Lorna Shore's 'Pain Remains' Is the 2022 Album of the Year

Lorna Shore’s Pain Remains is Loudwire’s pick for the 2022 Album of the Year. We caught up with vocalist Will Ramos to go deep into the record and the band’s landmark year.

“I love sad music,” the eternally optimistic Will Ramos raves. “People see me as a really happy person. I like to think of myself as that as well, but for me, I really love listening to sad music. I feel like that’s the kind of music that speaks and that stays. I think everybody in some kind of way has experienced pain whether they’re aware of it or not.”

Ramos possesses an incredible insight into pain thanks to his love of sad music, which can be heard in “Pain Remains I-III” — the epic and fiercely emotional climax to Lorna Shore’s 2022 full-length album. The trilogy brings the listener back to the beginning of the album’s concept — a dream world created by someone who wants to escape their reality. Through lucid dreaming, the main character becomes a god-like figure and even falls in love in his dream world, but ultimately burns everything down and returns to the reality he came from.

“A lot of deathcore nowadays… it only really has anger and maybe some sadness, but it doesn’t really touch upon the emotional part of the sadness,” Ramos says. “That’s what I want to hear — melodic, sad deathcore. I think we nailed it. We have those blackened deathcore elements, but we also have death metal elements, I have a metalcore background. All of these things start to flow into one another and at the end of the day, it’s just metal. This is just our take on metal. If we could bridge the gap and bring people closer [to deathcore] that would be amazing, but we’ve still got those people who are just like, ‘Man, this isn’t this. This is this, this and this.’ We’re like, ‘Whatever man, it’s just metal.’”

Lorna Shore, "Pain Remains I: Dancing Like Flames" (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

"We want to be a little bit of everything.”

Ramos entered Lorna Shore with Loudwire’s pick for Song of the Year in 2021 — “To the Hellfire.” The vocalist’s sick noises during the final breakdown put a stamp on the song’s arrival, captivating fans and YouTube reactors alike, but did Will Ramos feel pressure to create another moment like that somewhere within Pain Remains?

“Partly,” Ramos admits. “But at the same time, we don’t want to be one of those bands where that’s the whole band. You want to have little parts like that, but there are so many other elements that are going on. Yes, we do have that one part from ‘To the Hellfire,’ but if you actually listen to the whole album, we have a very similar part like that in ‘Apotheosis.’ They’re there — that’s just not the identity that we want to take on. We want to be a little bit of everything.”

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Lorna Shore also got the opportunity in 2022 to bring extreme metal to Lollapalooza. With metal acts such as Ozzy Osbourne famously unwelcome at past Lollapalooza festivals, Lorna helped bridge the gap in 2022 for a genre once thought of as “not cool enough” for the popular festival.

“We thought it was going to be bad at first,” Ramos says of their Lolla slot. “Honestly, it was one of the best shows that we could’ve played. We hit the first note, we’re looking out at the crowd, we’re like, ‘Okay, here we go. It may not be very great, but we’re just gonna play.’ And as we kept playing, you could just see this area filling up with people, whether they’re just normal people or they’re us metalheads, people that are walking back and forth are just like, ‘Wow, I hear something going on.’”

“The mix of people, it made me hopeful. Honestly, I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ We started out, there wasn’t a lot of people here, now we’re ending it, there’s like a billion people here, it feels like. Then I go over to Metallica and I see them and I’m like, ‘Damn, these guys got a lot of freaking people!’ You can’t blame them, they’re Metallica. That was a moment for me, for sure, I thought that was amazing.”

Lorna Shore, "Into The Earth" (PIT) Lollapalooza

"I still feel like I have such a long way to go.”

As for his new status as one of metal’s biggest vocalists, Will Ramos has his mindset to thank for his success. In 2014, he posted onto Facebook, “You quit because you think you suck? Man up, practice hard everyday so that one day you’ll be what you always saw yourself doing.” So how does Ramos feel now that he’s “what he always saw himself doing?”

“It’s surreal. I’ve always wanted to do this. I never thought in the back of my mind that it would be possible. Now things are happening, we’re making it happen. Part of me doesn’t even believe it, the other half of it is like, ‘Well, people are coming out to the shows.’ Something good must be happening out here. I guess practice makes perfect at the end of the day. I still feel like I have such a long way to go, but I’m glad that people are latching themselves on. Forward momentum, let’s f—king keep going, see what happens.”

Facebook: Will Ramos

Congratulations to Lorna Shore for the incredible Pain Remains. Check out our full interview with Will Ramos below.