WHILE SHE SLEEPS looked poised to be one of the defining names of the 2010s metalcore scene. Formed in Sheffield in 2006, the band were known for their D.I.Y. ethics, playing every show they got the opportunity to play as they recorded their music in a barn that was converted into a music studio.
After resounding success with their 2010 EP The North Stands for Nothing and their 2012 debut album This Is The Six, the band looked to be on their way to stardom. And yet, it never quite worked out for them. Due to a three year gap between their first two albums, the music scene moved on, and WHILE SHE SLEEPS seemed to disappear entirely. At least, that is what it looked like to any casual heavy metal fan.
But WHILE SHE SLEEEPS knew different. They quickly built a loyal fanbase with each album release. This meant that the band could become fully independent in September 2016. They created their own record label called Sleeps Brothers and built their own studio in a warehouse in Sheffield.
But the way we consume music is constantly changing, as streaming services become more popular. Whilst this is great for discovering new music without paying for it, musicians are worse off due to the poor payment they receive from Spotify. As the coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on everything – especially the arts and entertainment industry – WHILE SHE SLEEPS launched a monthly subscription page on Patreon in October 2020 called Sleeps Society, which has changed everything for them.
“It’s allowed us to do so many things in terms of touring, recording, and taking control of every aspect of the band. The Patreon has allowed us to do that without a record label lending us the money. Our fans are our record label. They fund straight towards us to allow us to hire our crew, pay for the recordings and things like that. It’s a special experience for us and the fans to be able to see what we’ve created together,” lead guitarist and producer Sean Long explains.
He and vocalist Lawrence ‘Loz’ Taylor have sat down with us today to discuss their sixth album, Self Hell, which the band – completed by rhythm guitarist Mat Welsh, bassist Aaran McKenzie, and drummer Adam ‘Sav’ Savage – have worked tirelessly at for the past two and a half years. It is both their darkest and their most varied album to date.
The title Self Hell is something that Sean and Loz came up with whilst they were in the studio. As Loz explains. “We’d noticed that this term self help had been thrown around quite a lot, and if you were to write down self help, you’d get self hell first. I think that’s a great metaphor, as you must go through some shit before you realise where you need to be.”
“Before you decide to get help or to change your life in a way that is beneficial, you must first experience the pain of it all,” Sean adds.
The lyrics of WHILE SHE SLEEPS have always been outstanding, but they have also been raw. “As a band, we don’t really follow trends,” Loz explains. “We’re not trying to write what’s hot right now; we’re trying to write good music for the foreseeable future.” The band never sugar-coat the topics they talk about, especially death and grief. In fact, they are one of the very few bands to understand the dichotomy of grief and two songs capture this perfectly: 2010’s Hearts Aside Our Horses, which focuses on the happy memories and the promise to carry on a loved one’s legacy, and 2012’s Our Courage, Our Cancer, which focuses on the pain and confusion of living without a loved one.
Grief and death are also explored on Self Hell with the song To The Flowers, which is one of the stand-out songs due to the emotional lyrics. It starts off with an audio sample from a speech by Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti about how – as Sean explains – “no matter how much outwardly attention, power, and energy you spend trying to fix everything externally, it’s never going to change anything…the change always begins from within.”
The song itself sheds a light on anticipatory grief: the grief that is felt whilst someone is dying. But it can also happen after someone has passed, especially if it is a major loss, as it proves that no one is truly immortal, although we all like to think otherwise. For Loz, the song is about how “no matter who we are, or what we’ve achieved in life, we all go back into feeding the soil, and from our decay, other things will live.”
That positivity hidden in the darkness is a great summary of the album. One example of it is Dopesick, which is a pop-metal song that addresses the dangers of identifying yourself by your mental illness. Another is closing track Radical Hatred / Radical Love, which contains the lyric ‘I will be here for you when no one else is’.
It is musically where the album really shines, crossing from drum and bass, electronica, to pop and nu-metal. It could fall apart if any other band had made it, but not WHILE SHE SLEEPS. Working alongside their longtime producer Carl Brown, the album has a definitive start, middle and end. It sounds like the band have captured their live show and recorded it as an album. It also pushes Loz vocally as he delivers some of the heaviest screams of his career, alongside some singing. But the biggest surprise is when he delves into rapping.
“If I wanted to make a pure rap song, I’d say the words faster. But we tried to make a rap with a sort of punk-rock edge. The band wanted to do something a bit different vocally. We’ve been a metal band for so long, just screaming constantly, so it’s nice to throw some other things in there,” he explains. “We were listening to a bit more rap, including a lot of [rap-rock supergroup] TRANSPLANTS and a lot of NF at the time. It was nice to pick the pace up and try something out.”
Another stand-out song is Leave Me Alone. It opens and closes with the line: ‘We are WHILE SHE SLEEPS’. “I just thought it was badass,” Sean says. “I had playing it live in mind as well, and I thought it was cool introducing yourself. The guitar riff that accompanies it is one of my favourites as it’s very simple. It also sounds like a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who has doubted our band. I wanted the introduction to shut those people up quickly. It’s us saying ‘This is our band’, and once you hear us introducing ourselves, you get this massive riff. It’s egotistical in a cool way.”
They have a good reason to feel like this. After a phenomenal sold-out show in September 2023 that saw them crowned the new kings of London’s esteemed 10,000 capacity Alexandra Palace, and with a genre-bending album under their belt – alongside a loyal fanbase that will be with them through thick and thin – the only limits that WHILE SHE SLEEPS face are the ones they put on themselves.
Self Hell is out now via self-release.
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