Trivia / Arsis

• Creative Differences: Why Darren Cesca was fired. While Malone still respects Cesca's musical career and the bands he's been in, he has made it clear that he was a nightmare to work with in a band situation.
• Creator Breakdown: Malone spent the better part of the 2000s struggling with a drinking problem; when he finally quit, his old anorexia issues came back tenfold strong, culminating in his weighing only 128 pounds, which is a dangerously low amount for a man of his stature (6'1") and build. He then gradually began to pull his life back together from there, which wound up resulting in his having to sit out a tour. Thankfully, he's since gotten better.
• Development Hell: The five-and-a-half-year gap between Unwelcome and Visitant can be chalked up to several things: Brandon Ellis joining The Black Dahlia Murder and James Malone's own work with Necromancing the Stone took a lot of time out of the band (along with Noah Martin and Shawn Priest's own side projects), while Malone and Martin made cross-country moves during that time and Malone additionally had to deal with his father's death. While they were touring on Unwelcome into 2016, there was a fairly large gap between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2018 where Arsis was on the back burner. Nonetheless, Malone stated that the actual creation of Visitant wasn't particularly stressful, as all members had home studios where they could do pre-production and fine-tune ideas on their own time; almost everything was ready to go long before it came time to hand it over to Mark Lewis for mixing, and the one track that was largely spontaneous (the cover of "His Eyes") came together extremely smoothly in spite of it being a last-minute suggestion from Ellis.
• Throw It In!: The cover of "His Eyes". Visitant was effectively done and ready to hand over to Mark Lewis for completion when Brandon Ellis hit up Malone at the last minute and rather enthusiastically pitched covering that song to him, and so the band managed to squeeze in one last track on what had originally been a completed album.
• Write What You Know: Many of their early lyrics and imagery (including the title of A Celebration of Guilt) were inspired by Malone's experiences playing guitar for quick cash at a Catholic church while he was attending Berklee; as someone who grew up in a secular household, he experienced his fair share of culture shock, and tracks like "Worship Depraved" were sarcastic commentaries on the Catholic liturgy. Furthermore, while Visitant was a loose concept album that paid tribute to various horror movies that Malone loved, it was also part of the grieving process for his father, as his father was a massive horror fan and used it as a bonding experience with Malone as a child.