5 Questions With... is your chance to get to know a new or up-and-coming metal band. This week we shine the spotlight on Boston's Native Construct. The progressive group's debut album is Quiet World. Guitarist Myles Yang introduces us to his band.

Give us a brief history of Native Construct.
Native Construct started out as a passion project between a handful of first semester students at Berklee College of Music in September of 2011.


 As a kid coming to Berklee fresh out of high school, you find yourself in a strange situation where you’re suddenly completely surrounded by similarly aged people who are as excited about music as you are. It’s a bizarre experience. The natural reaction is to jam  a lot with lots of different people, so jam we did. And as you do this, you naturally gravitate towards the people who are doing things that align with your own interests. Native Construct was born of this process.

We eventually noticed we were finding a heading we were eager to pursue, and so we began to cultivate the project more and more during our years at Berklee. Before long, the writing process became much more involved and focused, turning into a true compositional collaboration. It was often challenging to find time to devote to Native Construct while pursuing our academics, but slowly the music flourished.

By May of 2013, we were ready to record our first LP. We’ve been sitting on this material for quite a while now, and we’re very pleased to now be working with Metal Blade Records to finally share it with the world.

Describe the songwriting and recording process for Quiet World.
The composition process is, for us, generally a solitary affair. We don’t play the music together until we have it entirely written out and fine-tuned. The recording sessions were fairly straightforward since we mostly knew exactly what we were looking for before we began recording. That said, working through these processes while studying full time at Berklee was a huge challenge.

There was never enough time in the day to get as much done as we would have liked. This, combined with our fancifully elaborate vision for the album and our nearly-nonexistent college student budget, meant it took us much longer to get the album done than we initially thought it would, but we’re really glad we took our time with it and gave it our best effort.

How would you characterize the style/sound of the album?
Manic, hyper-dense, over-the-top theatrical metal.

How did you come to sign with Metal Blade Records?

We had a bit of luck on our side while we were searching for record labels. Tommy Rogers from Between the Buried and Me heard our music and liked it enough that he offered to do us the very kind favor of helping us shop the album around to labels. He was able to get us in contact with Metal Blade Records, and we went from there.

Anything else you'd like to mention?
A muffin can be very filling.

(interview published May 2, 2015)