Death Is Not The Enemy: Architects Interviewed
The UK metal titans discuss mortality, the end of the world and why it is they can’t be funnier...
*Architects’ *last decade as a band has been marked by seismic change. On the one hand they’ve grown from a gang of scrappy metalcore hopefuls into one of the biggest and most beloved bands in the country, gaining both critical success and commercial acclaim with each successive release, while steadily rising up festival bills the world over.
But their success was marred with tragedy in 2016 with the death of guitarist and songwriter Tom Searle after a three-year battle with cancer, an experience that informed his lyrics on the furiously nihilistic ‘All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us’. After a series of emotionally charged tribute shows, Architects elected to continue as a band, provided that any new material would live up to Tom’s legacy.
So it was that Tom’s twin, drummer Dan Searle, stepped forward to take the helm for the cathartic ‘Holy Hell’ (with Sylosis’ Josh Middleton joining on guitar), an album that dealt unflinchingly with the grief caused by the loss of both a bandmate and a brother. The highly successful record offered a form of closure for both the band and their fans around the world, ending the first chapter in Architects’ career and promising a blank page on which their story could continue, should they wish it.
Now, in 2021, Architects are returning with their ninth studio album ‘For Those Who Wish To Exist’. Dan and singer Sam Carter sat down with Clash to discuss where the band go from here.
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*Every Architects record has been emotionally driven and personal to some degree, but for obvious reasons your last two records were even more so. Was it a relief to have a blank canvas for this record? Or was it daunting knowing that fans have come to expect such a high degree of intimacy? *
*Dan Searle:* I think it was great going into this album. We felt liberated with a level of freedom that we certainly didn’t have on ‘Holy Hell’. Obviously there was a weight of expectation with that record, but the subject matter was basically a given, right? It would have been irrelevant writing about anything that wasn’t the grief we were all experiencing at that point. But this album, for me, was about stepping out of the shadow of grief and feeling confident enough to do our own thing.
I think the thing people may feel when they listen to this record is that, and I’ve seen it said in the odd place, it’s us stepping away from Tom, whereas actually I think… I mean, obviously it would be different if Tom were here. Who knows what it would be like? ‘Holy Hell’ would probably have been far more different from the Architects that everyone thinks of when they hear the name. But, as it happened, it wasn’t really time for us to change. Instead we just had to find our feet again and figure out how to keep on going.
Whereas, having come through that, this album was us rubbing our hands together and going, OK, we can do anything if we just believe in ourselves and go for it, you know? And that was basically what we did, and it was a lot of fun to be honest! That doesn’t mean that there’s not heavy subject matter on it, obviously. It was just less focused on grief. Of course (Tom’s death) still affects our lives, so it would be hard to totally ignore it. But instead of it being centre stage I reference it as an influence on my existence rather than completely consuming my existence.
*To my ears there are a few major themes on this record, the foremost of which is desperation in the face of impending environmental catastrophe. As a band who tends to talk in terms of internal struggle and the self, is there a danger of placing too much responsibility for averting global disaster on the shoulders of the individual, when many environmental organisations say that change really needs to come from the top? *
*D: *Yeah it does, doesn’t it? But I think that this album was about saying, ‘We’re not doing enough, but I kind of get why’. We’ve stood behind these kinds of causes publicly in the past but we’re still not doing enough. This pandemic has shown us that the threats that line the fringes of the media can come to fruition, so hopefully that will help us understand the reality of the planet crisis.
For me it was acknowledging how serious and imminent the situation is, seeing through the lens of having a child and looking further into the future, while also asking myself why I am not doing everything I can. It’s a strange paradox, isn’t it? We typically do everything we can to exist to the point of being totally irrational, and yet we’re not taking this step. Because it’s not here, it’s just around the bend. It’s like a psychological quirk that prevents us from doing anything about it.
*Sam Carter:* It’s weird innit? Last night on Our Planet, that David Attenborough show, they mentioned Sea Shepherd and there was a whole section on the work that Sea Shepherd were doing. But Sea Shepherd are a listed terrorist organisation in America. I’m an ambassador of a terrorist organisation, apparently! Something as simple as being against the killing and destruction of an entire ecosystem. Take one of those animals out and we’re completely fucked, you know? 80% of our oxygen comes from the ocean and humpback whales are being hunted to the point of extinction, as soon as you remove that everything starts to fall into complete destruction. But the only organisation that’s going out to stop that is deemed to be a domestic terror threat?! So it’s hard when those people at the top are the ones in charge of making substantial change.
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*D: *Change does have to come from the top, but I didn’t want the record to be a finger pointing thing where where I was trying to wash my own hands of it and say, ‘Well until we are told that this is how it is now I’m just going to carry on’. And it will get to that point! We’re seeing it now with COVID how freedoms will be taken away from us because we haven’t acted. So it will get to the point where you can’t have these nice things anymore, and you can’t do these nice things anymore, simply because to carry on doing so would finish us off!
It’s complicated isn’t it? Especially when you’ve got a population who don’t respect authority, and certainly don’t respect a government that has repeatedly done things to lose the public’s trust. Because as soon as you stand in the way of someone’s bank balance, you’ve created a problem. Like Sam was saying about Sea Shepherd – the people who have decided they’re terrorists, they don’t disagree with Sea Shepherd, they probably think we should save the planet. But Sea Shepherd are directly challenging their financial interests, and that’s where the problem comes in.
*S: *This change has to come from somewhere, because otherwise it’s going to end in catastrophe. People have known about this for so many years, but like Icarus we just want to keep flying closer and closer to the sun until it’s late.
*D: *Yep, we love the 11th hour. We love waiting for that moment.
*Speaking of Icarus, there is a lot of mythological and biblical imagery used on this album – ravens and doves, facing Goliath, drinking from the fountain of youth, wrestling with serpents. I wondered if this is an attempt create a sense of shared myth or parable that links us to humanity’s past and future? *
*D: *They’re just references that are universally understood, right? You don’t need to have read the story of David versus Goliath to understand what David versus Goliath means. I mean, the lyrics might give the impression that I’m well-read, but I’m not! I just use the language that I feel is the most communicative. It helps me to understand and visualise the gravity of the situation we’re in. It’s just what comes to me. Tom was the same with his lyrics. There wasn’t really a conscious effort to continue replicating that, it’s just our minds work in a similar way. Although I have seen people say that our lyrics are a big steaming pile of shit now, so not everyone agrees with that sentiment.
*S: *They were saying it to Tom back when I wasn’t writing about girls anymore, so it’s fine!
*Learning how to write songs when you’re already in one of the biggest bands in the UK must be a unique sensation, I imagine.*
*D: *Yeah, it’s a pressurised one for sure! But I feel like, and it’s difficult to talk about because it sounds distasteful, but it felt like Tom’s passing gift to me, really. Because it’s something I love and am passionate about and is therapeutic to me, and I always wanted to be more involved than I felt I was able to be. This pushed me to have a sort of expedited evolution. I felt, maybe more so back on ‘Holy Hell’, that that I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m taking over in a situation where the band is finally popular, and I want to do the band justice. Imagine how Tom would feel if I took over the reins and started releasing shit albums? That would just be tragic, you know? But that motivated us to set standards high.
*S:* In those situations we felt that it was time to really trust our guts and go with the immediacy of, that sounds like the right thing, or, that sounds exactly what we should be doing, or, that’s exactly where that chorus needs to go. Before ‘Holy Hell’ the majority of those decisions were on Tom. So then it came down to, OK, what have we all learnt as songwriters and as musicians? Especially me and Dan with the vocals, just being like, OK, have you had that feeling that I’ve got from this? Because if we’ve both got it then that means that this is good, and we can move forward.
*The vocals on this album are a big departure, with far more falsetto and softer passages, but also some really guttural material. What was your aim for your vocals going into it? *
*S:* Every album we do, when we come to touring I’ll start playing with new styles of vocals live, which unlocks ideas in my mind. Also Dan will hear things and is around me for the million vocal takes that happen in the studio, and every now and again something will work and we’ll both be like ‘Oh that’s cool’. In a weird way I like to think of it as like Ronaldo - I’m not the most gifted singer in the world, but I try my hardest and I always want to be better! And I always want to bring something new to the table with each record, whether that be falsettos or some other trick I haven’t done before. It means they’ll be something else on the next one that I’ll do better.
With this one there was a lot of really layering things out. Once you’re doing harmonies on top of harmonies in different octaves and scales, you find that different doors unlock and you’ll be like ‘Actually that sounds really good. Maybe that should be the top line?’ That’s where me and Dan really had a lot of fun once we’d finished writing.
*D: *I think one of the greatest tools that the band has at its disposal is Sam’s diversity and versatility. It allows the band to go to all sorts of different places musically, from ‘Impermanence’ to ‘Flight Without Feathers’. Whenever we write something that’s a little bit out there for us, I’ll say, ‘Well, Sam will tie it together. Sam will be the thread that makes the record cohesive.’
*Unusually for Architects, you’ve also included guest vocalists on this record (Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr, Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall and Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil). What was the thinking behind this?*
*D: *One of the reasons we’ve had no guest vocalists, bar maybe one on our last three records, is because we’ve always felt like, well, Sam’s just going to do it great anyway! But the diversity on this album just opened up doors to have other people involved. When we listened back to ‘Goliath’ it just felt like a metal Biffy Song, it’s got strings stabbing along with the guitars and the vocal just came out as such a Biffy melody.
*S:* They are three really identifiable voices that add so much because there’s so much flare in the way they do things. It’s really cool, especially with Winston coming in over that bit that feels like it’s teed up ready for him to come in and kill it.
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*Winston’s entrance is a real fist-pump of a moment. *
*D:* For sure!
*S:* That’ll keep the moshers happy.
*D:* They’ll be crying and then get to that bit and go, ‘Oh, no it’s OK!’
*S:* Yeah but then they’ll go ‘But why didn’t you do a ‘bleugh’ when it kicked in?’ D: Definitely! I feel like it’s going to be a confusing album for the super hardcore metalcore fans that don’t really want anything else. One track they’ll be in tears, the next they’ll be in heaven, and the next they’ll be devasted again. It certainly has a wider sonic palette than you’ve drawn from before. Did you have the orchestral sections and electronics in mind while you were writing these songs?
*D:* No, no. I think with ‘Dead Butterflies’ the strings and brass came first, just written on my computer. Then ‘Meteor’ and ‘Giving Blood’ started with just synths. We had fully formed songs with no guitar! So yeah, they were definitely not an afterthought, they were part of the embryonic stages of the songs, which is different to how we’ve done it in the past.
*I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun working out how to recreate it live.*
*D: *Yeah we haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Fortunately we don’t have to! That’s the silver lining of COVID right? Sorry, you can’t joke about COVID silver linings.
*Much of this album is about moving past grief and accepting death. Given that the lyrics of your last two records really raged against the dying of the light, and now you have a song like ‘Dying Is Absolutely Safe’ on which Sam sings “Death is not my enemy”, would you say ‘For Those That Wish To Exist’ is a natural step towards accepting the role of death in human life?*
*D: *Yeah, I think that began on ‘Holy Hell’. But that was my perspective. Before it was obviously totally different because it was written by someone dying, someone who was young and didn’t want to die and was trying to get to grips with that. Whereas, yeah, ‘Dying Is Absolutely Safe’ was kind of like the end credits for the record, a reminder to myself not to take this all too seriously, no matter how bad it gets. It’s a really difficult message to communicate because people take offense. There’s all sorts of suffering and injustice in the world and you’ve got to take it seriously, right? Otherwise your passivity makes you complicit in the problem. Finding that balance where you’re able to operate in the world effectively and be a valuable member of the global community… To achieve that you need to not be eaten alive by the state of the world and the horrors that come with it. That song was a gentle, slightly emotional reminder that, though things are really hard, it’s OK.
*So this album is a reminder to yourself? *
*D:* It’s a reminder that, you know, I’m terrified of dying. Just because my brother died doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable with the idea of it. The fact that he’s been there and done it makes it slightly more bearable, maybe, but it’s still terrifying. We’re wired to survive to an almost irrational degree, but it’s really complicated because we see death, at least in the west, as the absolute worst-case scenario of every situation. It’s complicated, right? It’s hard for me to talk about because then you get into conversations about saving people who don’t want to be saved, of euthanasia, and every situation’s different and I don’t want to make broad sweeps of the brush with this conversation. Really for me it’s just a personal point of view.
*S:* It’s such an interesting topic, though, isn’t it? Because we all die. Everyone dies. Going through it and losing someone at such a young age when a lot of us hadn’t been around death that much… It sparks a conversation, and it’s a conversation that a lot of us had with one another. I think you have these conversations because it’s so interesting, but also so painful. I think things like that are easy to get passionate about and want to write about.
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*I was struck by the close link between the album’s environmental message and this acceptance of death being a natural part of life. On ‘Libertine’ you sing about people searching for the fountain of youth, and one of the problems we have is how we keep pursuing the extension of life above all other things, and how this eats into the resources meant for future generations. *
*D:* That’s where the irrationality of it all is brought into focus. I felt that really clearly after Tom died - we all feel like we’re on a journey somewhere, and we never get there and then we die. I was there after Tom died just thinking, so that’s it then, it was all for nothing? Like there was going to be something. There wasn’t ever going to be something. It just is, you know? We’ve just all told ourselves a story that we’ll get there eventually.
All this stuff we’re doing all the time - the work, whatever it might be that we do in our lives – we think it’s all building towards something. But usually that something is just, like, a car… or a house… things that we don’t take with us. And when you have that experience… I think it’s really more poignant when the person is young than if they’re old, because it certainly felt like at 28 Tom’s work wasn’t completed. But, what is the fucking work? What are we shooting for here? What is the aim? It’s all about the stories we tell ourselves.
At times I would think about how Tom left right as the band really blew up, but he did years with the band! Writing records and touring, mainly sleeping on hotel floors and sitting in vans. The unglamorous stuff that we did for years. And there’s no difference doing that to doing what we do now. I mean, there are a lot of perks to what we do now, but it’s all just stuff. In terms of the emotional experience of it…
*S:* It’s not any more or less than it was, is it?
*D: *Exactly! We had amazing, challenging experiences. We still have challenging experiences, but the struggle of being in a band and not ‘making it’ for a long time… there was just as much joy and fun in that as there is now, I think.
*S:* I look back on those times so fondly.
*D:* Oh 100%. I mean, do we want to be successful? Yeah. Do we want to be a big band? Of course we do! We get to play music as a career, that’s all we’ve ever wanted. If we were still playing pubs then obviously we would have to pack it in. Mortgages, kids… this is just the world we live in. The fact that we’re able to do this is in the world that we live in, that’s a great joy. But in terms of the other stuff, it’s neither here nor there. It’s all the same, there’s good stuff and bad stuff. It’s just easy to tell ourselves stories, sob stories and stuff. But they’re just stories in our heads. Just imagination.
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*There’s an element of self-effacement on this record, when Sam sings “sing us a sad song” on ‘Discourse is Dead’, for example, or the meta-commentary about fans getting angry at the band’s more accessible trajectory on ‘Little Wonder’. Do you think that, no matter how serious the subject matter is, there is room for Architects to poke fun at themselves while singing these sad songs?*
*S:* I think so. Especially from a live perspective. It’s not like we all sit backstage or on the bus just sad all the time! We’re five lads who love having a laugh and being stupid. And being on tour is a nice little escape, like going to camp. Being in a band enables you to kind of live out this childlike dream for as long as you put in the hours to keep coming up with good music.
You don’t want to go spend your money going to see a bunch of miserable blokes. I mean, sometimes you do, but I think actually coming to an Architects show and seeing that we enjoy what we do and have a laugh on stage and show different sides of ourselves when talking about what we talk about. I think it’s good, especially for young kids and people wanting to start bands. You don’t have to look cool and moody all the time.
*D:* You’ve just got to pick your moments, you know? Having a sense of humour is a vital part of being able to enjoy life. I would say that we’ve been guilty of being too serious at times, and now trying to inject any kind of humour is quite difficult.
*S: *Especially when that humour is sarcasm. It’s hard to get it across.
*D: *I found myself writing sarcastic lines for Sam to deliver, but Sam doesn’t deliver them like he’s being sarcastic, you know? So people will misinterpret the songs, which is fine. You can’t be too worried about the way people perceive your stuff.
*So Architects aren’t about to drop a comedy music video for ‘Dead Butterfies’ then?*
D: I remember we were talking about music videos with Jordan Fish of Bring Me the Horizon. We were talking about doing something silly, and he said to me, “It’s a shame your band can’t do that because you’re too serious!” Bring Me have serious songs, but they can also to a silly music video with Dani Filth walking around a supermarket, stuff that just wouldn’t fit for us, certainly not at this point in time.
I see that probably fading a little bit with us over time, this constant weight of being overly earnest. The problem is that all of us really enjoy emotionally affecting music and we want to write these big anthemic, emotive songs, you know? We write songs in a minor key so it’s most likely going to sound sad and melancholic, and that’s what we like! But yeah, I think there is a place for a bit of dark humour in there, it just takes time. It feels like that will be part of the evolution.
In many ways this album feels like our first record. We don’t feel jaded at all about the band, about writing music, about making music. All of us feel as fired up and excited about being a band and writing music as we ever have. I think to say that on our ninth record is amazing, really, I mean, we’re only two or three studio albums behind Metallica! Right now we’re ready to go, ready to do more. We don’t feel tired or like we need a break or anything like that. We’re ready for more all the time!
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Architects will release 'For Those That Wish To Exist' on February 26th.
Words: *Josh Gray *
Photo Credit: *Ed Mason*
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