The Well arrives at the Wood Shop, a 200- to 250-square-foot former wood and antique furniture showroom in Bushwick, Brooklyn, now converted into an experimental performance and music space. Backstage, the band—lead vocalist and guitarist Ian Graham, bassist and vocalist Lisa Alley, and drummer Jason Sullivan—reflect on returning to the heavy grinds and an Austin swagger they’ve patented over time on their fourth album …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, with a few unexpected slips into electronic and synth.
“I was listening to Echo and the Bunnymen again, and revisiting shit from the early 2000s,” says Graham. “I was really into Depeche Mode and would sit at home and just stay in that little bubble. It was fun because I never fucked around in that little area before.”
Depeche Mode carried over from the Well’s cover of the band’s 1993 Songs of Faith and Devotion song “I Feel You” on their Love Song Demos EP in 2020. “I was so obsessed,” says Graham. “We were, like, busting a Depeche Mode cover, and it was addictive.”
Moving around different time frames, closer “Other Girls” and the band’s stab at a twisted holiday song, “Love Cult (Xmas),” also called “Christmas,” glide along the electronic spectrum. “If you listen to ‘Christmas,’” he says, “it’s a Depeche Mode song.”
Opened by festive bells before the heaviness sets in, the latter was inspired by a headline Graham saw during the pandemic about a cult leader who was found mummified and wrapped in Christmas lights, a story that inspired the 2023 HBO documentary “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”
“Christmas” is also accompanied by a music video, directed by fellow Austin musician Daniel Fried, who goes by the moniker TV’s Daniel, that the band describes as a visual cross between Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” and Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane.”
“I want to write a horror movie now,” says Alley, with Graham adding, “so Daniel can direct it.”
On …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, a title conjured as the album was wrapping up, songs roam through the philosophical, from a contemplative excerpt on mortality from Alan Watts on “Love Look This Way” to an ode to the mother of the legendary folklore creature the Jersey Devil, on the crunchier “Mother Leeds.”
In some ways, …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals is also conceptual, an account of the band’s life stuck in limbo during the pandemic before regrouping. “The concept is ‘This is my life,’” says Alley, adding that the album cracks into an entire range of emotional experience.
Perfectly suited for a slasher flick, the sludgy “Mystery Babylon” switches to a bluesy jam toward its end, breaking off from its earlier heavier half, with a different groove.
“It’s unexpected, but it contributes to the overall story because it’s what you do after the crushing mystery,” says Alley. “How do you move on from that? However you want, baby.”
Before reconnecting with their longtime producer Chico Jones to finish off …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, the band initially recorded the first four tracks, the earliest written—“Other Girls,” “Love Cult (Xmas),” “Season of the Flame,” and “Love Look This Way”—with the Sword bassist Bryan Richie, who also helps manage the band’s new label, the Austin-based Spaceflight Records.
Jones, who previously worked with the band on their 2016 album Pagan Science—featuring “Black Eyed Gods,” which became the theme song for Norman Reedus’ AMC series “Ride With Norman Reedus”—and again for their third release, Death and Consolation in 2019, helped them flesh out the remaining tracks.
If a song wasn’t coming together, Graham says he learned to sit back and “trust Chico” during the process. “He was so good at pulling it out of us, and he did it not because he was making money off of us,” says Graham. “He’s like the fourth fucking [band] member.”
Written during a period spanning confinement during the pandemic and through personal upheavals, Graham admits a sense of indifference toward the new album, because he hears all the strained years that led up to it. “I don’t have a great fucking relationship with this album, and that’s okay, because when people connect to it, it becomes something,” Graham says. “I’m just a vehicle. I want this to be for people to escape shit.”
At one point, Alley questioned her own relationship with the album before she found its story, and remembers the first glimmer of Graham’s connection to it when the band began rehearsing the lead single, “New Hallelujah for the Damned.”
“I watched something switch in Ian, where the pressure of the record stopped existing,” Alley says. “That was a song that lifted him out of it in a way.”
When the band was ready to finish the album with Jones, the remaining songs were written in closer proximity than the first four, and started leaning more heavily on what was happening in the world.
“It was 2025, and there was a lot of turmoil in the world that we felt like we needed to fight against, whether conscious or unconscious,” says Alley. “Those songs have a lot more of a battle cry to them without getting too political.”
Refusing to dive into anything blatantly political didn’t mean they couldn’t get some messages across. “Oftentimes, whenever you don’t name something in a specific way, it’s even more palpable and powerful,” says Alley.
There’s propulsion and some kind of shamanic healing on …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, right off the first chords of the opening “Season of the Flame,” which has been serving as the band’s live intro. That’s the song, Alley says, that invites listeners to come along with the Well on this journey: Wake now from your dream / A soul that suffers too much/ Gets used to its own screams.
“There are different response options throughout the album,” Alley says. “You can take this back to yourself and meditate on it. Maybe it’s your own hang-ups stopping you from getting where you want to go, or maybe you need to fucking fight against the outside world and whatever that perception is.”
The art of crafting a song was also something the band could center on this time around since they worked mostly around label deadlines on the three previous albums. By the time Death and Consolation was released in 2019, the band had already been touring incessantly since their 2014 debut, Samsara. Then …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals lifted all those restraints.
“When we started getting back together and writing, it let us slow down for the first time as a band and start crafting songs,” says Alley. “It forced us to slow down.”
In 2025, the band also parted ways with their previous label. “When your back’s against the wall, you become a different person,” says Graham. “Everyone changes, and you find out who you truly are. That’s what really made this long span of time happen, piecing together everything after the pandemic.”
Written by Graham, the new songs were also composed with the live shows in mind. “We wanted songs that reflected what we want to do live, instead of some of the more jammier shit we did before,” says Graham. “We wanted these to be pretty concise and ready to rock.”
Alley adds, “The live show aspect has always been really important to us and impacted what we were writing. We wanted to consciously write songs that would be incorporated into the set and lean on that reciprocal energy.”
Still in motion, the next batch of songs Graham is writing are less Depeche Mode and more trash metal, circa late ’80s Slayer. He jokes that there may also be a concept album on the horizon.
“I’ve wondered when I’m going to slip into concept album mode,” he jests, planning out a King Diamond-like getup with makeup, a hat, and gloves. “I’m damn close to it. At the end of this tour, it might start. There’s gonna be fire dancers and shit on the stage. Look out. I’m going to start making chainmail at home and speak in Old English.”
If …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals faces turbulent times, it also leans on hope. “That’s what made me fall in love with it: the idea that no matter what is thrown at you, we can keep on chugging,” says Alley. “We can attack it with this heaviness. We can attack it with hope or acknowledge, sometimes, that it’s just sad.”
Playing the songs live has even helped Graham come around to the immensity of the album and its “fucked up” beauty.
“Sometimes it takes a long time, and I think of the emotional shit that’s gone on in the last seven years that has stifled me, then made these explosions,” he says. “But those explosions are what made this album. It’s been hard. It’s been strange. I’m getting older, and I hope it’s fucking easier next time. It feels like it might be.”