Amid a generation gripped by loneliness, fear, and a desperate concern for the state of the world, Invent Animate are grabbing fans by the hand and choosing to walk with them. There’s a sense of duty among the band – comprising vocalist Marcus Vik, bassist Caleb Sherradan, drummer Trey Celaya and guitarist Keaton Goldwire – to bare their own pain and tragedy for their listeners, indeed creating a safe, familiar place for listeners to process their own. It’s this deeply empathic and concerned approach to their output that sets Invent Animate apart, and has seen the band develop a close knit, cult-like following over their 10 years together. “I think what’s really important to our generation of music consumers is finding something beautiful out of all the chaos,” shares bassist Caleb. “It’s important to us – we’ve got a lot on our plate, life is weird, life is hard – but we’ve come to understand how important it is as artists to be there with our listener, to be vulnerable ourselves so they might be able to say, ‘thank you, you guys helped me articulate this’ or, ‘you guys helped me walk through this journey’ because of what we’ve created.” Stationed across Texas, Colorado and now Sweden (following Vik’s recruitment in 2019), the four-piece mark the latest addition to the UNFD roster. Home to a plethora of the band’s touring partners including Silent Planet and ERRA, alongside Spotify “sounds like” mates such as Like Moths To Flames, Void Of Vision and Thornhill, Invent Animate perfectly complement their new label address with their ambient metalcore, djent and prog blends. Throughout their catalogue the group have sought to unravel depression, loss, the fragility of life and the fleeting nature of time. The band’s first release on UNFD comes in the form of their new EP ‘The Sun Sleeps, As If It Never Was’ –  a powerful discourse on the ricochet effect of trauma and addiction. Searingly close to drummer Trey and his family’s story navigating a drug addiction crisis, the EP comprises a one-two punch of songs describing both perspectives of this tragic scenario: the drug affected, and those left reeling in the sphere of impact around them. “We wanted to explore both sides of a deeply painful situation, and to draw out how nuanced and weird and difficult these things can be,” shares Trey. “I think people are learning in the modern day it's not as simple as ‘this is just a bad person, and they were addicted to drugs and they did it to themselves’, there's always a string of trauma and things that are not dealt with and stigmatised mental health that sets off a spiral. Even if one person is clearly in the wrong, it doesn't exempt them from being a victim in another sense.” Shortly after the release of its first single ‘The Sun Sleeps’ in early September, the band will follow with the closing chapter ‘As If It Never Was’, this time untangling the perspective of the innocent bystander. It’s often Invent Animate’s objective to explore all sides of tragedy, to concede that nothing is ever black and white or one sided. Their most streamed track to date, ‘Luna’ is a prime example of this cutting openness and vulnerability hitting a nerve with listeners. Though the track – an exploration of Trey’s brother’s death from an overdose – has shot to over 4 Million streams, it was ultimately “never pushed as a single”, says Trey. The closing anthem on the band’s 2014 album Everchanger, ‘Luna’ finds Trey venting his own confusions and grief at the front end, before flipping the script to explore what must have been his brother’s tornado of emotions in the lead up to his passing. “Despite the other songs you try to push, I guess those really honest ones just cut through... there’s been this real impact and resonance with people where they’ll come up on tour and say, ‘Dude, I lost my dad or my brother, that song means so much to me,’” he shares. “It’s kind of tough, because you can't fabricate something emotionally hard-hitting, you have to actually draw off your own loss or pain, but that song really made us aware of how important the level of vulnerability in our band is.”