece that doesn't really need anything added to it. I had to rewrite it from scratch, seeking the same general ideas, and that's what "The Man Who Wasn't There" is.
Aside(?): Maybe if this world had monsters in it, predators of our spiraling paranoia stalking us in the corner of our eye and vanishing in a blink, in this modern time the monsters would wear a suit and tie. Strangely, a song about this very subject was known to The Guy, though he never paid attention to the lyrics; the song itself was kept in his periphery, the "corner of his eye."
Death of the Author
Slow grand full-band dirge, reprising the melody of "Prophetic to the Blind," then having an extended suspenseful outro.
A Lindsay original. I've done very minor edits to it over the years, almost entirely to the drums. This song is a crushing one, so heavy.
In his last days, The Guy's beliefs were no longer consistent, held together only by anger and fear, and the increasing sense that he had a duty to fulfil.
Best Regards
Long, wandering, jazzy, dark rock. An exchange of riffs and melodies, making good on the promise of "A Sick Story," eventually reprising "The Man Who Wasn't There," and building to a climax that's the heaviest moment on the album, before dying out in an epilogue.
The Big One for this album. This took a lot of work between the two of us, and the nature of that work is hard to explain. This needed to be a strange song, a narrative-driven one where it feels like we're going off the rails and just have to hear where it's going. It needed a tight flow. Did we succeed? I mean, I think so, but really it's up to you.
One day, The Guy read through the journals one last time (which, truthfully, hardly say what he claimed they said and were rather opaque).
Then he placed the journal aside, and grabbed a gun, and left his house to do a terrible thing. He died in a shootout with the police.
A sick story.
No Entry has an uneasy cohesion: its plot is bitter and uncertain, its music tighter and more punchy than previous albums. Its vibe is hard for me to pinpoint, but I know it's there. Maybe the vibe is "careful." It's confident but careful, like it's concerned with speaking around a dark subject.
This is the start of the second "era" of the Sunsetters project. We're a few albums in and have even had an EP by now, we have been sufficiently introduced to the project's form and its appeal, and anything that comes now must stand on its own as confident music. Everything before this has at least an element of "well, the sunsetters are still figuring out some things." By the point of No Entry, they have their sound, and maybe they're figuring out additions to their sound, but it's from a firm position of already innately understanding their foundation.
There's a lot to say about the actual plot! But most of what I'd want to say can be found in the NONFIC Commentary PDF.
There's also a lot to say about the "deeper Fiction," or I guess, as the cool kids would say, the "lore" of this album. No Entry stands the closest, of all Sunsetters albums, to the adjacent Coestts project, Coestts being another fictional band represented by MIDI music I've been working on. But Coestts is a solo project, I'm writing it all from scratch by myself, and so progress goes at a far slower pace than Sunsetters. But. There is still progress.
So this album is immersed in context. That is another aspect of the fact we are in the second era of the Sunsetters project now. The narrative is starting to shift. That.. also requires a lot more work on my part, so I can't guarantee the Fiction side will always update alongside the music side, but by the time the project is finished, it will all be there, so stay tuned.
At this point, who knows what the fifth album will be?