Black Mirrors are a four-piece Rock ‘n Roll band with an ambience amalgamated with Blues and Grunge based out of Brussels, Belgium. They are made up of vocalist & lyricist Marcella Di Troia, lead guitarist Pierre Lateur, drummer Yannick Carpentier, and guitarist/synths/backing vocalist Pierre Guillaume. They released their debut EP Funky Queen in 2017, followed by their first full-length Look Into The Black Mirror in August of 2018, and on November 4th, 2022, they released their second full-length titled Tomorrow Will Be Without Us through Napalm Records, a label’s whose headquarters reside in Austria. Black Mirrors have been with Napalm Records since their very first EP.
Fan Facts: The band was initially supposed to record Tomorrow Will Be Without Us in the United States at the Rancho De La Luna studio in Joshua Tree, California, a studio where Queens Of The Stone Age, Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop, and Eagles of Death Metal have recorded albums, however because of the world shutting down over the last couple of years, they had to record it at home.
We caught up with Marcella Di Troia and Pierre Lateur to find out more about Tomorrow Will Be Without Us.
Tomorrow Will Be Without Us was written during the lockdown era, rather than writing about the situations going on, they were more interested in writing about the question of how did we get to that point. Marcella’s lyrics in the album are a reflection about the way we as Human live on this planet, how there is a want to control everything, especially during the lockdown, as well as how we can destroy everything. “That’s why we decided to call our album, Tomorrow Will Be Without Us because for sure tomorrow will be without us, because of what we are a part of…And it’s happening right now, we’re part of a mass extinction. I mean, we believe so.”
Black Mirrors recently unveiled their third Music video for this album with the first track off the album, titled Snake Oil. It is the longest song on the album, saying it was a good statement for the album, “It was a good statement for the album. We just want to hit people in the face, right from the start.” He continued to describe the ending of the song as if it were an apocalypse, “the end of the song is like this big mess, this big Rock ‘n Roll mess, which was actually improvised in the studio.” The song was supposed to end sooner than initially planned, but Pierre felt like, “ok, we missed something at the end, and we just started to improvise and jam together. and we found this end.”
Lost In Desert is the second track off of Tomorrow Will Be Without Us. The Music video was co-directed by Marcella alongside Ludwig Pinchart. Marcella worked with the clothing, the scenery, and the backdrops, “I drew it, painted it, and the story, and ideas with the faceless people… It’s the first time I did that, and I’m proud of it. ” She added, “It was pretty fun and exciting to just think about the whole story and made everything from the very beginning to the end. “
Lost In Desert is a song about going somewhere else, when you feel like you don’t belong anymore where you are, going back to your roots, what you truly are, so you go to the desert, somewhere fast, somewhere quiet, and there’s nothing there….”I tried to use the faceless people as the people you see in the streets, but they look so weird to you because you don’t like where you are. So, it’s a bit like… Usually I quote The Doors songs People Are Strange. …It’s like ‘people are strange, when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone.’ I kind of took this influence…Basically, it was having these faceless people that looked weird, but you’re going back to something, what you truly are… The thing is you’re going back to the desert and something like the Nature side, to feel better with introspection… That’s what I wanted to show in this video.”
Pierre was very impressed with how Marcella was basically taking care of everything except shooting, as he was very busy working as a guitar teacher, doing the year end shows with the students to show their friends and family. Pierre wrote the Music for the song while being in a desert in Spain, “The state of mind I was in when I wrote the Music of the song before starting to work on the song with Marcella, it was natural to write this song in Nature. I was lonely, alone, in nice places…And the way her vision embraces mine, was awesome… It was like someone else was thinking or feeling the same kind of emotion as you, which makes sense because we worked such a long time together. I was amazed.”
Marcella began listening to Janis Joplin at a young age, falling completely in Love with her voice and how Janis would put her Soul into her songs, “I always want to cry when I see her perform. I think it’s kind of like a Spiritual Mother for me, although I don’t have the same voice as her, of course.” She is also very inspired by The Doors, as her big Sister used to listen to them a lot during her childhood, where she started listening to them around eight years old. Marcella had a huge poster of them in her bedroom, she Loved how Jim wrote and how he was an icon for the generation of the sixties.
She feels his voice is like a Father singing her a lullaby, “It soothes me, it’s super weird. On stage he was so wild…He was huge. He said, “did you have a good world when you died, enough to base a movie on?” It’s like, as an Artist, we are looking for that in a way when we do Music or a movie or something. As an Artist, do you look for something that stands in the future? Then people get to talk about you right after you’re dead, or many years when you’re not part of this world.”
Their first video released off of Tomorrow Will Be Without Us is titled Hateful Hate, I’ll Kill You, it is a video that was censored by social media because of the title of song. They received a message about their level of breach, saying they were using words to incite violence. “It’s nothing to do with our title, we’re not saying we wanted to kill other people… Just listen to the fucking song and maybe you’ll understand. We were like ‘oh c’mon!”, Pierre said.
Marcella wrote the song during the Black Lives Matter movement stating there was so much anger, and so much hate, “there’s something about hating our environment, why don’t we Love each other, respect our environment…what’s the deal? That’s why the first title that came out was Hateful Hate I’ll Kill You.” She said while laughing, “because I’m part of the people who are angry and sometimes not nice toward other people, I’m part of this as well, but there’s kind of an irony in it.”
Hateful Hate I’ll Kill You chorus:
Slaughtered body,
Every night and day, fire a gun,
Hateful hate tears us apart,
How silly is that?
We’re letting our lies shape our pride again,
How silly is that?
We act surprised and let it all drown again.
When it comes to the Music video, they wanted to portray a Life sequence for people to get to know how they act on stage. Marcella shared, “It’s pretty similar as the energy as you find when you see our shows. We wanted to have this live performance, and also the tree bark, the transformation…Was like being part of Nature and how to be part of Nature if you’re just turning to Nature, to be part of Nature and becoming the Nature, and we are still part of Nature… Transforming into a tree, seeing also from another perspective as well.”
Collapsology [Raise Your Voice], is another grungy, hard-hitting song on the record that heavily features Alain Johannes, who also produced the album and played many of the other songs on the album as well. When they wrote the song, during the pre-production process, Marcella recorded two different vocal tracks for the sound, “Here we had this Alice In Chains atmosphere where the lead singer and the guitarist were at the same level, not on every song, but most of the time….We were like, ‘ok, Alain is such a great singer and we really like the tone of his voice’ and as he was already producing the album, we just asked him and he was like ‘yeah’ and just go for it. Actually, he played on a lot of the songs on the album, but on that one we really mentioned it very clearly because he sings. He played guitars, keyboards, instruments from everywhere in the world…. But on that song, we really wanted to mention him.”
Fan Facts: Alain Johannes has worked with No Doubt, Hillary Duff, Kelly Clarkson, Iggy Pop, Queens Of The Stone Age, and more! You can check out all of the albums he’s produced and performed on here!
Aside from the fast, grungy, and harsh songs, Tomorrow Will Be Without Us also reveals Black Mirrors’ more melodic and vulnerable side with two very mellow, slow, yet powerful songs, Ode To My Unborn Child and Tears To Share. For this record, they had written twenty to thirty songs, and most of the songs were quiet, however they didn’t want to release something with only quiet songs, and they might use some of those songs for the next album.
Pierre elaborated, “It was quite natural to put these songs on the album because it’s also part of what we are, what we felt during that time…All the reflection we had at the time. To us, maybe the way we see it, an album it’s like a picture of what you are, or what you were in a certain moment of your Life. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best Music ever or the worst, to us it’s just like a way to express ourselves and clean ourselves from our past feelings, or to express some good feelings sometimes. To me, Lost In Desert is a positive song. Especially with Ode [To My Unborn Child], it’s super personal to us as a couple, but for Marcella as a woman…”
Marcella kindly shared the deep and personal meaning behind Ode To My Unborn Child, “The song was about, with the whole idea of Tomorrow Will Be Without Us, and also the fact that we have this reflection of our future for us as Human beings. Because we were wondering about having a child or not, and it was pretty tough in a way because I really Love kids since a very young age, I’m super easy with kids, I Love my niece, my nephews…And the thing is, now the question is, do we want one ourselves… Basically I’m still angry about the world with how it’s going on…And as a Mother, you want to raise your kids in a safe environment, you want the best for your kids…So, I was like, ‘maybe not in this world.’ So, we made a decision to not have a child, which was super hard…Because in another world I would Love to have one, but not in this one… I find it too, too hard…. It’s difficult for me to think about putting a new soul on Earth, as myself I don’t feel good in this world… I don’t want to put that on another Soul. It was super difficult. The song was kind of a mourning for me. Like a way to grieve everything. The recording process was also not that easy, but good in a way… It was super hard to record it, of course I cried…I think you can hear it; my voice was a bit shaky or trembling…But yeah, this was a part of the process. I think it was important to share our opinion and reflection on that because we are not the only ones who think that.”
When it comes to their album Artwork, which has a body being incinerated….Pierre wanted to get the meaning across, “It’s kind of a way to show society we will disappear from hurt and at the same time, if you can think about it personally as not as society, but as us as Human beings, like me, Marcella, you…One day or another, it’ll be the end of us, so we just have to do as much as we can to live a better Life, to enjoy it…To share good moments with people, start to think about stuff and how we can react, try to change a little bit, but brick after brick we could achieve something better than that. And at the same time, we don’t want to sound like a political party or anything…
We don’t pretend we are better than anyone in the world, we are part of the problem, we are part of this society….If it means anything, but we’re not saying to the people, ‘man, you should start to think, look at us, we are so intelligent, and you should act as we do!’ No, that’s not the case…We are part of the problem…. And also it’s like a reminder of Rage Against The Machine, a way to say thank you to the Music of the nineties.
We Love Music from the 90s for a very long time because that period of time was so exciting, and there were so many different good bands, and very different genres…If you think about the early nineties, of course you have the grunge, like the Seattle vibe, like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers…. And Rage Against The Machine showed up at that time, and you had bands like Radiohead, and Alanis Morrisette. It looks a little violent, the image itself, maybe our way to say thank you to these Musicians from the nineties.”
Tomorrow Will Be Without Us Track List:
1. Snake Oil
2. Lost in Desert
3. Tomorrow Will be Without Us
4. Hateful Hate, I’ll Kill You
5. Ode to my Unborn Child
6. Through the Eyes of a Giant
7. Collapsology (Raise Your Voice), feat. Alain Johannes
8. Anthropocene
9. Tears to Share
10. Say it Again
