Behind an unprepossessing corrugated iron door on a non-descript Sheffield industrial estate, exciting things are happening.
Because through that door, across the warehouse floor and up the stairs you’ll find the most thrilling, fastest-rising rock band on the planet. This is the HQ of Dropdead, the hugely successful clothing line owned by Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes, and the de facto base of the band. As phonelines buzz and staff lug shipments of T-shirts around, the band slowly drift in.
Guitarist Lee Malia and drummer Matt Nicholls leaf through a rock magazine, asking searching questions about Greta Van Fleet and whether or not they are “for real”. Bassist Matt Kean buries himself in the sofa and debates how the band will approach the older songs they’re playing on tour. Keyboard player and production guru Jordan Fish tinkers with his broken vape and tries, in vain, to persuade his manager to go to the shop and buy him a new one. They are, collectively, in what they refer to as the “twilight zone” between finishing the new album, Amo, and it being unleashed on the general public on January 25.
Sykes is last to arrive, his understated, approachable demeanour at odds with his intense on-stage presence and, indeed, with the buzz currently surrounding the band. Because Horizon continue to defy the reduced expectations around rock and metal at the tail end of 2018.
Their last two albums, 2013’s Sempiternal and 2015’s That’s The Spirit, have both sold over 1.5 million units worldwide. Their UK sales trajectory is, almost uniquely for a UK rock band, entirely upward: 2006’s Count Your Blessings has sold 49,162 copies, according to the Official Charts Company; 2008’s Suicide Season 62,281; 2010’s There Is A Hell, Believe Me I’ve Seen It There Is A Heaven, Let’s Keep It A Secret 74,766; Sempiternal 177,979 and That’s The Spirit 235,916. Nor do they conform to the rock stereotype when it comes to streaming: 42.5% of That’s The Spirit’s ‘sales’ have come through the format, while Amo’s lead single Mantra became one of the very few hard rock songs to ever be added to Spotify’s all-conquering Hot Hits UK playlist.
“We’ve been working with Spotify and the various digital platforms for a while,” says the band’s manager, Raw Power Management founder/CEO Craig Jennings. “People are thinking that now it is time to support the band on a greater level, whereas before it has been more niche. We’ve bucked the trend for rock music and I’m hoping that that is the tip of the iceberg for this record, with the depth of singles we’ve got.”
The band is a global priority for Sony, with the album released on RCA in the UK and Columbia in the US.
“It’s a proper album but it’s got real big singles on there,” agrees RCA president David Dollimore, who says the label is “100%” going for a No.1 album on the release. “We’ve got the band touring and the perfect set-up to really have a huge album for next year. Then the sky’s the limit for the festivals and what they’ll be doing.”
The group has sold over 100,000 tickets for its current UK tour, which hit arenas in Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff before two dates at London’s Alexandra Palace this week. The band hope to curate their own festival at some point and Amo is precision-tooled to take them to the next level creatively, not just commercially.
So, collaborators range from beatboxer Rahzel on the ironically-titled Heavy Metal; Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth on the off-the-cuff mayhem of Wonderful Life; and Grimes on the stunning dark rave of Nihilist Blues, as main songwriters Sykes and Fish continue to expand their own horizons, going ever deeper into electronica while retaining every ounce of BMTH’s rock power. The album contains everything from Horizon’s most straight-up love song (Mother Tongue) to the poisonous power of Medicine (“Some people are a lot like clouds you know/’Cos life’s so much brighter when they go”).
“When we were writing That’s The Spirit we were all like, ‘This is mental, this album’s crazy’,” says Sykes. “It felt cutting edge and bold. But then we released it and it did as well as it did and it was getting on the radio and stuff, we took a step back and said, ‘It’s not as out there as we thought’. But you have to write a record like that to be able to do an album like we’ve done this time.”
Time, then, to hunker down on the Dropdead sofa with the entire band to talk streaming, songwriting and what’s gone wrong with rock music…
How do you look back at the That’s The Spirit era now?
Matt Nicholls: “It was the biggest tour we’ve done, arena shows and stuff we’d never thought we’d end up doing, so it was very successful. Good numbers and all that!”
Oli Sykes: “It was cool, we were starting to get recognised outside of our genre, like playing the NME Awards [where the band caused mayhem by jumping on Coldplay’s table]. Hearing songs like Throne on the radio in heavy rotation, it felt like we weren’t just getting big in our own world, we were actually doing the thing we’d wanted to do for a while: cross over and bring new people into it.”
Jordan Fish: “Glastonbury felt like a big thing. I don’t think we ever thought we’d get a slot like that – bands like us don’t. To do that show, we were definitely moving into a different world than the rock world.”
Is it important for you to do that?
OS: “It’s very important right now, because there isn’t really a rock scene. Rock is niche now. It doesn’t feel like people are getting into rock music anymore, simply because there’s not enough talent to support it. There’s not been an icon to come out of our genre [in a long time]. It’s still Metallica and Black Sabbath that people are going to see headline Download.”
JF: “It’s not as cool a genre as it used to be. We just did some press in America and they’ll say, ‘You guys throw the horns’ and we’re like, ‘Really? We’re 30 now, we don’t tend to throw the horns that often’. You’re getting interviewed by someone who looks like they’re in fancy dress. It’s hard for us, it’s so far away from something we’re into.”
Matt Kean: “That’s why it’s struggling at the minute. Whereas when we were young, you had bands like Linkin Park who brought people into rock.”
JF: “When that Nu-Metal scene died, it never quite figured out how to cross over again.”
OS: “That’s why rappers are almost the new rock’n’roll or punk or whatever. Rock’s gone soft, it’s gone miserable and boring, there’s not really much exciting about it. So it’s important that we cross over, because we feel like we belong more in a place where people just like music and it’s not about how heavy it is.”
So, what was the vision for Amo?
OS: “We wanted to write music that would excite us if we were a fan of our band. When you’re a fan, you appreciate the singles, but it’s usually the songs where the band’s gone deep and done exactly what they wanted to do that you love the most. We wanted to make more of those songs.”
Some of this album is a long way away from your roots. Do you worry about the fans’ reaction?
OS: “That’s the thing. If you’re a true fan of a band, you go on that journey with them. You’re always going to see people who are stuck in the past and just want you to sound like one album, but what can you do? You can’t please everyone.”
Lee Malia: “It would be more of a worry if the songs had been weird but not good. But they’re really good. If you like music and you like us and it’s a different sounding song, I don’t see why you’d think it was shit when it’s not shit.”
JF: “A lot of the artists I like have changed constantly throughout their career. Radiohead are one of my favourite bands – and I wouldn’t ever compare us to Radiohead – but a lot of people would have said, ‘I prefer The Bends’. But I don’t like the old stuff, I like them from when they went electronic onwards.”
OS: “We’d be lying if we didn’t say that we’ve all been thinking, ‘Fucking hell, what are people going to think of this album’, because you just do. But we’ve already won in a way; we’ve made an album that we’re absolutely over the moon about, that we feel smashes the record before it. Some of this stuff isn’t going to appeal to our fans who just like Throne or Sempiternal. But, at the same time, it’s a record that’s really rewarding if you get on board with it.”
JF: “When you’re writing, you really don’t have as much choice as to where a song goes as people think. When you get something that’s working and you’re buzzing off it, you can’t be like, ‘This isn’t going to be heavy enough’.”
Did Grimes take any persuading to be on the record?
JF: “She was top of our list. We had a shortlist but we were like, ‘We’re not going to get her, but that would be ideal’.”
OS: “We saw an interview where she said she liked our band a few years ago. But my wife’s obsessed with her and she was like, ‘She’s not going to do it, she doesn’t do collaborations’, so when it came through it was like, ‘Christ’. Grimes said she listened to 30 seconds of it and was like, ‘Yes, get me on this’. It might sound cheesy, but just her acceptance of the track when she gets people asking her to collab all the time… We were buzzing.”
There are a lot of contrasting lyrics on the album, from Mother Tongue to Medicine…
OS: “The theme throughout the album is love. Since That’s The Spirit, I’ve got divorced, met someone else, fell in love with them, got married. I found out my ex was having an affair and all this stuff, so everything happened surreally fast. When it came to writing the album I didn’t really want to write about it. I didn’t want to dredge up the past or talk negatively about my ex because, as much as it was shit, I’m glad it happened. Jordan kept saying, ‘Why aren’t you singing about this?’ It just felt wrong at the time. I don’t want to upset my current wife or make it seem like I still care about it but, at the end of the day, I was scarred from it, I did have emotional baggage from it, it did mess me up.”
JF: “The problem is, if you don’t talk about it, it limits what you can talk about, because it’s been your life.”
OS: “Totally. So, after a while, I just had to go, ‘I’ve got all this stuff in my head, I’ve got to get it out, otherwise I’m not going to do this album any justice’. I have nothing else to sing about; I’m not into politics, I don’t like to make up stories, I like to talk about real things that have happened to me. You can be so in love with someone and just like that, if someone does something to you, you can be like, ‘I never want to see that person ever again’. I find that so mental, it’s such a powerful emotion but it can be literally just taken away or flipped on its head. There’s not even any residual emotion. If someone fucks you over that bad it’s not, ‘Well, they did this, but I’m still longing for them’, it’s just: ‘Alright, that person is scum and that’s it’.”
Mantra was on Hot Hits UK but rock and metal in general has a hard time on streaming…
JF: “That’s because it’s bad, generally. In my opinion, it’s mostly shite. The people who are writing the songs aren’t good enough songwriters. I don’t love the music on Hot Hits UK but they are well-written songs and that’s something a lot of rock bands don’t appreciate. The craft of writing good songs is hard.”
OS: “Any of these bands could write a big song but it means they’re just going to have to keep going and be so honest with themselves that it hurts. We could have half-written all these songs and then gone to see a producer, hoping he was going to sort them out. But one of the important things about being a rock band is that you do write your own music. It’s not a very rock thing to have people writing your songs or your lyrics for you. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a little bit of help, or some outside perspective, but a lot of our contemporaries now just have people straight-up writing songs for them. I find that bonkers.”
JF: “If I bought a piece of art by someone and they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s by him, but someone else tweaked this bit’… I want the one by that person, I don’t want it to be from a pool of people. I know that’s not the way a lot of people do things nowadays, but we’re different to a lot of bands in a lot of ways.”
A lot of people at Sony think you could be the biggest rock band in the world. Is that important to you?
JF: “We’d rather be the kind of band we like. Like Nine Inch Nails, where they play whatever size venue they play and their career is based on them doing what they want. We aspire to that more than, ‘Can we sell out a huge arena tour or be as big as Coldplay?’”
LM: “So many rock bands come out and the first album’s the biggest one and then they’re always chasing to get back up to that. We’ve never had that. We’ve always been on our way, doing good.”
OS: “It’s time people brought out albums for the people that don’t listen to the radio, for people that just love music and want to be arrested by an album, sit and listen to it, not just press play and have some tracks while they’re doing their homework. You can’t put [this album] in the background. It might not be as heavy as our last record – or it might be, I don’t even know – but what’s important is that it’s exciting and exhilarating. Even if it’s a poppier song, it’s a million times more exciting than the shit you hear on the radio. It’s emotional, it’s got depth and it’s always going to grab you and make you feel something.”
Submitted November 26, 2018 at 11:30PM by Top_Carai https://ift.tt/2Rm4dxG
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