A conversation with rising indie pop prodigy Belmez Faces

From paranormal to reality, this is how Belmez Faces was introduced to the world. And we understand why the duo has been named after a mystic event in which faces appear on the concrete floors of a home in Spain: their music sounds from another planet, unveiling an incomparable experience. 

Consisting of Royce Thompson and Steven Hilmes, the Seattle-based duo effortlessly combines dream pop with electronic sounds, all rocked by captivating musical experimentation. 

Their discography is a whole new musical world that you should discover right now, but be careful, you might be addicted, and never come back from this journey:

We had a little chat with them that we invite you to read below:

Welcome to the-further! We are glad to have you today. Could you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us how you started to make music?

Steve and I both work as teachers at the same high school. We started making music loosely together as a hobby and are also in a full band together (A Thousand). This is not a “side project” of that, but more like a continuation of our musical tastes manifesting themselves outside that band

What inspires you to write and create such an artistic universe?

Usually something we’re reading or listening to. Sometimes it’s watching a movie. There’s usually a key phrase or image that gets the gears turning. It’s just a compulsion to create, you know?

Do you have a specific creative process?

We usually just start with a small idea, the song can start anywhere. We make the music first and lyrics follow. We obviously try to stay loyal to an aesthetic, but we’re not too afraid to do something that is kind of weird or outside what we might be entirely comfortable with. We don’t really play live or jam out the song too frequently. It’s a lot of layering on top of a skeleton of a song to make it full and interesting.

Can you describe your latest release “This is the Dark Timeline”?

This release has been 3 years in the making. Lots of life that happens during that time, but we always came back to the music to try to finish the idea. We tried to really tie up the album as a whole idea, but hopefully each song stands on it’s own, because they were written in that format. Perhaps it’s morphed into a grander idea that we wanted to chase down after more songs were written over time.

What can we expect from you in the future?

We have a couple singles coming up next year (2022) and then a forthcoming EP for 2023. It’s interesting to think about how people listen to music now and how we want to respond to that. But in the end, we’re definitely full album guys and like to listen to songs in that format; so we will probably continue to write for that in the future.

FOLLOW THEM ON INSTAGRAM NOW: @Belmezfacesband