@alpaca.presents by Brandon van der Berg @vdb.brandon The Sound Engineer for the night was Rowan
I had an absolutely greatly enjoyable and long chat with up’n’coming UK band “In Fear” at the penultimate headlining show of their “Lesson In Death” Tour at The Crofter’s Rights, Bristol, promoting their new album “All Is. All Shall Be”. The group are sitting at a warm 600k streams on Spotify in total and I sat down to talk about as much as I could before their fantastic set on the 23rd.
Find them on Instagram or Spotify
For Fans Of Of Mice & Men, Thy Art Is Murder and Glass Tides
Read Below.
You’ve been on the road for 6 days, how’s it been?
(Ben) It’s been good, we had a Premier Inn last night, so we had a good nights sleep, we’re doing pretty well.
How have the show’s been?
(Kurtan) Mate, really really good.
(Ryan) It’s been a bit interesting actually, one night has kind of been ‘meh’ and then the next nights been really good, It’s been like that the whole tour so its been up down up down. We are really looking forward to tonight because it’s a Home Town Headliner and we have some amazing supports lined up and then we knew that Rowan was on sound so we’re just looking forward to tonight.
A few of them have been cancelled haven’t they?
(Ben) Yeah, the first one I wont go into too much detail about as we couldn’t control what happened, but something you might not have known about was the Newcastle date.
Kurtan Chuckles
The first date, we drove all the way up there and as we were driving up in the van we noticed there was a crack in the road, a substantial bloody crack there and it was starting to dip in abit, looked at it like “Well we’re not parking there haha”. Parked up and within thirty minutes that crack had then fallen through and made about a 3ft by 4ft? *Gestures to band*
(Sam Drummer) A rather large sinkhole.
(Ben) It had hit a water main, so we got in, we sound checked, the first band went on and started playing and then the water company shut off the water to the street to fix it so they had to pull the show. So we just had to grit our teeth, chuck our stuff in the back of the van and go to the air bnb. It was a bit naff.
(Sam Bassist) It was entertaining.
(Ben) What can you do about that right? Haha
(Sam Drummer) If it weren’t for the fact it was like a seven and a half hour trip, it’d been okay haha, but it was a long way to go to just drive back.
(Ryan) After the first one in London getting cancelled and then the Newcastle one we were on a bit of a low, so thankfully Manchester was really sick and a really good turn out and we had amazing supports that night as well. Our friends in Blind Summit played as well so it was really nice to see people we know.
Excluding one, you guys have played every TechFest UK Festival since 2019, is there a relationship there or is it just a running booking?
(Kurtan) Oh god yeah, we’re really good friends with Simon.
(Ryan) He was there last night in Luton, he came to watch us so it was really cool we got to hang out and talk about stuff.
(Kurtan) He kind of feels apart of the band weirdly because he drives us on tour usually, well not this tour but usually he does, it’s just great vibes. A lot of guidance from him.
Your live show is very important to you and “Cessation” is one of your favourite songs to play live off of your album, do you play or do anything live that people can’t find online?
(Sam Drummer) There’s a lot of fills that change as I play, the more you play the more Ideas you find but you have to have played it for like 12 months to find some of these ideas, so yeah loads of little fill things like one in “Let them Hate” that’s not on the track. They don’t seem like that big of a deal but I guess to someone who’s listened to the track a few times and then comes in I suppose it’s a little nugget for them to go ‘oh he’s added in something cool’.
(Ryan) I think drums are probably the biggest thing, Hayden does do some different vocal melodies aswell
(Kurtan) I probably will also just randomly become a death core vocalist for like a line haha.
There’s one part in “Purest Fire” where it’s a scream that just says ‘pure’ but I just go *Makes low burp like growl that I cant type phonetically*
*Group laughs*
I don’t say a word Just like yeah PHAT!
Nik Popovic Aka Nik Nocturnal, a large creator on Twitch, reacted to your single “Let them hate, so long as they fear” live on stream, how did it feel to be shared In such a big community?
(Ben) I think that was 2021 just after Covid-19, at the time that was mad. That was the first like, big bit of not really press but kind of press. We didn’t even know it was happening, we had one of our friends, I think it was one of your friends wasn’t it? *Gestures to Ryan*
(Ryan) Yeah someone messaged me and was like ‘Oh yeah I was watching Nik’s stream and he like, reacted to you’. I was like ‘Mate, no way’, because I don’t really use Twitch that much, so we jumped on and watched his stream back and there we were and I quickly recorded it so I could make an edit and post it. But he’s got a huge community and it’s grown and grown and grown and sharing smaller bands on his Twitch streams its really cool. And what he did for us at the time gave us so much that we could promote and say like “Nik’s backing the song, go and check it out”.
The more attention you receive online, is the product of anything you release at all influenced by how you think it will be viewed by the public?
(Ryan) Yeah, definitely. Everyone will probably feel differently about it but personally I think you always think about what people are gonna feel or react to certain songs or certain parts. But I think for me on a personal note, it’s just important to remain dedicated to what you want to do and not let numbers and things drive you too much.
(Kurtan) That’s a major thing, I’m relatively new to this band and I came from local bands with no streaming numbers.
(Ryan) It’s easy to get really fixated on it.
(Ben) We were releasing a track every two weeks and when it gets to your favourite track off the album and you release it and then it just bombs you’re kinda like “Awwwwwww…”.
(Kurtan) When “Trace My Skin” came out I actually cried.
The Daily Express described your songs “Shoreline” & “Remember Me” as ‘gap-fillers’ in the album, How do you feel about those songs?
(Ben) They’re not wrong, haha.
*Group Laughs*
(Kurtan) They’re not, because they are gap fillers, but it’s an album, a concept album and it’s meant to take you on a journey and I think they are essential for the album listening experience, like you could take them out, but the album wouldn’t flow nearly as well without them. ‘Shoreline’ is a great introduction to the album because it sets the scene of this character entering his… ermmm, *snaps fingers* whereabouts, where he is…
(Sam Bassist) Purgatory.
(Kurtan) I forgot the story bruv haha
*Group Laughs*
(Ryan) The newspapers comments on that were valid but at the same time I feel like some of that was because we released everything else as singles, and then those were the two remaining things once the album was kind of out, other than ‘Wither’ which I think came out on release day. And I can see how they might have thought ‘Well now the albums out, what other content have they released?’ and then we released these two kinds of like, interlude tracks. I can understand it, but that was always our intention.
You have previously said that you created the synth sounds on your song “Virtue & Regret” from scratch, can you describe the process of making one of the synths?
(Sam Drummer) During lockdown I got obsessed with Mick Gordon, who did the DOOM Soundtrack, and there’s a livestream online where he’s talking to everyone about how he got these sounds that people absolutely obsess over and purely through me wanting to learn I just set up his synth workflow in Logic and I literally had two notes and I was just playing around with them when we were like “theres something to this”.
So that part where its just drum and synth at the start it’s that massive wall of distorted sound.
(Ben) Let’s not forget that ‘Virtue & Regret’ has me, now run with me on this, playing electric guitar acoustically in Ryan’s bath recorded on an iPhone speaker. It’s buried but its in the final track, somewhere.
(Ryan) It’s a little easter egg for the ones that want to try to find it haha.
The first Demo for your song “ABYSS” was created 2018 and almost completely rewritten in the studio, how much of a role do your producers play in your songwriting?
(Ben) There are two tracks that are very heavily influenced by George Lever which were “ABYSS” and “Trace My Skin”. Those two we wrote very closely with him because we were trying to find where we wanted to go, so he helped us along that path and then everything else was based off of those two songs.
(Ryan) “ABYSS” was like, I’d come up with a demo which was just like two minutes of guitars and drums, but at the time I really had no concept of how to write songs and George sort of listened to it in the studio and would go “Right, there’s a useable part here”, and It would be like, literally ten seconds…
*Group Laughs*
And it would be like “right, I’m gonna build a song around this” and then we’d all sit around his computer and he’d show us what he was doing and talk us through it and it really helped because, I don’t know if many bands talk about this but a lot of bands are good at what they do in terms of performing, but actually learning your craft in terms of songwriting is a real skill and sometimes bands only have like one key songwriter or maybe two. So for us there were some ideas floating around a few members but we hadn’t really established how we were going to write music and didn’t have the skills in the band to do that yet. “ABYSS” was primarily George, I would say.
You owe a large majority of your streams to your single “Erebus” released 2019 currently sitting at 484k on Spotify, having received that kind of attention only 2 years into the bands life, how has that impacted your perspective on your bands growth since?
(Kurtan) My god, I can’t wait to one day beat that off haha
*Group Laughs*
(Ben) Nah we wrote it off haha, we haven’t played it in years, It was originally an entirely different song that we wrote for the EP, we were gonna kick it off of the EP and then went “Nah lets salvage it” took the second verse, the chorus and the breakdown and binned everything else off, and then we started from there. Did the music video for it and what we had ended up creating was just a run of the mill metal core song.
(Kurtan) Haha it is so metal core.
(Ryan) It basically explains the streaming numbers, because we got very lucky with playlisting on that song, it was picked up by like every playlist ever and some Twitch streamer that was quite well known picked it up and put it on a playlist for gaming like League Of Legends, so it was massive and then got a huge, huge amount of streams. All of which to be honest were completely lucky, because the other songs off the EP did nowhere near as well. And what you said about if we’re influenced by how people take what we write, we could have been like “Lets do Erebus” and get more streaming numbers and perhaps make a bit more money for the band, but it feels disingenuous because we don’t really like that kind of sound anymore.
Not saying that we hate “Erebus” like we’re still proud of it and I’m sure the guys are as well but we’ve all moved passed that kind of sound now.
Given your years of commitment and experience, what Is a harsh truth that you think people need to know before really pursuing a career in a band?
(Ben) You’re Sh*t!
*Group Laughs*
That’s it, like, get your ego out your ass, you’re not a big band, you’re sh*t. Practice your instrument, commit time to making yourself better and even if you’re a big band in your local scene you are a f*cking tiny band in the country and an even smaller band in the world. Check your ego, sort yourself out, sort your band out… Ya sh*t.
Find them on Instagram or Spotify
For Fans Of Of Mice & Men, Thy Art Is Murder and Glass Tides
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