Exclusive: How UNFD shaped Northlane’s surprise album campaign

It may be Beyoncé’s signature move, but you don’t have to be the world’s biggest star to throw your fans for a loop: Sydney metalcore act Northlane released a surprise album this morning, after an oblique campaign that had their devoted following speculating something big was on the way.

The band released a single without warning earlier this year, and launched a cryptic Facebook Messenger chatbot this week, which dropped hints about “something big” that would happen today.

Sure enough, the band’s new longplayer Mesmer dropped this morning, with the band telling fans in a Facebook post:

Releasing Mesmer in this way has been right for us at this moment in time. … We didn’t want to keep it from you a moment longer than we had to. We felt we owed it to this album to try and think creatively about every aspect of the way people would experience Mesmer, like a gift from us to you that is being unboxed. We wanted to make everyone’s discovery of this moment special.”

UNIFIED Label Manager Maya Janeska told TMN that the label dropped plenty of hints for fans – and in fact, it was a pretty standard album release campaign, except for the fact that they never actually announced an album.

“At UNFD we generally announce an album and a release date and immediately put it up for preorder. With Mesmer we wanted to treat it like a normal campaign but omit the album announcement entirely. We released two singles and two videos, we announced a tour, we released the visual counterpart to the album titled ‘Mesmer’ which was essentially a visual representation of the album.

“We kept our eye on social media for every release and noticed that the fans went through a whole range of emotions each time, from surprise to excitement, anger, confusion and we loved every moment of it.”

Janeska says that there were very stealthy clues nearly two years ago – a URL in braille was hidden on Northlane’s 2015 album Node – but nobody ever actually found it.

“We updated this website with studio footage months ago to see if anyone would pick up on the clues, and no one did until we shared it via the band’s socials in a series of white tile images a couple of weeks out from album release,” says Janeska. “This was essentially a diversion to suggest to people that the band had only just entered a studio, so an album announcement wasn’t expected until much later in the year.

UNIFIED also toyed with the fans in other ways, such as editing the band’s Wikipedia page with a fake release date and setting the chatbot to answer questions about new music with mostly the same cryptic response: “Don’t shift your view. You might slip and fall.”

“It was refreshing for us to drop a surprise album to a fanbase that had no prior knowledge of it and as a result weren’t given a chance to think about what they could expect. As a label, we never know what to expect from Northlane, which is both terrifying and exciting, so this was a chance for us to pass on that feeling to the fans and let them experience what we do, when it comes to new music from the band.”