'We Were Confident In Ourselves': How Heriot Became The UK's Most Exciting New Metal Band
Wednesday, 25 September 2024
Written by Will Marshall
“We shouldn’t have been allowed to do as much as we have done,” Heriot guitarist Erhan Alman says with a laugh, and it’s true that their rise has been blood-fizzingly rapid since the release of the crushingly intense ‘Profound Morality’ in 2022. It’s also warranted. The EP’s arrival through Church Road Records, the label run by Employed to Serve’s Justine Jones and Sammy Urwin, set in motion an arena tour with Architects and packed out festival sets, including a memorable opening of the Dogtooth stage at Download. “It was all the things we’d ever dreamed of doing,” Alman continues. “We were playing shows with bands we adore, and still not off a real album.”
Now, though, that album is right around the corner. ‘Devoured By the Mouth of Hell’ is the sort of statement that will set the seal on Heriot’s position as one of British metal’s best new bands, leaning into the hype and finding weird, suffocatingly heavy answers to some big questions. “The album probably would’ve come a lot sooner had ‘Profound Morality’ not done as well, but things just kept coming in,” drummer Julian Gage adds. “We’re well aware how lucky we are to have had that experience.”
The EP’s success caught the eye of the powerhouse label Century Media, who quickly snapped the band up while they were working on what became ‘Devoured By the Mouth of Hell’. With that added weight behind Heriot, the LP’s announcement only heightened expectations. “There was definitely a lot of pressure,” Gage says. But it was outweighed by their excitement to work on new music again, with a quiet assurance in their improved writing abilities. “We were confident in ourselves that what we would come out with was a step up,” he adds.
Even with all the extraneous noise, any deadlines were self-imposed as the band found they worked better if they put some time constraints on themselves without losing sight of why they were writing in the first place. “We had a positive outlook,” Gage explains. “You have to make music because you enjoy it, and forget about the outside world for a bit.”
As they chipped away at things, they found their touring experiences began to inform their writing. Those arena shows with Architects, for example, taught the band a lot about how to write for unfamiliar audiences. “Some things [from ‘Profound Morality] didn’t translate when we played to a brand new crowd,” Alman admits, leading them to revisit what they’d written once they were home again. They also decided to introduce some outside ears in the form of Sylosis guitarist Josh Middleton, who came on board as producer. “Although the bulk of it is the same songs, it’s a completely different record,” Gage observes.
In Alman’s words, they learned to “write stuff that metalhead Joe could get into.” And yet there’s no sense that they’ve toned down any of the extreme sounds existing fans love about Heriot. With help from Middleton and mixer Will Putney, whose recent work has taken in genre-reshaping records with Vein.fm and Knocked Loose, they’ve only become more effective at going for the jugular.
The lead single Siege Lord, for example, was two different songs before being reworked into a grinding death metal assault that’s pure Heriot, playing duelling vocals from guitarist Debbie Gough and bassist Jake Packer off one another, while Harm Sequence is a metalcore ripper that clocks in below two minutes. “It was so inspiring,” Alman notes of working alongside Putney and Middleton, with Heriot also set to open a series of UK shows with Sylosis and Putney’s Fit For an Autopsy in the coming months.
Equally, though, the industrial interludes that dotted ‘Profound Morality’ have been allowed to reach natural conclusions by evolving into full songs. Lashed channels its inner Health, coming on like a grimy club banger with a propulsive electronic beat. It’s both familiar and worlds away from their earlier dabbling in this realm.
Zooming out, the LP’s strength is rooted in this variety — it’s as good at punishing riffage as it is haunting, ethereal melodies, such as the one Gough nails on Opaline. “We were still very much trying to figure out what Heriot is, what our sound was, on the EP,” Gage says. “The things we tried there but didn’t flesh out, we’ve done that on the album.”
Gough, whose phenomenal vocal performance on ‘Devoured By the Mouth of Hell’ is singled out as one of the band’s most profound leaps forward by Alman, took influence from influential work of late hyperpop pioneer SOPHIE, while techno musician Sara Landry casts a long shadow across Lashed. In fact, they don’t listen to much metal at all while writing Heriot material. “It inspires us to keep pushing boundaries,” Alman says. “We also need each other to push ourselves.”
There is a sense here that Heriot have sought out and eventually found a sense of balance. On one hand, they’ve done some head-spinning things that lead Alman to term the record “‘Profound Morality’ on crack”. On the other, they’ve not lost sight of what got them to this point. “It’s not more of the same,” Alman stresses. “But it’s elements that we hadn’t explored before, and we’ve blown them wide open.”
When it came time to sequence the songs, Heriot challenged themselves to step into the shoes of their fans and, as Alman puts it, find “what they want to hear”. “There’s one guy with a Heriot tattoo and he was in the back of my mind a lot,” he says. “I really don’t want to disappoint him.”
Not a chance. No-one is ready for what’s coming.
Heriot’s ‘Devoured By the Mouth of Hell’ is out on September 27 through Century Media.
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