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We're at UK Tech Metal Fest 2013, we're here with Heart of a Coward.
Just say your name and what you do in the band.
Jamie, vocalist.
Noddy, drums.
You guys have been through a bit of a journey to get here, suffice to say.
You played a bunch of festivals and shows.
You came from Russia. Just go through what the schedule was to get here.
8.5 hour night train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 13 hours at the airport,
4.5 hour flight, 4 or 5 hours of sleep and then drive straight here.
Then there is the train journey to actually get to St. Petersburg
and of course the flight from the UK to Russia.
Everything that could have gone wrong with that journey went wrong.
We had 50 Chinese ladies on the night train,
literally the loudest cacophony of high pitched voices I've ever heard in my life.
And I fully lost my *** at about half past 4 in the morning.
We were sleeping in these bunks that are about 4 ft long
and you can't actually extend yourself, no ventilation,
there's a smoking carriage with no windows in it and everybody's constantly smoking in there.
It might as well be a smoking train all the way down.
So we're sitting in there festering in our own vomit,
trying to sleep to the warming sounds of 50 Chinese old age pensioners,
gaggling about their knitting.
I actually poked my head out the door and told them, if they don't shut the *** up
I was going to skin them alive and hang them out from the train.
They were quiet quite quickly, but I kind of felt like I was going to go hell after that.
There's a special place reserved for us, as Noddy says.
A little corner with a velvet rope saying 'Heart of a Coward', just waiting for us.
So it's almost like a PSA to bands who say:
"Oh I want to grow up, I want to be in a band, I want to tour", that what's touring is like.
Pretty much, yeah.
When you have that sort of schedule, how do you mentally prepare yourself?
Just be sensible with your intake and the amount you're smoking.
Look after your diet and have vitamins and try and get rest.
If you're not going to get to sleep, just sit and shut the *** up and don't waste your energy.
As soon as you step up there, you automatically just do it anyway.
It's different for me for vocals. If I'm really exhausted and dehydrated,
I find it *** hard to get the high notes and stuff.
Obviously your stamina suffers when you're really tired,
but we try to make the best of it when we're really knackered.
We've never had shows go really badly,
but you do definitely notice when you haven't slept properly the night before.
It's not as much fun.
That's just something that comes along with touring, really.
It is, yeah. And you have to just get on with it.
If you complain about feeling tired, you shouldn't be in a touring band, really.
You recently got signed to Century Media.
How did it feel to go to such a big label for Europe and America?
It feels *** great, obviously it's a huge label, and they've had some great releases.
It's a great back catalog and they've got the largest actual star faculty
in the world out of any metal label. Like 75 people or something.
Perfect label for us, really, for what we want to do.
My work stuff ties us fairly close to them.
I'm good friends with a few of the guys there and deal with them quite a lot for work anyway,
so it made a lot sense from a business side and a trust side to be dealing with Century Media,
because they're very straight ahead. There's no ***.
They have a very organized and routine way of dealing with the admin side of the band,
the accounting and the product management.
And you had a personal connection, like you said.
The personal connection was important,
and then obviously we've got a lot of friends on Century Media as well,
like Monuments, TesseracT, Bleed From Within.
And they all had great things to say.
Exactly. So yeah, it was a no brainer.
When did that actually all come together?
How long was it between "Hey guys, we want to sign you", and then it was all public.
How long has it been in the pipeline for?
We've had label interest since before 'Hope and Hindrance',
but we decided we wanted to do that album ourselves.
Retain the rights for the back catalog so when we do eventually get a large deal,
it'll be worth more to us when we got the freedom to do what we want with it,
which is where we are now. So, I think it paid off.
But the actual Century Media thing came last year.
Towards Christmas we started having conversations with Jens and Robert and Steve Joh,
and then we signed by April.
We got all the negotiations figured out by the end of February.
With 'Hope and Hindrance' it was like I showed the album to some people
and even the artwork and the media production for it was really professional,
but self promoted and self released and everything.
How much work did that take to get such a really sleek, professional product on your own?
You just have to be organised. Pulling in favours from friends as well.
We went through a lot to get that album out
and I think that's why we called it 'Hope and Hindrance',
because it was the hope that helped get the *** album out,
and we were constantly hindered.
The album started before I even joined the band and before Steve joined the band,
so it's a combination of 4 songs that are nearly 5 years old.
And then there's like 'Killing Fields', 'Nightmare' and 'Shade',
the only 3 that I wrote lyrics on. All the rest were written before.
So this new album is the first album we've written as a five-piece, it's very different.
Still sounds like us, but it's very different.
With 'Deadweight', the production of the song leans more to the hardcore side.
'Hope and Hindrance' was kind of clean, but this has real crunch in it.
Yeah, we've gone for a much heavier sound for sure.
'Deadweight' is definitely the "meat and potatoes" song on the record,
it's the quick fix live anthem.
There's no singing, there's no polyrhythms, there's no progressive sections,
it's just a punch in the face.
But there are a lot of songs on the album that are a lot more dynamic.
We pretty much dropped the "Milton cleans" guitar tone.
We've gone for proper valve tones for the guitar, it's miced up.
It's not direct, it's not Axe-FX.
The drums are organic.
We wanted to strip the whole sound down really.
And that was a really conscious decision? Like, this is what we want to do now.
Yes, some bands go "we want to be more technical, we want to showcase our arrangements,
we want to be more lead guitar driven."
We pretty much went in the opposite direction.
'Deadweight' is definitely the most basic song on the album, in terms of guitar parts.
A lot of people were like "where's all the groove gone, where's all the lead gone?"
If you're expecting an album full of songs like 'Deadweight', you're going to be very disappointed.
It's definitely more varied and a lot more cohesive as well.
'Hope and Hindrance' was kind of a mish mash with a lot of different songs and sounds.
The lyrical directions were very different, because they were all written by different musicians.
This album is the first cohesive piece of music.
This is us, this is the band, this is what we sound like.
Lyrically on this album it's all you, so what kind of direction do you want to take it in?
All of the songs are personal, but they're not all around the same sort of thing.
There is a running theme throughout the album of basically removing yourself from a trap,
a spiral of depression and anger.
The angrier you get, the less chance you have of getting rid of that anger.
The more chances are that anger is going to affect other people,
like it goes with any negative connotation in your life.
The other running theme is society's obsession with social status,
basically relying on the success of other people to make their own lives better.
There's a lot of quite personal anthems on it, but it's stuff that we all feel strongly about.
It's definitely not a political record.
It's more social, like if you're talking about it in that respect,
we've definitely got strong views on certain things
but they are more based on how we like to live our lives
and the things that we see other people do.
It's not like a self-righteous thing but sometimes you want to *** stamp on people's heads.
I've met some real dickbags in my time and I just don't want to be anything like those people.
That's what the album is about,
just people who are on a self-destructive path and want to drag other people down.
I've got no time for people like that, none of us do.
That's why we all get along so well as a band, we enjoy each other's company.
We're not trying to be the biggest band in the world and make a big statement,
or reinvent any genre, we just play music that we love.
Compared to 'Hope and Hindrance', how quickly did the new album come together?
It's like a fart, it was so quick.
We shat it out.
Six months really, when we look back.
We set a studio up at my house, we did all the tracking there.
It came together really quickly.
Steve joining the band played a big part in the speed.
Carl and Steve, they're pretty much fifty-fifty in terms of the riffs
that they're bringing to the album.
V got a lot more involved in the riffs.
I got more involved in the arrangements, Noddy always writes his drum parts anyway.
Just us five, we had a lot more input. Steve was a real catalyst to that.
In the past we've had people who were quite difficult to work with,
in terms of settling, letting it breathe and moving on to another one,
not just obsessing over the same...
We're taking a step back and stripping down our approach.
If it feels good, let's leave it there and come back to it, don't try to add another layer.
It's the same with the vocals as well. There's very little double tracking on the album.
Everything is one track, straight up in the middle, one take.
I've done very little punch ins, very little overdubs.
If we didn't nail the song in a take, we just keep doing it.
Compared to the last album, we'd record a line, we'd listen back, and then another line.
It's a lot more organic in pretty much every single way, even the artwork is not as polished.
So, it's essentially ready to go?
It's nearly done, it's getting mixed in America at the moment by Will Putney.
He did Thy Art Is ***, Northlane, Suicide Silence,
and a bunch of other records that we really liked the sound of.
'Insurrection' by Molotov Solution.
It was all tracked in Milton Keynes though, with Acle Kahney (4D Sounds).
He's a good friend to the band as well,
so it was good to work with someone who is nice and laid back.
If he was any more laid back, he would be horizontal.
It was a nice environment for the guys to work in.
What's up with Milton Keynes? There's even the term 'Milton cleans'.
'Milton cleans' is just the guitar tone.
There's like a million bands in this scene from Milton Keynes.
There's *** all to do up there, that's why.
There's actually not that many.
TesseracT, Monuments and Heart of a Coward came out of Fellsilent.
Fellsilent were inspired by SikTh and Meshuggah.
Acle is actually the only member from TesseracT from Milton Keynes.
Browne lived just outside Milton Keynes.
Steve's from Brighton.
Invocation who played here on Friday, they're from Milton Keynes.
I remember them coming to see us at a Fellsilent show.
They're quite young as well, it's cool to see them here.
They were in another band, The Machinist.
And there's Hacktivist as well of course.
A couple of months back on YouTube,
over the song 'Shade' there was various footage of people falling down, getting hit.
The suffergrams came about.
That was just something that kind of sprang out organically and it went viral, almost.
We have the Russians to thank for that. That's how it went viral.
That's why we were in Russia, funnily enough, because of that song.
I'm literally getting eaten alive. I've got like 50 insects crawling around on me.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of insects at Tech Fest. Insect Fest.
It's been pretty... not British. The weather has not been very British.
It's been like this every single day.
Russia was the same, it was pretty hot.
On the camping site you had to be out of your tent by 8.30 or else you'd suffocate and die.
Anyway, with the bugs eating you alive we'll let you wrap up.
There's another one. I think they're falling out of the tree.
They're gonna burrow inside me and lay eggs and I'm gonna hatch *** everywhere.
Any last words to say?
I don't like bugs!
We like Chinese women, just not Chinese women that *** talk at a million decibels
when I'm try to get my sleep.
Try shutting the *** up.
The new album will be out in November, buy it.
Keep an eye out for that ***.
Thanks a million lads.