Deathbeds new album ‘Sinner’ is out now and they are currently doing a small run of shows to celebrate it’s release. Prior to it’s release I called up David (Vocals) to have a chat. Check out the interview below:
Your new album is about to come out. How are you feeling about that? Is it more nerves or relief?
I think we’re more excited than nervous, mainly because it feels like we’re ready for it. We’ve been working on this for so long. We’re 100% ready.
Why did you want to do an album about the seven deadly sins in particular?
The idea was mine and we came up with it a couple of years ago or possibly 3 years ago. I just wanted to do it because not many people do the religion spiel currently. I inspired a lot from Marilyn Manson. He was anti-religion but that was more back in the 90’s. These days bands are doing, which is still a good cause, anti-government and the world is dying stuff. So I guess I’m just trying to do something that hasn’t been done in a while but it’s still relevant and fresh because it’s 2020. I just think in this day and age, not many bands are doing a concept album on that.
Our whole album, with the artwork and everything it’s all sort of renaissance era, so it’s back in the day when religion was more controlling. Like the towns, who had priests that they followed. But it’s not really like that anymore.
I guess it’s like everything. It’s controversial but we’re not putting any religion down. It’s not like we named things fuck this and fuck that, if you’re religious you’re a fucking idiot etc.
With the artwork, you just said it was from the renaissance period, was there any particular artist or image that drew you to that style or those particular images? (I mentioned Goya as that is what the artwork made me think of a bit)
All of our artwork for the album & singles, even our single last year, was done by Calum Johnstone (Honest Crooks). I worked with him and we all just love his artwork. He’s a talented artist. I’d say his style is oil painting, that renaissance-canvas-oil painting look. We’re all friends with him and just saw his artwork and thought “that’s really good”. So he did all the artwork. I also feel as though it does match the whole religion imagery & the album. But yeah Calum did all of it, mainly because he’s a friend and we just love it so much.
Most album covers were done by hand back in the day e.g. Korn (David Stoupakis).
Yeah which is really cool. There are a lot of bands that just do that thing where it’s all just a collage of images. I think it’s cool when you have something that’s actually drawn.
You guys are going on tour with this new album. So obviously we are based in NZ so I was wondering what does a Deathbeds show look like in a sense?
So we actually haven’t played in over half a year. The reason we have done that is because we wanted to come back with our new live sound that we run and because it’s a concept album we now have a live attire as well. We wear the same thing on stage every time. It is pretty coo. Some of our costumes are personally altered to make them unique. That’s going to add to the whole experience, being a concept album.
I suppose you don’t want to play too much because then by the time the new album and everything comes out, everyone will be over it.
Yeah, with the album coming out and having new live set up, samples with the orchestral tracks and stuff , we wanted our first show in a while to be our own show. We did have some pretty good opportunities come up with friends that we had to decline because there’s no point playing a show and then a couple of weeks later being like “oh come to our album launch”.
Have you guys looked much into what you want to do in 2020 or are you just focusing on this for now?
We are probably going to ride it for a bit because it has just been released. We’re really going to push for interstate. Because being a Canberra band, anyone who isn’t a Canberra band cant relate, but we only have one or two venues that we play. If a band comes to Canberra, there’s only a handful of Canberra bands that can play. The perks of being a Sydney or Melbourne band, you could a play a different venue every night for a week if you had the opportunity. In Canberra you only have 2 venues so it’s easy to over-saturate. So we’re really just trying to push interstate show and get out of Canberra and get our name out there.
See I mainly travel to Melbourne so I can see how it makes sense to hit those bigger places.
Yeah well on this tour this is actually our first show in Melbourne ever.
Are you a bit worried about that?
Yeah I mean everyone I’ve spoken to has told me your first tour isn’t going to pack-out. It’s more the experience, dealing with it and playing with different bands. It’s a learning experience and I can’t expect every show to be full of people because it’s our first ever tour. But as much as it’s nerve wrecking, we’re all very excited and I don’t care if there’s only 3 people in the room, we’ll have a mad time.
This is the first thing for all of us. This is our first tour, our first proper album release and not a lot of people know who we are. We just want to push our music. We’re pretty happy with this album because we’ve worked on it for son long. So we’re happy to release it and we just want to put it in front of as many people as possible so they can share how they feel about it and what their opinions are on it.
How would you describe who you guys are or what your sound is like?
A big reference to us is Make Them Suffer, more their older stuff. Pretty much symphonic metalcore. So we have metalcore riffs, we’re quite heavy and then we have nice piano & orchestrals with male and female vocals. One of the songs on the album I don’t even sing on. We tried to make each song like almost a different genre in a way. But most of our songs are quite djenty. We’re probably like radio metal. I try not to swear.
Obviously you guys are just going interstate now. Do you guys want to go any bigger or is this more of just a hobby thing for you?
All of us want to push this like we’ve already started writing our next album, which is also a concept album. Concept albums a re pretty fun. We just want to keep going and going. I think all of us, if it took off, we’d just want to do this. All of us want to do this as far as we can do it. When we tracked with Corey, one thing he said that I never forgot is “Good music sort of always prevails” which if you write good music, somethings gonna make of it.
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