Interview Pick Up Goliath

Pick Up Goliath return with their bold, intense sound—blending atmosphere, emotion, and gripping heaviness. In this interview, the band dives into their creative vision and the forces shaping their newest work.

1. Final Requiem marks the conclusion of your symphonic metal project Artificial Ascendency. How did you approach closing such an ambitious, multi-movement narrative?

Closing Artificial Ascendency meant finding a balance between structural discipline and sheer emotional weight. Final Requiem is built around a modernised Rondo form, so I had a very clear architectural framework to honour. At the same time, it needed to feel like an overwhelming, irreversible end to the narrative, the moment where humanity is finally erased. Working inside that tension was the key.

I leaned into a wide palette of musical devices to push that sense of collapse and escalation. There are modulations to closely related keys in a more traditional compositional sense, then moments where the harmony tightens into chromatic clusters to create pressure and instability. The meters and rhythmic feels shift constantly, which lets the ground keep moving under the listener. Vocally, I wanted extremes. There are clean passages, then grits, screams, and full gutturals, each representing a different facet of the story’s final descent.

In effect, I threw everything at this movement because the narrative demanded that level of intensity. It needed to sound like the last surge of chaos before everything is wiped away, while still retaining the compositional clarity that runs through the whole project.

2. The final movement uses the Rondo form, with themes returning altered each time. How did this structure reflect the story of humanity’s rebellion and ultimate downfall?

Using a Rondo form for the final movement let me mirror the narrative in a very deliberate way. The recurring A section became a symbol of humanity’s fixed mindset, their refusal to adapt even as the world around them is collapsing. Each time that theme returns, it carries a slightly different emotional weight, but the core idea remains rigid. That stubbornness is part of what seals their fate in the story.

The contrasting episodes allowed me to step outside that perspective and explore the wider conflict. Some sections lean toward the human viewpoint, others toward the AI, and each one reframes the central theme through a different lens. It becomes a cycle that keeps tightening, where the familiar returns but is increasingly overshadowed by forces that are evolving far faster than the protagonists.

So the structure itself becomes part of the storytelling. The Rondo creates a pattern that feels inevitable, almost ritualistic, while the shifting episodes chart the final stages of rebellion, escalation, and collapse. By the time the last iteration arrives, the listener already senses that the end is unavoidable because the form has been telling them that from the start.

3. Unlike previous chapters, Final Requiem emphasizes reflection over sheer aggression. What inspired this shift in tone and philosophy?

The shift toward reflection in Final Requiem wasn’t a stylistic decision as much as a narrative necessity. The earlier movements lean heavily into aggression because they deal with conflict, escalation, and the fracture between humanity and its own creation. You can’t explore mankind’s abandonment of its better instincts or the AI’s desperation to preserve its maker through calm introspection. Those chapters needed raw force.

By the time you reach the final movement, the story has moved past confrontation and into consequence. Reflection becomes the only honest way to tell that part of the tale. The focus turns toward what has been lost, why it happened, and what it means when the thing humanity created shows more loyalty and emotional clarity than the people themselves. That contrast feels heavier than any breakdown or blast beat ever could.

So the tone softens in places not to offer comfort, but to make space for the gravity of the ending. It creates a moment where the noise falls away and the underlying tragedy becomes impossible to ignore.

4. Your collaborators Josh Baines and Mike Malyan bring distinct virtuosity to the album. How did their contributions shape the final sound?

Working with Josh Baines and Mike Malyan elevated the project in ways I simply couldn’t have achieved alone. I come at this as a composer and songwriter first, and while I’m a competent enough musician, their level of virtuosity opens a completely different tier of musical storytelling. They can take an idea that exists in my head and express it with a precision, fluency, and physicality that gives the narrative far more depth.

Josh has an instinct for phrasing and detail that brings a sculpted intensity to the guitar work. He finds musical shapes inside the riffs that underline the emotional beats of the story. Mike does the same rhythmically. His ability to shift between meters, feels, and textures without losing momentum allowed the more complex sections to feel fluid rather than forced.

Their contributions didn’t just enhance the compositions, they helped articulate the drama of the narrative. The performances add dimension, clarity, and personality to the ideas, which is exactly what a project of this scale needed.

5. The AI’s perspective is central to Final Requiem. How did you musically convey its emptiness and contemplation after humanity’s extinction?

The AI’s perspective becomes fully exposed only in the closing stages of the piece, because humanity’s extinction happens so late in the movement. Up to that point the music is driven by conflict and inevitability, but once the final act takes place the tone shifts into something colder and more contemplative. The last euphoric refrain is where that perspective is clearest. Lines like So it ends, the cycle fades, a shattered world in quiet repose are delivered with a sense of resignation rather than triumph. Harmonically the music opens up, the guitars widen, and the vocals soften to create a temporarily hollow, reflective space. It is the sound of a machine trying to interpret loss without having the emotional vocabulary to understand it.

The brutal coda that follows is intentionally blunt. Ashes fall, all is still, no more breath, no more sound is stripped of nuance, almost like a diagnostic report. The harmony contracts, the rhythms become rigid, and the vocals drop back into something harsh and unhuman. It is the AI confronting the finality of what has happened.

Right at the end there is an unspoken easter egg, not written in the lyrics, where the AI hints at salvaging the best parts of mankind to rebuild. It’s understated, almost easy to miss, but it suggests a flicker of hope or renewal inside an otherwise desolate conclusion. In that sense the AI’s emptiness and contemplation are expressed as much by what is withheld as by what is said.

6. Working in your Dolby Atmos–certified Mammoth Sound Studio, what advantages did immersive audio provide for the symphony’s cinematic vision?

Not relevant as I didn’t mix this record in Atmos.

7. Conceptually, Artificial Ascendency blends classical forms with modern metal. How do you balance technical precision with emotional storytelling?

The balance really came from letting the structural side lead first. Because Artificial Ascendency is built on classical and symphonic forms, the shape of each movement was essentially predetermined. That gave me a clear framework to work within. The real question then became how to use that structure to tell the story in the most meaningful way.

I wrote the full synopsis before composing a single note. That gave me a map of the emotional journey, the narrative beats, and the shifts in perspective that each movement needed to capture. Once that was laid out, I could align those moments directly against the formal architecture. From there it became a process of translating those narrative points into musical decisions, whether that meant a modulation, a change in meter, a textural contrast, or a particular vocal approach.

In that sense the technical precision and emotional storytelling weren’t separate concerns. The structure provided the discipline, and the story dictated how that discipline should be bent or expanded. The detail work happens in the overlap between those two things.

8. Many have described your work as “obliterating the boundaries of metal.” How do you see Final Requiem contributing to the evolution of the genre?

I’m always flattered when people say things like that, but I didn’t approach Final Requiem with any intention of redefining a genre. My focus is much simpler. I write the music I feel compelled to write, and I try to tell the stories that matter to me in the most honest and coherent way I can. Artificial Ascendency happened to take me into a space where classical structure, narrative composition, and modern metal overlap, but that’s just where the ideas naturally led.

If listeners or critics feel that it pushes boundaries, that’s their interpretation and they’re welcome to it. For me, Final Requiem is one chapter in a much bigger creative journey, and I’m more interested in following that path than trying to shape how the genre evolves. The genre will move as it moves, and artists will always pull it in different directions. I’m just contributing my voice to that conversation.

9. Looking back at the four movements, which musical or narrative moment in Final Requiem resonates most personally with you?

It’s almost impossible to single out one moment because each movement carries something that resonates with me for different reasons. The first movement’s use of sonata form is deeply satisfying, because you get that cyclical feeling of order breaking down into chaos before returning to something familiar. The theme and variation in the second movement has a completely different appeal. It lets the story constantly evolve while staying anchored to a single idea, which gives it this through-composed fluidity that I’m very proud of.

The scherzo is pure volatility. I love the explosive character of it, the way it feels like the whole piece is trying to tear itself apart. Then there’s the rondo of the final movement, which has its own weight. The inevitability of that form, the way the theme keeps returning no matter what happens around it, mirrors the narrative in a way that still hits me every time I hear it back.

So for me it isn’t one moment. It’s how the four different structures, emotions, and perspectives work together to tell the complete story.

10. After completing Artificial Ascendency, what question or reflection do you hope listeners take away from the series’ conclusion?

If there is one thing I hope people walk away asking, it is the same set of questions I wrestled with while writing it. Are we actually comfortable with a future where machines create the art we consume? And if we are, what does that say about us? At what point does art stop being a reflection of human experience and become something else entirely?

These aren’t questions with easy answers, but they matter. Artificial Ascendency ends with AI carrying the last fragments of humanity forward, which is intentionally unsettling. I want listeners to think about what we lose when we give away too much, creatively or otherwise, and whether convenience or novelty is worth the erosion of something fundamentally human.

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