Interview: Getting to Know Artifact
Artifact are a melodic metalcore band who recently released their brand-new EP, ‘Umbra’. In this interview, we get to know them a little better.
1. Hello! Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. First things first, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started.
HI! We’re a band from regional NSW, Australia, made up of Michael Veneris (vocals), Rebecca Horseman (vocals), Hayden Rapley (guitar), Nathan Clarke (guitar), and Harvey Saxton (drums).
I (Michael) started the band in 2021 with our original guitarist, Andrew Atkinson. It all began with a random encounter at a local supermarket—Andrew noticed I was wearing a Monuments shirt and sparked up a conversation. We connected on social media soon after, and after a bit of harmless scrolling, I discovered he’d uploaded several guitar playthroughs, including the sweep-picking section from “Machine” by Born of Osiris. I was blown away. At the time, I was already keen to start writing original music—initially as a guitarist—so we got together, jammed, and began working on what would become “Unravel.”
Harvey joined next. Andrew reached out to him after spotting a photo of him playing drums on Facebook. Harvey jumped on board straight away. We grabbed a few beers to make sure the chemistry was right, and it didn’t take long to realise we clicked both musically and personally.
After playing shows in major cities alongside bands like Signs of the Swarm, Northlane, and Within Destruction, we started attracting attention from other musicians. One of them was Hayden, who reached out and sent through some playthroughs of our songs. He absolutely nailed them and quickly became part of the lineup. Around that time, Andrew was preparing to step away, as the travel commitments were taking too much time away from his family.
Hayden proved to be the perfect successor.
I’d known Bec for quite a while—we previously performed together in a soft rock acoustic duo called Summer Sonder. When we needed a fill-in vocalist for a local show, she learned the entire set in just a couple of weeks. We were impressed with what she brought to the table, and she officially joined while we were midway through writing “Insurrection.”
Nathan was also a longtime friend, and we had been casually working on new material together. Hayden suggested we could use extra support with writing and production. We were cautious at first and took time to see if he’d be the right fit. But once I heard some of his demos—fresh, unconventional, and creatively bold—I was sold. He eventually joined the team, and some of those early demos evolved into tracks featured on our latest release, “Umbra.”
2. Someone comes to you and asks you to sum up what kind of music you play – what do you tell them?
Tough question… uhhhm… DJENT. The serious answer would be we are a dark melodic metalcore band.
3. What’s currently keeping you busy? A new album/EP/single release? A new video? Playing live, or planning ahead?
Currently we are flat out organising our year, creating content and finalising the release of our new EP Umbra which came out on the 6th of Feb.
4. What is about this current period that is particularly exciting for you?
We had the opportunity to tour overseas in South East Asia last year so that has shown us what is possible. Honestly having no limits on what we can do as a regional act is really cool and the uncertainty on what is on the horizon for us is very exciting to say the least!
5. Tell me about the work that has gone into making it a reality and what it means to you.
We are trying to build a career with music and the work we have to do is very hard. Despite being a smallish band, we have to make so many sacrifices to keep the ship afloat. Whether it’s spending time with our families, hanging out with friends, burning the midnight oil working on demo’s or other random admin jobs. It impacts our sleep, finances, relationships, jobs, health… the list could go on.
I can’t finish this answer by just complaining though, music and being on the road has made us many new friends who are just as hardworking and passionate about this as us and regardless we are very lucky to have so much support from all fronts. For example my dad flew to Taiwan to watch us when we played there which left me speechless. It made the trip twice as memorable.
I can’t speak for others as it would be unfair but music for me is almost everything, it’s my outlet. It’s a tool to help me through the worst moments of my life and it also makes the best moments more impactful. There is a method to the madness, we aren’t purely masochistic!
6. Making music and being creative can be a very positive experience and can be very good for the mind. In what way has making music had a positive impact on your mental health?
Music and creativity is a great way to express yourself and make sense of all the sh*t life throws at you. Personally for me I can find it very hard to articulate how I am feeling.
Because we fit in the metal category the sounds are aggressive and depressing. I would much prefer to direct those emotions into a microphone or instrument than people.
7. It can also be incredibly challenging, more so in the modern times. What have been some challenging aspects of making music and how have you overcome them?
Try to be as grounded as possible, talk to people even if they don’t understand. Reach out to organisations that support musicians financially e.g. Music NSW for us. Communicate with your bandmates.
8. How do you handle the online aspects of being in a band? Having to put out content constantly, promoting across several different social media platforms, and having your success measured in likes and follows?
We are trying a lot of new things at the moment. We are working very closely with our good friend Emma from Wagga Socials working on content creation. Karl, our certified content poster and mentor manages most of the social media stuff. Meta business suite is great because we can post on both instagram and facebook.
Some of us also have our “Band Avatar” accounts and post song cover reels which helps with building our audience e.g.
Me: https://www.instagram.com/michael_artifact
Hayden: https://www.instagram.com/hayden_artifact/
Nathan: https://www.instagram.com/nath_artifact/
9. How do you make this part of things enjoyable, and fulfilling, for yourself?
We take the music seriously but not ourselves. Literally just have fun.
10. Speaking directly to listeners – what would you ask they do to help support you?
Please engage with our posts, like, comment, message us something nice, it’ll make our day. If you want to help us financially please buy our merch. Vegemite is getting quite expensive in this economy.
11. Outside of music, what do you like to do to relax?
A lot of us are gamers so we jump on discord and sweat on counterstrike occasionally. Some of us like to go camping and fishing.
12. Where can people find you?
We can be found on most streaming services. This linktree should have most of our stuff on there including discord.
