Trivia / Rivers of Nihil

• Breakthrough Hit: Where Owls Know My Name. They were a low-level support when they recorded Monarchy, and while that did increase their profile, they were still finding themselves consistently placing low on bills. More than anything, the Ending Fatigue for the latter album's touring cycle (by their own admission, they spent way too long touring on that album for way too little in return) was ultimately what led to the major change in sound on Where Owls Know My Name and its general eclecticism; "fuck it, let's do it" was the spirit of its creation, and they deliberately took large risks. While it wasn't obvious at first (aside from better sales), their Canadian headlining tour in support of the album in 2018 was ultimately what proved that they had made the right decision, as they sold out numerous dates and played to packed houses every night, and one of the songs that they were the most worried about ("Subtle Change") wound up becoming a fan favorite and a big crowd-pleaser live.
• Career Resurrection: In a way, Where Owls Know My Name was this. By their own admission, they had intended for Monarchy to be the album to make them blow up. Instead, they got a very long, very disappointing touring cycle that was marked by lineup instability, missed or aborted opportunities, and a final tour that was fun, but ended with them in a position that was barely better than when they started the cycle. They wrote Where Owls Know My Name with the very real expectation that it was going to be their last album before they broke up, so they took risks that they normally wouldn't have taken because if they didn't pay off, they wouldn't be around to care anyways. Instead, they got an album that rapidly took off, won them a ton of new fans, and provided a touring cycle that was everything they wanted the Monarchy touring cycle to be and then some. In short, the album that was written with the expectation that they were doomed wound up being exactly what saved them from their doom.
• Creative Differences: The core of why Dylan Potts didn't work out. His inconsistency didn't help, but it was his lack of any real band experience (let alone touring) coupled with his immaturity that really wore out his welcome. This also was the reason why Jake Dieffenbach was fired; per Biggs, he was always a messy person with a shitshow of a personal life that was one crisis after another that he mostly brought on himself, and they had long given up on trying to get him to change. As his issues increasingly impacted his reliability and their ability to schedule tours without worrying that he would have to bail, the rest of the band began to have serious discussions about whether it was time for him to go. After he had to abruptly leave a tour in the fall of 2022 to go home and deal with yet another crisis, the band finally made the call and parted ways with him.
• Flip-Flop of God: Back when they were still writing The Work, they went on record to say that the saxophone was a one-and-done and was not coming back due to their fear of becoming a gimmick band, only to renege on their word. Word of God is that they had originally planned on it not coming back, but had come to realize at some point during the writing process that it would add a lot to the material that they were working on.
• Throw It In!: "Subtle Change", apparently. According to Brody, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision between him and Biggs at the very end of the writing process, as they suddenly felt like writing a sprawling prog song that they knew would probably be polarizing, but decided to go ahead with because they liked the idea just too much to pass it up. This was also how Zach Strouse's saxophone parts came to be; Biggs had a bunch of lengthy passages that he had no idea what to do with, and he wound up sending the files over to Strouse for creative input. Strouse then recorded himself playing saxophone over the parts and sent them back to Biggs, who was so impressed by the results that he opted to keep it on the final product.
• Write Who You Know: The protagonist in the video for "Hellbirds" was based off an acquaintance of the band, who was a notoriously sloppy drunk with a fairly rough life who had been thrown out of bars for drunkenly exposing himself on multiple occasions, including the bar they filmed the video in.

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