Black Veil Brides offered up “Scarlett Cross” as the first taste of their impending sixth album, The Phantom Tomorrow, nearly a full year ago on November 13, 2020. Now, on October 29, 2021, the elaborate and intriguing concept album, based upon characters created by vocalist Andy Biersack, will finally be released via Sumerian Records.
“Truth be told, the record wasn’t complete when we released that single and video,” begins Andy. “We were in a position where we knew we couldn’t tour (because of the pandemic), and we were excited about where this record was going. We were in the finishing stages, but we still had some writing to do. We felt like, let’s get something out there and introduce this world that we’re building. Because now we have the course of this next year to further flesh it out and do additional music videos. And to get what we thought was a pretty detail-oriented vision across to our fans.”
The video for “Scarlet Cross” has been viewed over eight million times in just under a year on YouTube. “We feel extremely fortunate to be 11+ years into our career as a band that people know about. To still have that level of support, and people who are so dedicated… this tour that we’re on right now (in The United States), we’re playing bigger venues than we’ve ever played; it’s a pretty humbling experience to know that, regardless of anything else, the audience for the band has grown over the years.”
The lyric, “The world will stain us with a scarlet cross,” immediately brought Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel from 1850, The Scarlet Letter, to mind. “I was always really interested in the branding idea,” admits Andy. “There’s something about you that is innately and societally unclean, or different, or wrong, and making sure that everyone can see that, and how f*cked up and bizarre that is. But also, culturally, the way we are nowadays, there’s a point of pride in being different that didn’t exist when Hawthorne was writing that book. The idea that the things about us that are seen as less than or off-putting, are so much more celebrated now. I wanted to be able to speak to the idea that, regardless of what anybody else thinks, the person you are, the aspirations you have, and who you want to be, both from an interior and exterior perspective are the most important thing.”
It was a long time ago when that book was published, and the world has certainly changed since then. “Absolutely. In some ways for the better, and some ways worse. We live in a world right now where things are changing so quickly and evolving so rapidly. For me, as a lyricist, to try and take some moment that I’m seeing as the world unfolded into what it did over the course of 2020, and mirror it through the song, I think that is, as an artist on any level, something that you always aspire to be – a channel for things that you’re experiencing and turn them into escapism for people.”
Biersack is blending reality with a fictional element, by creating a concept and characters that are new to all of us. The Blackbird is depicted on the cover of the album, but who is this mysterious individual? “Well, in our story of the record, it’s not known. Within the context of the album, it’s about this kind of, almost a legend. This idea that there’s this character, that in death, someone who is innately flawed, or morally kind of ambiguous is… their penance in the afterlife is to be the savior of the people, kind of an unwilling savior. I always liked the idea of developing a story where a hero is not born of trying to right a wrong. But rather righting a wrong, or being a hero is something that you must do. And to learn to be empathetic. The whole idea is to try – for all of us – you try to be less of a piece of shit than you were the day before. For all of us, it’s a journey to try to be a better person. Inevitably, there are some people where that is not the case. But for most of us, we want to try to be a better person through life. So, I like the idea of making some sort of almost pseudo-religious parable about the idea of being good to one another, and the afterlife. As we go through the course of the comic book, we reveal that the character’s name is Dennis Kane. He’s this scientist who’s obsessed with his work, and is doing some questionable things, and doesn’t care who he hurts. Ultimately, he is killed for it and that has him become this character.” The Phantom Tomorrow comic book series, published under Incendium’s music-focused Opus imprint, “is going to be six issues, broken into like a trade paperback. There’s a Blackbird action figure, t-shirts, all kinds of goodies,” confirms Andy.
