Malcura - Walk-On

Release date: 10/02/2025

In December 2023, German power metal icons Blind Guardian performed in Melbourne, Australia. Simon and Colin attended the Friday night show. Standing in the Northcote Theatre, with the lights low, the sound of the house music fades, the audience cheers, but - instead of the band immediately charging onto the stage, something else happens. Ambience. Poetry. Ticking clocks. Violins. Sound and light coming together in an epic foreshadowing of the performance ahead. As the crescendo nears - the "walk-on" occurs. The band finally emerging from side-stage. The crowd goes wild. For Malcura, 2024 became the year of the walk-on track.

Captain Snus fights his way across an unforgiving galaxy, hell bent on his quest to find the Queen of Spades. While exploring an ancient crypt on an outer moon of Epslion-2 Alpha-45, Snus makes a chilling discovery about the nature of the Queen's plans - but too late! The Queen of Spades arrives, bringing with her war and destruction. The Captain makes a lucky escape and seeks urgent repairs to his ship on a distant planet. The services of the mechanic come at a high cost, derailing Snus' quest and scuttling his moral compass. Set on her own mission to bring peace to the galaxy, the Queen heads for Earth to unleash her reckoning. Her terrible medicine: Malcura.

Meanwhile, our band of heroes enjoys coffee at a local café.

About the music

Malcura bass player, Colin, shares his inspirations in creating each track from the EP.

Mordi Fest - February 24th

My one goal on this track was to emulate classic sci-fi action movie "In a world..." trailers. It seemed only natural to build the dialogue from the plot set out for us in Malcura II. However, despite technically being in the band since before the release of our second album, I have never actually asked my bandmates what the real plot line is, or what the final image for the song Queen of Spades means. So I invented for myself a dark sequel, like David Bowie did for Major Tom. We find Captain Snus lost in space, mercenary for hire, caught in a constant struggle for survival. What part of his adventure changed him? Will he ever return to Earth? Will he ever find peace?

It was a surprise to all of us how well the walk-on track worked. Imagine: it's a Sunday afternoon, it's hot, you're resting in the shade, enjoying the delights of Mordi Fest, when suddenly, without context, this sound booms across the open space. We waited until the choir section began and then made our way onto one of the largest stages we had played. The crowd cheered. They had no idea what was happening or why. But they cheered. That's the power of the walk-on track.

Bendigo Hotel - March 3rd

This gig was billed as being the last ever show at the Bendigo Hotel. The Bendi was a dedicated rock and metal venue located in Collingwood, a premier area for music in Melbourne. This particular gig saw us take the stage at midnight, after 5 of the most face-melting thrash metal bands I have ever seen. I decided to find inspiration in the venue and circumstances when writing the dialogue for this walk-on track.

• "Dim hallways, thick stale air, shrines to alien gods" is a reference to the band room itself. In particular the sticky floors that lead you past the stage and out to the beer garden, which was often crammed with smokers. The stage is the shrine. Since there was no elegant way to walk-on to the stage, Josh, Jenna and I knelt in front of the drumkit as if we were praying. As the track progressed, we raised our metal horns in honour of the venue.
• I was playing "Doom: Eternal" at the time, which has really evil, male choir parts in its soundtrack. The chromatic descending bass parts here are a reference to that game, as well as the generally gross, wet, mouth noises at the beginning of the track.
• "A temple of fierce spirits, clad in black, proudly wearing the twisted sigils of their clan" is simply a description of metal heads wearing band t-shirts.
• The words "A deafening sermon" precede the pounding of drums, and is intended to reference Slayer's "Reign in Blood". And I just realised the character in Doom is often referred to as "Slayer". That's sick.
• "Another heartless development to your cruel conspiracies": Earlier I mentioned Collingwood as being a premier area for music. The fact is that property developers continue to seize land in popular cultural hubs and cram dense, multi-story apartment buildings into them, capitalising on the seemingly unstoppable cultural-death-march of gentrification. These apartment buildings, once constructed, become homes to people who realise that living in cultural hubs isn't awesome, because live music venues are loud and generally host gigs at night, when you want to sleep. For years, the Bendigo Hotel was viciously brutalised by noise complaints and curfews. I believe these played a major part in the decision to close the business. With that context in mind, it seemed only right to place the dialogue over the sounds war, with us ultimately being crushed by a giant unflinching titan mech.

Last Chance Rock and Roll Bar - April 26th

By this point in time I had gone off the deep-end and perhaps forgotten the intention of a walk-on track. Of all the tracks, this one is the most zany. After putting the Bendigo Hotel together I had gotten the idea that a long-running narrative should unfold across multiple gigs. A way to reward dedicated fans who consistently see us perform. This wasn't a realistic expectation, since the previous two tracks were aired in such drastically different settings that I had rendered it impossible for anyone to achieve any level of comprehension that a story was unfolding. Subsequently, the 20 people attending our performance at the Last Chance Rock and Roll Bar were completely bamboozled by this walk-on.

• "The motivator and hex-caps are totally fried": this introductory monologue is a reference to the opening scenes of "Halo 2", in which an engineer tells Master Chief how cooked all his equipment is. The character of the mechanic was mainly inspired by classic and modern characters from Star Wars, in particular Peli Motto from The Mandalorian (whose name I had to look up).
• "It'll cost you 6 million Solaris and take a couple weeks." In the year leading up to this gig, another institution of the Collingwood music scene was under threat. The Tote was being sold, and yet again, there was a serious risk that this bastion of live music would be bought and demolished by property developers. The owners of Last Chance Rock and Roll Bar created a successful crowdfunding campaign and raised $3 million to help them compete in bidding for the property, which was estimated to sell for $6 million. It was only a few weeks before this gig that they successfully negotiated the sale.
• The chosen currency "Solari" is a reference to the currency of the sci-fi epic, Dune. The 2nd Dune movie had just been released in cinemas, so it was fresh on my mind.
• "Last chance for glory" is a minor reference to the name of the venue itself.
• "I can't stand this new-age space rock." In early 2024 the AI revolution was kicking off, and getting the machine to produce creative stuff was the popular target for start-ups in this space. In particular, the first wave of AI music apps had just been released. In response I had a minor existential crisis. We can and will debate the worthwhileness of generative AI for the rest of time, but the reality is this stuff is pretty amazing. I wanted some classic rock music for the workshop so that I could split the scene in two parts: on the shop floor and in the office. Initially I went looking for free samples to assemble into a pretty normal rock track. Finding the resources proved difficult and time-consuming. I wasn't getting the result I wanted. So I offloaded the responsibility to the machine. "Make me some generic rock music with screaming guitars and big drums, please." That's what it did. And that's what the Mechanic can't stand and promptly switches off.

Evelyn Hotel Residency - July 4th, 11th, 18th

In July we performed three weeks in a row at the Evelyn Hotel, with The Mistakes, Trubug and Jenna Campbell (our brilliant guitarist) making up the opening acts respectively. Initially I had planned to create different walk-ons for each week, but that proved a difficult task. Instead, we get this trio of tracks, for the beginning, intermission and 2nd set of our performance on July 4th.

Now we meet the Queen of Spades for the first time, and realise that she has her own motivations moving through the galaxy. Her use of the word "Malcura" is different to Captain Snus, who mainly seems to use it in reference to some obsession or trait of his own. Here the Queen speaks of it as a "gift," something to be given or forced upon others. The Queen of Spades has big Thanos energy.

In parts 2 and 3 we hear the ticking of clocks. This is a direct reference to the Blind Guardian gig which inspired this whole set of works. At this point it is worth mentioning two other excellent walk-ons that I experienced in 2024: Windrose and Rumahoy. In a lucky coincidence, I got the chance to see them play at Max Watts in Melbourne. Rumahoy's walk-on was hilarious, with the drummer emerging from behind the drumkit, perhaps having been hidden there since before doors had opened to let patrons into the room. Windrose enhanced theirs with an animated movie of mountains and mines. Windrose - Dwarf Metal. Rumahoy - Pirate Metal. Blind Guardian - Power Metal. Malcura - metal-adjacent Latin inspired fusion. See? This walk-on thing makes sense for us.

Tanglewood Festival - December 30th

Walk-ons are meant for this exact sort of gig. But the feel and tone needed to change. As fun as it is producing gloomy sci-fi noir, it's not the right vibe for Tanglewood - which is full of hippies - which I say with great affection. The direction with this one was to fill it with pseudo-philosophic tripe. That doesn't mean it isn't full of fun references though.

• The staccato flutes at the beginning of this track are doing two things: first, the playing style is meant to reference the theme music from Alien. Second, the chords that the flutes are outlining are referencing a popular flamenco tune called "Libertango," which is one of Josh's favourites, and which Malcura has performed a handful of times.
• "Tales of life, death and rebirth" - The narrator in this track is supposed to be me, but the style is imitating famous popular science communicators like Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson. In particular, this section about stars and stories is inspired by Tyson's famous "we are stardust" quote, which my mother recited during my wedding earlier in November.
• "Common life that we all experience" - This whole section is more pseudo-philosophy. I wanted to poke gentle fun at the cultural scene that surrounds "hippies." Don't get me wrong, they're great. But, you know those times when you meet people, and they use a lot of vague language that sounds kind of enlightened, but you walk away not being sure whether they really meant what they were saying? That's the vibe of this bit. And I thought it was really funny to juxtapose the epic synths, strings and dialogue of "common ties that connect us all" against the totally normal procedure of ordering coffee.
• The coffee order is what we would get at a café, with the exception of the cappuccino, which I assigned to Jenna. She usually orders a latte as well, but I had to change it because it didn't help the flow saying "latte" so many times in a row. For completeness, Simon has a large strong latte, I have an oat latte (or soy, long black or batch), and Josh has a large, strong, soy latte, one sugar.