Of Mice & Men

The official account for RIAA Gold Certified American Metalcore band from Southern California.

With Another Miracle, their most explosive full length yet, Of Mice & Men deliver a masterclass in modern heavy music balancing bone crushing breakdowns with arena ready rock anthems that hit just as hard. The unifying characteristic is the fact that the band are always authentic to themselves while they take creative chances that will likely surprise even their most dedicated fans. “We’re always pushing the boundaries of what excites us musically,” vocalist/bassist Aaron Pauley explains. “We never thought we would get to our ninth album, so the only way to progress forward is to challenge ourselves and utilize what we’ve learned from working with different producers over the decades.” Correspondingly, this is the third album that the band which also features drummer Valentino Arteaga as well as guitarists Phil Manansala and Alan Ashby self-produced and engineered, with Pauley mixing and mastering the album in order to fully realize the band’s collective vision.“The process of self-recording and self-producing this album as well the last two has seen us really trying to one up what we’ve done in the past and it’s on us to do that,” Arteaga explains. “On this album in particular, we wanted to push the boundaries of what that sounds like for our band.” From the electronic accents of “Troubled Water” to the unfiltered aggression of “Hourglass,”
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Another Miracle sees Of Mice & Men leveling up without retreading the sonic formulas that have been successful in the past. “We wanted to create songs that didn’t have the predictability of what we were going to do next to keep the fans on the edge of what’s going to happen next,” Manansala adds. Listeners may not expect that the brutal breakdown at the end of “Hourglass” would lead into the acoustic guitar introduction of “Wake Up,” but in the context of the album these unlikely transitions make sonic sense. It’s no surprise why “Wake Up” is also one of the album’s singles. With its soaring chorus and atmospheric arrangements, the song truly transcends genres and shows Pauley stretching out vocally in ways that compliment the carefully syncopated instrumentation. While the band’s vocalist likes to leave the meaning of his songs ambiguous, he says “Wake Up” is open to interpretation when it comes to whether the lyrics are talking about the mental state of dreaming, hallucinating or having a psychedelic experience and that undisclosed liminal state that is mirrored by the music. “That song is really an imperative to live in the present because you have the opportunity to dictate your own experience in a lot of ways,” he explains. “You don’t get to control a lot of things in life, but you can control your consciousness in a few interesting ways.” That spirit of pushing himself and the band’s audience out of their collective comfort zone is a theme of Another Miracle, an album that will undoubtedly have a unique meaning to each listener. “I feel like on our last three albums we’ve really dove into layering tons of production and other instrumental elements into the background of our music,” Ashby says about the sonic textures of these songs that unfold themselves more deeply on each subsequent listen. “On the last two records people have said we sound a little more experimental, but to me that just means there were more elements of parts that weren’t just a guitar riff or a singing part,” he continues. Another Miracle undeniably features Of Mice & Men’s signature sound that fans have come to love, but if you are willing to take the time to really listen, there’s a level of depth lurking beneath the surface that keeps these songs from ever sounding stagnant or dated.
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In addition to having two gold selling singles, Of Mice & Men have racked up countless accolades throughout their career: Having their 2014 album Restoring Force chart at number one on the Billboard independent chart, touring alongside Linkin Park or taking home the Best International Newcomer Award at the Kerrang! Awards. While these accolades are nice, the band are most proud of the fact that their current lineup, which has been together since 2016, has been able to forge a relationship that allows them to keep creating powerful music. “I think we’re more locked in than ever,” Pauley says. “There’s less friction than ever before and I think that friction is what keeps people inside of a box because it gives it its shape,” he continues. “When you get rid of that, you open it up to allow for a bunch of different ideas that you may not have come up with [if the group dynamic wasn’t the same.]” That expansive sense of opportunity informs every second of Another Miracle
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and while the album won’t delude listeners into thinking they’ll never face adversity, it illustrates that we have more in common than we do separating us from each other. “A lot of the time, we feel that the uniqueness of our circumstance prevents us from connecting with others: ‘How could anyone possibly know what it's like to go through what I'm going through?’” Pauley says. “That being said, everyone, and I mean everyone, knows what it's like to wish for a miracle during a time when everything seems hopeless. It seems to be one of those core human experiences that ties us all together,” he adds. “That's exactly what Another Miracle is about and we hope you enjoy it.”