Origami Angel Kick Off Their Debut Australian Tour This Week…

Washington, D.C. emo rock duo Origami Angel kick off their debut Australian tour this week! Origami Angel – vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty – boast tens of millions of streams on Spotify for their boundary-pushing, breakneck, cross-culture and cross-genre music. Not ones to be pigeonholed into any one sound, the pair pride themselves on their rock rollercoaster sound, driving seamlessly between sunny easycore jams, crushing metalcore riffs, jazzy indie rock, misty emo, electronic and so much more. Their latest album, Feeling Not Found produced by the legendary Will Yip (Movements, Balance and Composure, L.S. Dunes), demonstrates Origami Angel at the top of their class—refined but unrestrained, unhinged and profound and in fierce pursuit of a creative expression of their lived experiences. Ryland Heagy talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour which starts in Adelaide.

Are you really excited about touring Australia for the first time?
Yeah, I’m honestly super, super excited. It’s so much like a dream like thing because you never really feel it until you touch down. At least for me, I can never be like, oh, I’m about to be in England next week, but I am so excited and I know it’s just going to feel like a movie when I’m there.

Does it add another whole other layer of excitement just going somewhere completely new for the first time?
One hundred percent, I never really think about it. I always think about, I’m a little weird, but I’ll think about the plane as like a teleporter that I don’t know where I’m going to, especially if I’ve like you said, never been there before. Once I get into this country, I just feel overwhelmed and surrounded by a new culture, and that’s one of the funnest things to me, especially knowing that we are doing it through music is something I never really thought I’d be able to do in my life. It’s so, so exciting to get to new places.

Does it amaze you, especially when you look at your passport now and you look at some of the stamps, how far and wide your music has taken you now?
Yeah, it really does amaze me, and I can’t really do it justice in words because it’s one of those things where you look at the passport or like for me, you have a lot of downtime on these tours, that it’s just travel. Maybe you’re not talking to the band, maybe you’re having a silent moment, but I tend to have these moments where I really can’t put a word to it, but it’s joy and nostalgia at the same time. Knowing I’m going to be nostalgic for these moments later. It’s really something I can’t put into words, but it’s something I’m incredibly grateful for. Just to see the journey you’re talking about and then also to know that something that we created in a bedroom in Washington D.C. in the United States of America can be even known about anywhere else in the world, it’s an overwhelming feeling and it really does feel good to in those moments to know that you’re doing something that felt so impossible a few years ago.

For those who don’t know anything about Origami Angel how would you describe your music?
That’s a good question. I would call it a mix of emo and pop punk, but with a tinge of alternative rock and also whatever else we could find in the kitchen that day.

I love the band name. Is there a story behind how that came about?
So, basically I was talking to my friend when I had first started working on the first couple Origami Angel songs on our first EP and I couldn’t figure out a name. I had a name that wasn’t going to work because another band had a name too similar to it. I told him that I’m struggling to find a name. Like, what should I do? Later in the conversation he was like, well, what have you been doing recently? What have you been doing? I got really back into origami, don’t you remember when we were younger, I used to make the origami angels. Then he was like, oh dude, you got to call the band that and then I was like, Origami Angels? He said, no, no, no, no. Origami Angel. From that moment I was like, oh, that’s cool. It’s cool too because it allows me in this band to have the band name but also feel good about it being good because I didn’t really come up with it. My friend came up with it, so it’s not like, oh, he’s too self-centred. He thinks it’s cool. I’m like, nah, one of my best friends came up with that and it’s cool so I can like it.

How did you meet Pat?
Pat and I met at a show that I booked for him when I was in high school. He was drumming in a band that came on at last minute. I had a band drop out on us and one of my friends was like, oh, I know some kids. They knew Pat’s band mates. I had known some of Pat’s band mates, but I’d never met Pat. The band I was in at the time, we didn’t really have a steady drummer. We had a rotating cast, like I’m sure many bands have had that. When I saw Pat drum and we’re like, oh, he’s really good, like a real drummer. We need to see if he wants to join our band because we had a show on Wednesday, and that was Saturday. So, we’re like, hey man, three shows, three days and we have a show you want to play like six or seven songs, and he was like, awesome, yeah, let’s do it. We ended up just jamming with him one time and then going right to the day of the show. Since then, he played in that band, that band fizzled out and then we had linked on it. We had become friends because of it, and we wanted to continue making music together and that’s where Origami Angel started.

Do you just tour as a duo or do you have an extra part?
We’ve never toured with another person. We’ve never toured with another band member. We’ve had our friends come in to do like a guest guitar solo before, but that’s as close as we’ve ever gotten, because a lot of the identity to me and to Pat is being able to make that sound with just two people. It’s been as much of an engineering task as it is a musical task.

The sound that you have been able to create as the two of you on Feeling Not Found is incredible. Have you been stoked with the fan reaction to the album?
It’s so easy to get in your head about something that you’ve been creating for years at this point. But, this one, I was really stoked to see how many people who have been listening to the band for a while and how many new people have latched on and checked out the music. We definitely tried something different on this record. Everyone says that by every record, but we tried to do something different on this record and to the people that stayed along the ride, we really appreciate just anybody giving it a chance.

Was it a challenging album to make or did it all go to plan as you hoped?
It was a difficult record to make if I’m being honest. It was probably the hardest thing musically that I’ve ever been a part of. The process of it, to make a long story short, I basically had written a lot of the demos in the peak of Covid quarantine. I think because of that, we tried to pre-produce it in my space, it felt good in the moment, but we’d take it out and listen in the car or wherever else, and it’d be like, something’s wrong. We figured out what was wrong later. It’s just that I was a crazy person losing my mind and couldn’t write a song like a normal person would.

It really sounded like I had not played a song with another human being in the room for months. That’s just really the reality of it is that I was so disconnected by that thing that was a honing device for me for such a long time, which was playing music together. Pat and I just like any group of people playing music together, you form a community, and you learn the steps without speaking about it. I think I kind of accidentally unlearned those steps. But when I was probably at my lowest on this record, a dramatic shift happened where I was talking to our manager who also manages the producer Will Yip in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is very close to us, and he was like, Hey man, would you want to try these songs out with Will?

I was like, dude, I didn’t even think Will knew who we were, he’s one of my favourite, if not my favourite producers in all of music. He’s done so many legendary bands in the States and he’s such an amazing producer and he has such an aura about him. Of course, I want to do it. We went in, we pre-produced the record with Will and just moved some stuff around and then he was like a beacon of light that just showed we can actually finish this. We can actually make this as good as it needs to be because we’d put so much time into this record. It wasn’t just going to be something we gave up on and Will really just breathed new life into the tracks. We were able to really feel confident. It was like as soon as we got there, I knew where everything was supposed to be. Pat knew how everything was supposed to be drum wise. It’s like we figured it out as soon as we stepped in there. A lot of it’s because the vibe that he curates for his studio and for his sessions. It ended up being some of the lowest lows that we ever had creating a record, but in turn also the highest highs by far.

Having those lows as you described, does that make it easier thinking about the next album when it’s time?
I will tell you it, it’s been a dual-sided thing because not to leak too much, but I’m always working on something. It’s been two sides because I’m kind of always fighting this thing in me that’s like, oh, this isn’t as good as the last thing because I have to have this other side of my body that’s like, dude, the last thing was produced by Will Yip, your favourite producer of all time. I got to remember we haven’t finished this new thing yet. I do think there’s a lot of validity in what you’re saying in that knowing the challenges that we overcame with feeling not found pretty much, I think that we can make a record. However, I do think that it makes me feel a lot better about the next record, the record after that, which we hope to make and get to sooner rather than later instead of this dark cloud and it’s me, man, it was just my brain, it wasn’t really anything physical or anything, but instead of the dark cloud it’s turned into the light at the end of the tunnel.

Was it always the intention to create a concept album?
I think because of the situation I was in writing it and just because the situation in the world was in around the time, it kind of just breathed out as a concept record. Then a lot of what I was honing in lyrically over the next couple years, I think that’s when I had a batch of songs that when I put them together, I realised there was a concept there and then I tweaked a lot of that to fit a concept record a little bit better.

The themes of social media are still just as relevant now as it has ever been.
Yeah, that’s the thing. I had really worried about it being too dated to like 2020/ 2021 and coming out in 2024, but it seems like for better or for worse has stayed relevant and in some cases been more relevant. There’s a lot of nefarious things going on by people that control bigger parts of the internet now. I’ll listen to stuff back stuff, and just be like, I don’t even think this was half as bad when I wrote it as it is right now. So that for better or for worse, it’s relatable, but at what cost?

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Origami Angel on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…