When you put Object Unto Earth into a search engine, you actually get some pretty out of this world results in the form of 3I/Atlas theories of every kind you can imagine. To be honest, we pretty much forgot about that thing and it was nice to have a moment of distraction, but of course that’s not what we were looking for.
The actual Object Unto Earth, as in the Portland prog project, has had a lot going on the last few years. There was a host of ambitious singles leading up to 2025’s The Grim Village, and they all seemed to be slightly altered references or quotes. Indeed the entire EP was like its own language – not alien, but warped, twisted up, and frog-ified enough to require attention to translate.
Luckily it always sounded good, there’s lots of emo, post-hardcore and swancore flavors without sounding super similar to anything else in the ballpark. Another strength for the band is the fact that the lyrics / titles continue to find themselves in a league of their own, which you can hear this for yourself on their new single “The Meaning of Haste:”
It’s the first single from their next EP Memory Tyrant, and to celebrate the release we’re stoked to present a QnA with OUE’s main brain Jonathan Zajdman, who also runs the studio Seven Sided Sounds. Below you’ll find frogs, bogs, and more. Enjoy!
FB: First of all, where did the band name come from?
Jonathan: I wanted a name that had weight to it and felt evocative or atmospheric. I had a few things written down with the word ‘earth’ that came close to clicking for me and can’t remember how ‘object unto’ entered my mind, but it felt right and that was it.
There’s a lyric in the song “Onward, With Blinding Speed!” from the first OUE album that uses the band name in a phrase, it happened sort of by accident but hit on the feeling I was trying to capture. That’s always in the back of my mind when I think of what this band is about for me.
FB: Object Unto Earth has a consistently dreamy, almost liminal quality to all the songs. How does an OUE song come to fruition?
Jonathan: ‘Dreamy and liminal’ is going all over our press from now on, I really love that description! Noodling around on guitar is where everything starts. Luckily I’m never short for riff ideas, but the goal is trying to capture a specific atmosphere or feeling that’s inspiring me.
The first record had two guiding principles that drove all the songwriting. Sonically, I wanted to create something expansive and cinematic. Lyrically, there was a lot of personal stuff I’d gone through that was getting exorcized on that record, so using the sonic-principle to support the lyrical one (and/or the other way around) was very clarifying if I ever got stuck in the writing process.
Wrapping it all in this loose narrative about a village of frogs made it easy for me to say, “I need a heavier song for this part of the record,” or, “this song needs to feel dreamier,” or whatever creative/production call got made, because there was a throughline coalescing that I wanted to support.
The closing track, Alas I Hop Along, is the strongest example of that – the other songs were all written and ready to go, but I felt like I had to punctuate the ending of the album somehow. Especially after the song Bombina, Bombina!!, which is this seven minute climax of the record with a ton of riffs and different movements to it. I needed a softer landing for the end, so writing a song that felt meditative and self-reflective consumed me for a bit, and once the refrain of ‘alas, I hop along’ came to me I was able to write guitar parts around the mood it triggered.
FB: Another signature element of the band seems to be… well, frogs! Song titles, artwork… can you tell us about how frogs (or maybe it’s one particular frog) became a part of the band’s presentation?
Jonathan: I’m not sure what the first frog-themed moment was, but when I came upon it I knew it was gonna be a whole thing. Visually, there’s definitely a call back to stuff I loved as a kid like The Secret of Nimh, Chrono Trigger, DnD, Battle Toads, and all of the visuals associated with other similar fantasy media. And it’s a good creative cheat code – the song name Bombina, Bombina!! comes from the scientific name for the European Fire Bellied Toad, which is sort of the band mascot now. I discovered that and knew it had to be part of this little world I’m creating.
Lyrically, I have a hard time writing directly about whatever it is I’m trying to communicate – as an example, a line like, “You can work it out before it’s too late, you are so much more than the flies that you ate,” felt more honest & interesting than saying, “you can move past things you feel shame about.” If people hear the lyrics and think, “frog puns!” that’s great, but if they get some of the subtext and poetry out of it, that’s very meaningful to me too.
FB: As a guitar player and vocalist, does one or the other come to you first?
Jonathan: Guitar about 90% of the time, but once I have a riff or chord progression that clicks a vocal melody will reveal itself pretty quickly.
I took vocal lessons while working on the first OUE record and became a way more confident vocalist, subsequently I spend a lot more time singing and have a few melodic ideas brewing that I’m building guitar parts around for new material. It feels a bit like tying my shoes before slipping them on, but it’s fun to change up my approach.
FB: Do you see it as a challenge to craft / build songs in this style or do they come to you naturally?
Jonathan: I’ve been pursuing a version of this prog/post-hardcore/math-rock mix in some fashion for a long time. So while it does come quite naturally, I had to work really hard to find my voice within it and that feels like a recent development.
I’m settled into my process now and the songs on ‘Memory Tyrant’ happened pretty quickly, but a few songs on the first album went through five or six demos before they felt right. Some had major structural rewrites, others were about tweaking a single riff or harmony. I can get pretty hard on myself about all those little details, but I really enjoy hashing them out and love playing in this style of music.
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FB: This one is a bit of a two-parter: do you have specific inspirations when it comes to the band’s music, and are those influences separate from lyrical influences?
Jonathan: I’m definitely a product of the late 90s/early aughts boom of emo and post-hardcore, that wave of bands is an evergreen source of influence for me. The way I hear guitar tone, the way I like my riffs to dance around and cascade into each other, the odd meter and atmospherics, all are very tuned to that era of music. My goal with OUE has been to take that influence, throw in some modern-prog, but keep it ear-wormy enough that people who usually balk at everything I just mentioned can’t help but groove to it.
My biggest lyrical influences have been people like Emma Ruth Rundle, Ben Gibbard, Cedric Bixler Zavala, Kristin Hayter, and Rick Maguire of Pile. I don’t aspire to write like any one of them specifically, nor could I, but they all do something with their poetry and vocal deliveries that gets its hooks in me and I take a lot of inspiration from that. I don’t read as much as I’d like but Jeff VanderMeer’s prose has definitely had an effect on my work, and watching older films certainly helps my desire to use language that feels a little heightened and esoteric.
FB: We ask that specifically because the new single, “The Meaning of Haste”, is a clear reference to a legendary wizard and his horse – what made you choose that particular title for the song?
Jonathan: Part of it is certainly my boundless love for all things LOTR mixed with the post-hardcore/math-rock tradition of silly and referential song names I like to contribute to in any small way.
More specifically, there was a moment with the previous OUE line up where we’d discussed naming this EP “Four Songs About Horses” and spent some time throwing around as many horse-themed song names as possible. The drummer on this EP suggested ‘Show Us the Meaning of Haste’ and I edited it a bit from there.
And there is a bit of thematic relevance – the moment of the film where that quote comes from has this somber, foreboding sense of, “we’re up against something big and dangerous and we gotta move quick.” The lyrics to this song are reflective of what’s happening in the U.S. right now and I think ‘somber foreboding’ is an appropriate way to describe my own feelings about it.
FB: Both singles for the new EP feel a little heavier while still retaining that dreamy quality – was that a conscious decision for the music or was it something you observed afterwards?
Jonathan: Definitely deliberate! I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many folks within heavier music scenes here in Portland are into OUE, mostly because I came to heavy music later in life and have some imposter syndrome exercising that musical instinct. But I feel more drawn towards it and look forward to pushing the heaviness with some of our next releases. Plus, we play in an open C tuning that lends itself quite well to a heavier feel.
FB: Now that the EP is done and almost out, are there any other musical aspirations you want to explore with Object Unto Earth?
Jonathan: There are a handful of OUE songs that haven’t made it onto any releases yet, I’m looking forward to putting those out as singles in the coming months. I’m writing the next full length to be recorded later this year, and I’d love to do some touring and play a lot more shows before that happens.
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