Devin Townsend’s 2024 album PowerNerd was the first of a trilogy which continues with the recently-announced Moth, and saw him abandoning his prog influences to relive the party-rock bands of his past. But as he told Prog at the time, there was a deadly serious reason behind the move.
Devin Townsend has never shirked away from discussing his mental health in interviews or in his music, but it's never been presented like it is on PowerNerd. Much of its instrumental nucleus remains, with signature Devin guitar work and top-of-the-mountain choruses aplenty – but those elements are blended with the grappling with grief, and facing down his demons for perhaps the first time.
“The record follows the process of ‘how do you get through losing someone?’” he explains. “You can’t just stop working. So you get through it. Each song progressively goes through that. It wasn’t planned – it just happened.
Article continues below“Glacier is about the death of somebody, and then Goodbye is when you make peace with it. I think, for much of my life, I haven’t processed these emotions. I could turn it into work because of my tendency to get hyper-focused on projects; I hadn’t recognised I’d repressed so many of those emotions. So when the dam started to crack, I had to surrender to it.”
He continues: “I always thought you could intellectualise things and just keep things under wraps. But when it wants to come out, it does – and it did during the making of the record. There were moments where I didn’t think the record was going to happen. But I hope that process, and experiencing the stages of grief, is of some use to people. It was to me.”
PowerNerd stands as a manifesto for powering through adversity and turning what can be perceived as weaknesses – such as Townsend’s hypersensitivity to emotions – into superpowers. And as he soldiered on, lessons were learned of his larger-than-life self.
“So much of my career and my work has been complicated music,” he accepts. “It’s lots of notes and complicated time signatures and crazy stuff. But a big part of the process of losing someone was gaining this different view of myself.
“I told myself I had my shit together – but I realised I was still a kid; I was still 15 years old. That’s why the music on this record became ironically appropriate. I grew up in a lower-middle class kind of area and we didn’t have a ton of money. The social scene was to go to a bonfire; you listened to AC/DC and Motörhead and it was girls and beer. Part of the honesty of this record was just like, ‘That’s where my lineage is, more so than a lot of the prog stuff that people would assume.’
“I didn’t listen to Gentle Giant, King Crimson or Genesis back then. So when I got sideswiped by life, I realised the stuff I’d loved when I was 15 was coming out of me. It was a little strange to admit that, because that music has less social collateral for what people think is appropriate for a guy who writes prog. And so all my childhood, and all the loss and trauma, coalesced into this imperfect, perfect thing.”
In the quest to connect with his emotions, Townsend found his usually dense and exuberant production to be insincere. “It’s definitely still full of too much shit!” he admits. “But it was a conscious decision to strip things back, for sure. I had lyrics written for it that were simple and dumb. But then I realised, ‘I actually don’t feel that way.’
“The biggest problem was the verses – I couldn’t find an approach that seemed true enough. Typically what I do is I track four vocals, tune them and time-align them, and it’s this big pad of vocals. But every time I did that it sounded distant, emotionally, in a way that was in opposition to what was going on.
“By the end I was so pressed for time I ended up doing one vocal with a handheld mic without tuning it and without anything. It just sounded so vulnerable, so I kept it. It was weird because I didn’t love how it sounded, but it was the only thing that sounded appropriate. I went down all these rabbit holes with different ideas and sentiments, but they all sounded like I was lying.
“After all the years of choirs and orchestras and 700 tracks and all this shit, I’m just like, ‘Guys, it’s been a rough few years. I’m a confused 15-year-old from Surrey.’ PowerNerd ended up being the most vulnerable thing that I think I could possibly have put out. And I didn’t mean to! It wasn’t some clever artistic move on my part. It’s just that my fucking life exploded while I was making a party record.”
With a crack in his voice, he adds, “It was a leap of faith in a lot of ways to do that. I realised I’ve been insecure about it for so many years. You can hide yourself behind the production and make yourself sound like a god on top of Mount Olympus slaying a dragon. But what my voice actually sounds like is the verses on PowerNerd – I’m a human being.
“And there’s a part of me that’s embarrassed. You want people to think of you as always being a powerhouse or whatever, but that’s not what I wanted with this, to be honest. A more direct nature seemed more fitting.”
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