Track-by-Track: Utility Ponder Their Album ‘How To Protect What’s Left’

When it comes to Utility, the formula is simple, but not necessarily easy to pull off. Based in Portland, Oregon, the duo released four singles in the lead-up to the release of their brand new album, How to Protect What’s Left, on October 17th via LOABO Records. The band is led by lead singer RFK Heise, well known and highly regarded for his work with Last Giant and System and Station. Heise is joined in Utility by his rock n’ roll cohort Adam Draper, previously of Down Gown and Swim Swam Swum.

Formed in 2018, the objective behind Utility was basically to see how much sound could be generated by two people with limited resources. A bass guitar, a drum kit, and some modern technology… How could it be combined to make as much noise as possible? And how close can they get to sounding like a heavy rock band such as Thin Lizzy, with dashes of new wave and soul music? Heise and Draper are a powerful team, driven by their catchy hooks and acrobatic beats. Their self-titled debut album came out in 2019, and now it’s finally being followed up with the release of How to Protect What’s Left. The ten-track collection picks up where their self-titled debut left off. The rock is rawer, the grooves are groovier, and the sound is even larger.

We are joined today by Utility for an exclusive and comprehensive Track-by-Track rundown of how each song on How to Protect What’s Left came to life.

1. “Your Pain is an Ocean”

“‘Your Pain is an Ocean’ started with a demo I recorded at my studio in July of 2024. It was the last track written for the album. I decided to start messing with a drop C# tuning, and it sounded quite massive with the bass and octave up combo and created a lot of dimensions. At the time, my father was in hospice in Idaho, so I was running back and forth from Oregon to Idaho every month. After he passed in September of that year, I tracked a lot of the guitars for the proper album at his house in November, when his house was being emptied out. There was a lot happening at the time within my family, as things tend to when the patriarch passes.

“There was so much anger and hurt swirling in my life at that time, the music inspired a release of a lot of emotion in the lyric that had been pent up and needed to be let go. The lyrics are about someone’s damage being so overwhelming that it floods every relationship; it’s all in the chorus lyric, ‘Your pain is an ocean and you’re spreading the wave.’ It’s about immovable self–self-righteousness combined with a total lack of self-awareness.”

2. “No Wrong No Right”

“‘No Wrong No Right’ came from a jam that Adam and I had been messing with since 2022. We would mess with it for warm-up and just tinker with it. I decided to commit to making a proper demo of the song in late 2023, I believe. We have had such a long journey completing this record over the past five years since our first release and show cycle. We didn’t know if these songs would see the light of day as we went through so much life, death and devastation; it feels like a small miracle that this album is now alive.

“I think ‘No Wrong No Right’ is a true collaboration and has a wonderful dialogue between us on space and emotion. I think we dedicated ourselves to this track in the same light we dedicated ourselves to completing this album. ‘Where can we go and how the hell do we get there?’ It has been about simmering and letting things happen naturally.

“The lyric is inspired by the music, per my usual writing style and is always open for individual interpretation, which I love. My vision for them, however, was about purity and being real, being in the moment. I was finding it hard to trust the people closest to me at the time, and the world was upside down, as it is now, where greed and deception seem to be the only constants. It’s about seeing past the material and being a person of their word and calling out the thieves and liars.”

Utility “Steady Machine” single artwork

3. “Shiny Things”

“‘Shiny Things’ is the heartbreak track on the album. This song came out very quickly for me, within an hour or two. We played out with this track for a while before we tracked it for the album. I think it was in set rotation as early as 2022, so we were putting it to the test in front of people and honing dynamics, which was fun. People seem to really connect with the chorus and the emotion of the lyric, ‘You fell in love and love fell apart.’

“The music informed the mood with the verses being a confessional from a bitter point of view and the choruses an explanation of where it all went wrong, heartbreak. It’s a portrait of youth and how the world and passing relationships slowly chip away at our perceptions of the world. Our first heartbreak can reinform the world around us, who we are, what we think we know, and who we want to be. It also teaches us independence, self-reliance, and the meaning of sheer will. The scary thing is how we continue; are we the bitter character of the verse, or do we recognize and choose to live with wild abandon and love?”

4. “Walking in Charleston”

“‘Walking in Charleston’ was something I wrote on a trip to Charleston, West Virginia, to see my wife’s family in December of 2023. I love Charleston and the people of West Virginia I’ve had the pleasure of meeting; you want to talk about resilience and perseverance, this is where the conversation starts. The area has been through so much and has had to deal with the tyranny of corporate greed, bleeding of natural resources, contamination of water and food supplies, and destruction of industry, which have turned so many nearby towns into ghost towns with lingering addiction caused by the flooding of opioids.

“It is an area of the world that has been consistently let down by outsiders, but the strength of the people and support of their own community is inspiring and true. The good and the light shine brightly amongst the darkness. ‘We’re just waiting on the sun as we walk in Charleston.’”

5. “Steady Machine”

“‘Steady Machine’ started with a jam, Adam and I had and morphed through demos and a couple of rewrites. We tracked the drums at my studio as well as all the other songs. I really like Adam’s performance on this track, on all the tracks, but on this track, he really creates a great tension in the dynamic and the spaces he leaves. He’s smart about it, and then of course the choruses are heavy and massive as he does. I had a lot of fun in the studio with this track on the intro. Being a drum and bass band, we need to incorporate a few loops here in there to recreate the intro live, but it was a blast putting it all together.

“I was somewhat inspired by Soundgarden’s ‘Searching With My Good Eye Closed’ from Badmotorfinger for the intro; the hardcore will know what I’m talking about. I also wanted to do something a little different with the lead vocal and create a ghost vibe with a haunting doubled vocal that’s run through a backwards filter. It creates a different vibe for the song that I dig. The lyrics are about breaking free of complacency and realizing you no longer recognize yourself, and getting back to your heart and loving yourself.”

6. “Interlooter”

“‘Interlooter’ is an interlude for the record. It comes from the following song, ‘Tightrope,’ and the middle eight section. I really dig the middle eight of the song, and it only happens once. And I wanted to get more time with it, so I decided to build the interlude around it. I added dulcimer and piano so it wouldn’t sound like anything else on the record and create a sort of reset for the second half. We used a cymbal with mallets as the crescendo to the repeating part, which feels hypnotic. This was a fun studio playground piece, good times.”

Utility ‘How To Protect What’s Left’ album artwork

7. “Tightrope”

“‘Tightrope’ is the classic pop-structured song on the album, and I feel it has one of the strongest choruses I’ve written. This song was a bit of an uphill battle in that how it was demoed is nothing like the final recording. I initially demoed the song in 2023, including the drum parts. I created more of a fast reggae offbeat, almost ska feeling, and it felt upbeat and faster. When Adam got his hands on it, he rearranged the part and created more space and calmed it down and played it straight with a four on the floor feel. At first, I wasn’t quite feeling it, but we tracked the song at least 20 times to get the right take.

“At the end of that, I was just ready to move on to the next song and let it simmer before mixing. Listening back to the original demo now and the finished product, I much prefer Adam’s take on it over mine. He had a keen sense of what the structure is and how to declutter.

“Lyrically, I wrote in a story format about a conman who was trying to get into someone’s heart and once achieved, realizes the person is as screwed up as they are and that they have met their match or soulmate in dysfunction. It’s a song ultimately about beauty and compassion.”

8. “King Sheep”

“‘King Sheep’ strips the bass and drum thing we are doing down to its essential, massive grooves and big riffs. It takes its cue from Rage Against the Machine, bass and guitar locked in the riff playing every note together (which makes sense because it’s just a bass playing both!) against a massive backbeat. This song is a lot of fun for me because it’s us in basic form, just make it rock. There is also Zeppelin and Sabbath influences in here, and the outro is bombastic, almost satirical; it makes me smile. The lyrics are a bit political; I’m going to leave it at that.

“This song tracked quickly, I think we got it within five takes, maybe less, and I used some distant mic recording techniques I read about Jimmy Page using on the first two Zep records. I put up a room ribbon microphone and located it across the room from the amplifiers; it helped to create this depth that really stands out. It really helps accentuate that it is only two people in the room playing, and the amount of sound we can create, just the two of us. The recording technique was an attempt to make one feel as if they were in the room with us.”

9. “Dead to Rights”

“‘Dead to Rights,’ I first demoed back in late 2021, and I was listening to a good amount of Fugazi at the time. Both Adam and I come from the scene of the 90s and are big fans of the DC bands of the era, particularly Fugazi. He added some cool cross-sticking on the intro. By the pre-chorus and chorus, the song changes into something else entirely, so the song is a great span of our influences. We tracked the song for the album at my studio in July of 2024, and Adam nailed it quickly.

“The middle section I wanted to have sort of a Jane’s Addiction vibe with the synth and the falsetto vocal. We used keys and synths to create the vibe of this part, so we are now using a few loops to pull it off live, but it works. I tracked the guitars in the same mobile sessions I was doing in Idaho in November of 2024.

“The only thing I had to keep my mind off my dad passing and being in the house I grew up in was to record as long as I could at night until I was exhausted. I felt something in the room while tracking, so many emotions from sadness and joy to hope and dread. I wrote the lyrics about the personalities and lives we build ourselves on social media and the impossibility of ever living up to societal expectations of these caricatures we create of ourselves or that we compare ourselves to. The idea of not being good enough has been taken to a whole new level when we are all just human beings, an evolution of a species that crawled from the ocean to now be stuck in tiny little fake, boxed-in worlds that have no physical meaning or true accomplishment. The vapidness of modern-day living.”

10. “Blood & Oil”

“‘Blood & Oil’ was another track first demoed in the summer or fall of 2021, I think. It was floating around for a while before we performed it as a band, and Adam put his touch to it. That has really been the story of this album, slowly collecting songs by myself and then as the two of us as we had time to while we were dealing with a lot of life. As they say, ‘life is what happens while we’re making other plans.’ I was listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy at the time and was taken by the song ‘Emerald’ off Jailbreak. The main riff of the song doesn’t sound like it, but it has the movement of an Irish trad song. The flow of it and the swing feel like an Irish song.

“The music influenced the lyrics of an Irish fighting song, kind of a we’re going to go down swinging vibe. The lyrics are based on different characters; you’re either going to see it through or you’re not, sink or swim, which is exactly what life felt like at the moment. We either survive or we don’t. I’m glad we are currently alive and making it work. Hopefully, the universe is listening.”