September Mourning: Progression is ‘Important to Keep Rock Alive’

If you're into graphic novels and dark music but haven't heard of September Mourning, you're missing out. Led by a character named September, the band is known as a "transmedia project," and their specialty is comics and metal. September spoke with Loudwire Nights host Toni Gonzalez about their new graphic novel, the progression of rock and how she considers their music "nerd-core."

September Mourning: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1 is the first graphic novel by September Mourning. "It's a culmination of all four issues, the standalone issues of September Mourning," September explains. Her character, as she describes, is a "human-reaper-hybrid" who wants to save humanity. "So it becomes this giant, epic battle between the living and the dead, and it's really cool."

The novel is can be found at Barnes & Noble, Target.com, Sumerian's website and will be available for purchase at their shows.

The project has a heavy emphasis on its image and portraying the storyline onstage, as between makeup and wigs, it takes three hours for September to get ready. "It's so different than my everyday, who I am. I love kind of transforming myself."

The music, however, is just as important to the project as well. Though their style is more of a dark alternative metal, September gives her stance on the progression of active rock, and how seeping other genres into it is imperative to keep it alive.

"It's interesting because genres of music, to me, the only way that they grow is if they kind of transform themselves over time, and they bring in other elements of other kind of musical formulations into their fold a little bit," she admits, citing Linkin Park, who brought in elements of pop in the early 2000s, as an example. "I think that, more or less, that spillage of modern hip-hop and modern urban music is going to define what moves into rock...Or they bring in EDM, which is very popular and is making a big movement too, and I think that's really cool."

"We've started to do that with 'Empire' and 'Glass Animals,'" she continues. "They have elements of both sonic landscapes, and we tend to bring that into our music. We hope to do that even more moving forward because it's progression. It's progression of the genre and it's progression of something that's original, and that's really important to keep rock alive."

"A lot of times, new and different gets a lot of slack before it catches on. A lot of times, something that's really good gets a lot of hate, and then all of a sudden, everybody's listening to it, and everybody's doing it and everybody's noticing it and everybody's trying to be it...It's kind of like the Nickelback factor. Everybody hates on Nickelback but still, they sell out arenas," she says laughing.

September is looking forward to their upcoming tour with Rob Zombie, whom she believes defined an entire genre. She says that on their upcoming album, the band is trying to find their own signature sound — which they call "nerd-core."

See their upcoming tour dates here.

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