Solitude Within

Intro

Solitude Within is a Belgium female fronted band. They bring you classical music with a touch of rock. The melodic female voice combined with melodies, their choruses, drums and guitar are giving you symphonic rock. With multiple gimmicks on stage such as candles, they create a fairytale vibe performance.

History

The band Solitude Within exists for almost two years now. The started officially under the name Solitude within on August 23th 2016.

It was Quincy (van Overmeire) who came up, after some brainstorming, with the name Solitude Within. The name was inspired by a song of one of his favorite bands Evergrey.

The name also stands for the fact that sometimes, people can feel loneliness insite, even if they are surrounded by many people, insite you are still alone.

Band members

The band Solitude Within has five band members. They are

Front woman Emmelie (Arents), who also plays the keys. As child she went to music school and chose piano as her main instrument. During the weekends she went to the Musical School. After she finished her studies at primary school, she went to the art academy where she choose “Vocals” as specialization.

Jean- Paul (“JP” Laffarque) on lead guitars. He followed a course of music production and audio techniques and has played in more than ten bands before he joined Solitude Within. He has a lot of experience and has played different musical genres from pop, jazz to rock and metal.

Johan (van Criekingen) plays rhythm guitar. He also played in another band before. After he had done a number of gigs with the previous band, he thought his highlight as a musician was far behind him. But when he met Emmelie and the rest of the group he knew that the best was yet to come.

On bass there is Quincy (van Overmeire). He is a self-thought musician and has developed his skills by ear. He also followed a studio engineering course and went to music school to learn sheet music. Before Solitude Within he also played in some bands. All of them were metal bands.

On the drums there is Ashley (Ysemyn), As a child he already had a strong rhythmical feeling and was already interested in music at very young age. However it wasn’t until he saw his big hero Tonmi “Otus”Lillman playing, that he discovered the love for drumming and bought himself his first drum set. He is also a self-thought musician and developed his skill by ear and by observing many different drummers. He has played drums in several bands and participated in a variety of different musical projects varying in different styles.

All the members of Solitude Within are not (yet) full-time musicians. Though it would be great, but, however they need to pay the bills and band stuff too. So they are forced to have a day job.

pictures: Kelly Thans Photography

The music

It’s not possible to put a certain label on the band when you talk about the kind of music. They are a mixture of classical/movie music, with hard rock and metal, combined with an added modern touch. So their music is very versatile and can appeal to both the rock, metal and even pop fans. But if you want to put a label on it then you could say “Female Fronted Symphonic Rock/Metal”. Depending on your personal musical taste.

Discography

So far they made one album. It’s their debut album “Disappear”. It was released on May 1st 2017. They say about it:

“It all started with a few good songs written by Emmelie and Quincy. Later JP wrote some more and soon we would have enough songs to fill a full album. We wanted to make an album without fillers. There are people who say that you only need 2 good songs to make a CD, the rest can be filled up with mediocre songs, but this is totally against all we stand for. We want quality, so we only recorded the best songs, the rest got thrown away”.

Video: Marleo Video

“Everything” was recorded mixed and produced by JP in his home studio and Emmelie recorded some vocals at her home studio as well. The whole process took about two years. We always want to try out many options and with that comes time. We are also not easily pleased and always want to give our best. Even when we finished something, we are still tempted to change things”.

“Once the songs were ready, we got a record deal with Mausoleum Records, but with the passing away of the founder ‘Alfie Falckenbach’ our dream ended abruptly. The fact that someone in the music business believed in us gave us the courage to go on. We couldn’t just leave the songs unheard. We felt like we needed to share this with other people, so we pulled ourselves together and released the album through our own label called “BoxFish Records”.

“We are satisfied with the result. The album turned out as it was intended to be, probably because we had so many factors in our own hands. We created an album with songs that have a common atmosphere and feel, but diverse enough to keep the listener’s attention. This has also been proven by the many positive (international) reviews the album received once it was released”.

Favourite bands

All the band members have different musical backgrounds and tastes. Some of the bands favourite artists are Therion, Theory of a Deadman, Hans Zimmer, Seether, Evergrey, Ex-Deo, Lordi, twisted Sister etc.

Pictures: Kelly Thans Photography

Plans for the future

They have a lot of plans for the future, both on short-and long-term. They tell us:

On short-term:

We are busy developing our first T-Shirts. We started creating some designs, once we have made something appealing and satisfying, we start the printing.

As for gigs: We hope to have as many decent gigs as possible. We love to be on stage, that’s just something we simply NEED to do and with that, we are not only focusing on our home country Belgium. We have played in The Netherlands, Malta , Spain and soon we’ll be in Paris (France). So the main goals is to spread our (live)music pretty much everywhere.

At the moment we are also working on some new songs now and then. However it’s not that we actively started writing a second album. First we would like to give “Disappear” the descent attention that it deserves.

On the long term:

We would like to become one of the sub-famous bands.

Right now in the music business it looks like there are 3 main kind of bands: The top famous bands who earn way too much, the sub famous bands who can play on a regular basis, who have a decent fan following and get payed right enough so they don’t have to spend a single dime of their own money to continue their work. And then you have the “beginning”/ “regular” bands, who have to do pretty much almost everything for free or have to spend most of their own money on everything, just to keep going. So becoming a sub-famous band would be the realistic plan for the future. Of course become a top famous band would be even better.