BLOOD YOUTH’S next album is gonna punch you in the face.
One of the UK’S most promising young bands have been channelling some good old-fashioned chaos
IT MAY HAVE taken Blood Youth a few years to capture the recklessness of their live show on record but now they have, they can’t stop writing. After a month spent locked in the studio, frontman Kaya Tarsus talks all about album number three, and Blood Youth’s newfound formula for darkness.
It’s only been a year since the release of your last album, Starve. Has much changed for Blood Youth since then? “We realised, with Starve, the band we wanted to be. We hated how with the first album, everyone had already predicted what we were gonna sound like because we didn’t feel like we’d found that sound yet. Then with Starve we loved everything from the music to the image; our fanbase has grown, the show is more exciting and we’ve experimented now. We’ve definitely found our formula.”
Apparently, you like tough recording sessions. What was it like this time? “It was just us in the studio in each other’s faces for a month, we didn’t see anyone else. We love to be savage when recording albums. We recorded our first album in our hometown and I’d track vocals, go home, have a bath and watch Netflix, but we realised that you could hear that on the album. We like when there’s a bit of tension in the room; when you’ve got cabin fever it all comes out in the recordings.”
There are some relentless, Slipknotesque bangers on Starve. How heavy have you gone this time?
“It’s still very dark. We’ve always wanted that raw, punch-in-the-face sound and there’s a song we recorded where I had to take a rest and the next day off. I was in the studio like, ‘That is the hardest Blood Youth song I’ve ever tracked vocals for’, and the whole band could feel it too. However, there are also moments where it’s really epic, there’s sections where it’s the heaviest we’ve ever sounded and times where it’s the softest. We’re not just a screaming band, we love melody and we love singing.”
Talking of singing, Blood Youth have some massive choruses. Are you planning on going even bigger here? “Yeah! We wrote these songs for big stages. It sounds cheesy but we love having that moment where you’re onstage and the whole crowd is singing the chorus back to you. We write for where we want to be in a couple of years and we want to play the biggest rooms possible. We love playing underground clubs but the sound we’re developing is massive.”
What’s your lyrical inspiration? “Starve was the first album where we stopped writing about ex-girlfriends, heartbreak, hometown blues and all that shit. We just got so bored of it. I can’t be arsed writing about the same people over and over again because I hate when bands do that. So I wrote the majority of the lyrics about us as a whole and what we feel mentally, picking up from where Starve left off. I still like that theme of us as a unit, how we’re feeling, how I was feeling and the recovery to the person I am now. I’m also a huge film nerd so I also take a lot of influence from movies.”
What films can we expect to see influencing the record?
“On both Starve and this album there are lines based around the scene in Goodfellas when he’s in the car, paranoid and the helicopters are watching. I take screenshots of scenes in movies and I’ll be like, ‘That face the man is pulling there, I wanna write the chorus that looks like that face!’ I know that sounds weird but how he’s feeling in the scene, I want to feel in music. It’s hard to put into words but it makes sense to me.”
THE NEW BLOOD YOUTH ALBUM IS EXPECTED LATER THIS YEAR VIA RUDE RECORDS