Is it possible to love an album with your entire Heart Mind Body & Soul? That was the question asked of The New Regime‘s fans when the band released its new album, and the answer was a resounding, “YES.” First shared as segments over the course of six months, Heart Mind Body & Soul came together on Mar. 6 to provide 16 tracks of modern rock glory. Anchored by a title track that gets the heart pumping and the body moving, Heart Mind Body & Soul showcases the band’s evolution as they shift between moods, genres, and concepts over the album’s runtime. The band recently released the John David Moffat-created lyric video for “A Sweet Kind of Suffering,” a track Ilan Rubin, the mastermind behind The New Regine, describes the song about flipping “the weight of isolation…and learning to appreciate it” as “a mantra, of sorts.”
“The thing is that the album was written as an album and then divided into these EPs,” Ilan says EXCLUSIVELY to HollywoodLife when discussing this project. “So, I then had to think about how the songs were going to live amongst themselves in this format of four tracks apiece, and then in the whole of 16. So, when the entire album is out, everything is going to be reformatted and re-sequenced, so it’ll just have a different arc if you were to listen to it as an entire album from track one to 16, but when it came to four songs at a time I kind of had to find the four tracks that best complemented each other. To answer the question in terms of why the third one is a bit more rock, we knew that the song ‘Heart Mind Body and Soul’ was going to be on that one, so what were the best ones to complement it?”
As the names imply, the songs on Mind were meant to provide a more intellectual listening experience, while the tracks on Heart were more emotional, whereas Body was meant to get you to move. “With each one of these releases, we knew what would be the main track, or the focus track, if you will, and then which best supported that song. That’s kind of how it was constructed, in terms of this will be the first song that comes out, this will be the next one, and so on and so forth. It’s odd how it kind of worked out, because it’s not like I had this all-encompassing sort of theme going on in terms of writing it, but I happened to write a lot. I’m fairly prolific when I’m in the mode to write music, and because I’m in the headspace, things just happen to connect on a subconscious level, but it’s not until I revisit it afterward and kind of put things in their own boxes that I realize that everything fits very nicely and neatly.”
“But there’s no concept, necessarily,” he adds. “The song “Heart Mind Body and Soul” was written before the album was called Heart Mind Body and Soul.”
Though the song arrived before the concept, this serendipity afforded a new musical experience for fans. Each component – Heart, Mind, Body & Soul – were released separately, but when the full album was put out, those EPs were removed from streaming services. While some might decry the effect streaming services have had on music, mainly rock, this experience wasn’t something that could be done back when physical media was king.
“There’s this weird thing going on,” Ilhan tells HollywoodLife. “This is weird for me or people who grew up listening to albums, and I don’t mean to date myself or seem as if I’m older than most people are because I’m not. But I did grow up listening to albums, and releasing things piecemeal seems very odd to me, so this format for release that we stumbled across was kind of the best of both worlds.”
“I know lots of people have released a lot of lead-up tracks to the album, a lot of singles, and by the time the album actually comes out, close to half of it is already been out for a while,” he continues. “That’s one thing, but I just didn’t feel like I was in the position to put out one song at a time, because that’s not enough. If you’re a massive band and you have a song that you put out to radio, and radio’s playing it for months. Whatever you want to call it, that is living in the public space, and it’s present enough, but for the people who are into me and the people I’m trying to get to, I just don’t feel like one song is enough material.”
“Two [songs] I don’t feel like that really does it either. Three is close, but four just seemed like enough material to make individual statements,” says Ilan. “B the time the entire album is out, those EPs or those divisions of the album will disappear, and we’ll just be left with one — for all intents and purposes — double album, even though that was not the intent.”
“What I write comes from what I’ve already written and not repeating that, so I’m just constantly looking towards something else that excites me, and even though this album isn’t completely on it, I’ve written five or six other songs that are recorded in between these last tours and they sound completely different. That’s just the way I’ve always worked. I’ve never understood the desire to sort of pigeonhole yourself or say ‘okay, I’m a rock band, so I’m going to write 12 rock songs,’ or ‘I’m this, and I’m going to write 12 of that.’ I don’t do that, I’ve never seen the point.”
“And all of my favorites have been very versatile in terms of what they put out,” he concludes. “There’s been an obvious evolution from one thing to the next, and I try to keep that alive within my music because that’s just what seems like a natural progression to me. In terms of touring and going from really big things to small things, I want the New Regime to grow as much as it possibly can, but I’m not going to let other accomplishments hinder my drive to get my hands dirty and build from the bottom up. I think anybody who expects to start at a level, regardless of other things, is kind of living in another world, so I just do what I have to do.”
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Heart Mind Body & Soul is out now.