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After sixteen years and six albums, TIDES FROM NEBULA have made a name for themselves as a purveyor of expansive, cosmic-tinged post-rock. Their latest album, Instant Rewards, saw the three-piece continue to refine their music, characterised by a meticulous wall of sound and deft dynamic control. After a thirteen-date tour across their native Poland, guitarist and keyboardist Maciej Karbowski sits down eager to discuss the new album and reflect on the band’s journey.
A five-year gap from their last album, From Voodoo To Zen, was partly driven by the pandemic and other demands on their attention. Karbowski and drummer Tomasz Stołowski run the Warsaw-based Nebula Studios and have also explored new creative outlets. “I started a YouTube channel on music production. It’s getting quite big, and I’m having fun with it,” says Karbowski. But the band was never far from their thoughts. “Last year, we made a decision that we have to stop fucking around, and we have to finally finish all these tracks we’ve been working on and put an album out. Because we’re not GUNS N’ ROSES. No one will wait for us!”
Karbowski is circumspect on any intentional inspiration for Instant Rewards. “With album number six, I believe we just have our own style, sound, and work process. Of course, everything inspires us, but it’s harder and harder to tell what it is exactly. We’re too deep into the band itself to get [specific] inspirations.” This time, the motivation is to enjoy the process and draw excitement. “Because if you’re doing it for only the sake of doing it, if it’s no fun anymore, what’s the point? So that’s our only goal – to still have fun.”
Instead, the focus is on the method and incorporating the expertise developed from running a commercial studio. “We’re super interested and professionally involved in music production, so we try to incorporate it and include it in our process,” states Karbowski. This is evident in the immaculate production of Instant Rewards, which is, in all senses, a studio album. Karbowski concedes there is a loss of spontaneity in their approach versus the early practice room days. “Maybe next year, we’ll prepare a small, smelly rehearsal room to just go back, just to make noise, and we’ll see if the outcome will be different.”
That said, the current approach feels true to where they are as a band and as people today. “You can’t be young twice, right? My opinion about legacy bands like METALLICA, for example – it’s a cool band as a live act these days, but I don’t believe them anymore. I don’t believe they really are angry, and they try to be angry. We don’t want to go that path. We just want to go with the natural feeling. I’m 40 at this moment, and when I was 22, 25, or 30, I was a different person, right? So why should the music just stay in one place?” A wry smile. “And we’re not METALLICA, right?”
If there has been a narrative arc for TIDES FROM NEBULA, it’s been one of cultivating greater agency. Self-production has evolved to the band managing every aspect of the release of Instant Rewards, including publishing and marketing. This shift was entirely intentional, says Karbowski. “When we saw the numbers and calculated everything, we thought, okay, somewhere on the way, the money is lost, and we just want to cut everything between the listeners and us. Just shorten the chain, and we’ll see what will happen.” With that has come further experimentation with online marketing – live Q&As, reels, homegrown video production. “Social media is kind of a cool tool, but with the music which we are doing, you can’t be too cheesy, because it’s a serious band. It was hard at first to find that point where you can be chilled, funny, but not too much, right? We don’t want to be seen as a goofy band from TikTok!”
Karbowski is tired after an extensive but highly successful tour of Poland and looking forward to a deserved break. But he’s bullish for their international footprint to expand in the New Year. “Definitely, there’s this hardcore [local] fan base, but I can see a lot of potential outside Poland. We’re an instrumental band. It’s a super small niche, and still, we have hundreds of people at every show in Poland. So why couldn’t we outside Poland?” Contemporaries on the heavier side, like DECAPITATED, VADER and RIVERSIDE, have found success abroad. “We feel like a really small, a [little] bit autistic brother of all these bands because we’re still on the way. Not a lot of bands from Poland are touring successfully [abroad], and we feel really privileged that we had occasion to do that.”
What excites Karbowski most about today’s music scene compared to the last ten years? “I think control,” he begins, before conceding that luck is still a significant factor, even more so in the oversaturated modern era. “During the pandemic, we switched the mindset about it. With the self-release stuff, we’re just gonna go with the flow. We will try to use this social media stuff. Why not? We’ll try to learn it. We will try to use it to our advantage. And we’ll see what will happen.” His guardrails are clear, though. “The music is never affected. We don’t care if it’s the label, if we’re doing it by ourselves, or if the trend is this or that. The music is just sacred. It should always be honest, true to the core, never touched. Everything else, we can adjust and try our best to put the music in front of the ears of as many people as possible.”
Instant Rewards is out now via Nebula Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS116 here:
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