Shape of Water is an alternative art-rock band formed in 2018 from Manchester, United Kingdom. The band’s music has no boundaries and is sure to redefine rock music as you know it…

Rox Capriotti and Luca De Falco met in 2004 in their hometown of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. The first band they formed together was called The Lotus. Over the following few years, the band had various members step in and out on drums and bass guitar, however, Rox and Luca kept the band together and on track. In 2015, the band relocated to Manchester, UK in search of new music experiences.

The band had a short hiatus period and eventually decided to split up. Rox and Luca remained close, writing music together however the rest of the band moved on, or back to Italy. After the breakup of The Lotus, Rox and Luca decided to move ahead once again, on their own together, and thus gave birth to Shape of Water.

After writing dozens of songs, they carefully selected the best of the best and started recording new material in early 2018 with producer Paul Reeve (Muse, Beta Band, Supergrass) at Airfield Studios. The band also brought on Sky Van Hoff (Rammstein, Kreator, Caliban) to mix the songs “Scar” and “Not All the Things“, and the drums on the album were performed by Marco Lancs. The result was a ten-song album entitled “Great Illusions”. The album deals mainly with the misconception of human feelings, politics, and society.

While shopping the “Great Illusions” album for a deal, they independently released their first single “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” which is a cover of the British 80’s rock band, Ultravox. Coincidentally just a few days after its release, the band heard back from Eclipse Records who had expressed interest in working with the band and shortly thereafter signed a deal with the label.

“Great Illusions” was released in the summer of 2020 and received critical acclaim from dozens of respected media outlets. The band was unable to promote it live due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic however, the duo was able to quickly adapt with the use of live-streaming performances which were widely received. Shape Of Water also spent time “reinventing” some of their songs for an early 2021 EP release entitled “Lockdown On Mars“. The EP is an exciting cinematic rebirth of electro art-rock that you need to hear to believe! Reimagined, re-recorded cinematic versions of “Mars-X” and “The World Is Calling Me” highlight the Lockdown On Mars EP which was produced by Paul Reeve and mixed by Rox Capriotti. These instant classics, along with an electro-acoustic version of “Perfect Love” and a daring remake of “Still Karma” entitled “The Great Still Karma” breathe new life into these fan favorites. Top it all off with a cover of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, and this EP sets a new bar for the alternative electro-rock scene. The world has been calling for more Shape Of Water, and they have answered! “Lockdown On Mars” was released worldwide on February 12, 2021. Check out our interview with Rox, who’s not only the singer of the band, but he’s also the bassist and keyboardist!

Beginnings:

Luca and I met almost 17 years ago in our hometown in Italy. We formed our first band called The Lotus, which lasted a long time. After we moved to the UK in 2015 we decided to disband The Lotus and form Shape Of Water.

Behind the name:

We were looking for a new name that could represent the idea of music in our head. We absolutely didn’t want to be labeled only as a rock or metal or prog or pop band so we thought we had to use a name that had the idea of constant changing.

Luca was watching an interview with Bruce Lee where he was saying these words: ‘Be like the water, my friend’. And so, he just came up with Shape Of Water which was the perfect sum of everything we were looking for.

Just to be clear though, we are big fans of Guillermo Del Toro but the band’s name has nothing to do with the movie. (smiles)

Inspiration:

If I have to be honest, at the moment I haven’t been much inspired by any bands or new musicians or things. The thing is that I find it very difficult to find inspiration when I cannot go outside and when I can’t interact with people and talk about new stuff, new music, new things that could eventually inspire me. So, in conclusion, I really can’t wait for this pandemic to be over!

Usually, we write about situations that happened in our lives (such as Perfect Love, Five Days To Shine, and A Silvia) and things that really caught our attention (such as the Space-X project, which inspired Mars-X or war supremacy of global superpowers that inspired The World Is Calling Me).

As I was saying before though, it’s been challenging recently to write new songs because of the pandemic. However we did write something and we had already something before the pandemic started, so I would say that a new album is not so far away! (smiles)

Teamwork:

It depends really! Most of the time one of us writes the song and then we finish composing it together, but it also happened that we made a song from scratch together or one of us just brought the song already finished.

We’re lucky to live very close to each other so any time we want to share new ideas with each other we just meet at one of our houses and start to compose.

Then I take care of the additional arrangements, such as orchestration, programming, harmonies…etc and Luca takes care of all the artwork.

COVID-19:

At the very beginning, it’s been hard: we had our debut album coming up and before the pandemic started, we had planned already gigs and stuff but then we had to rethink everything, but it ended up better than expected, actually! Now we’re starting to feel the need to go outside and play and talk to people, talk to our fans, play at festivals, play at venues. We do really miss all this.

Online concert:

We did do actually some online concerts and we have planned a series of live streaming events that had started on the 10th of March and went on until the end of May.
The series is called Livestreams From Mars and each episode consisted of different performances: for instance, the first one saw us playing live half set electric, half set acoustic. The second episode was an online writing session and we shared our ideas with our fans and composed a song together, it was fun! 

Fun facts:

Well, honestly not a lot of interesting things happened in 2020/2021 considering we spent 90% of the time at home. However, we have a long history of weird and funny things from when we were The Lotus: for instance, I remember once, when we actually were touring the UK, probably 10 years ago, we went to this pub near Stoke On Trent to check the stage for our gig the next day. When we entered the door, it was a complete mess, everybody drunk and shouting. Apparently, it was the owners’ birthday but we didn’t know it so we asked for info about our gig. When I finally met this old woman who seemed to be sober enough to talk to me, she asked me ‘Are you the singer?’, I said yes and then all of a sudden she showed me her breasts! She was the owner’s wife. (laughs)

Cover photo: Tatiana Biancucci