Emerging in the early 2000’s from Reading, England, Sylosis have been somewhat of an anomaly throughout their near two decade long career. The band’s founder and lead songwriter, Josh Middleton, who takes double duty as the band’s frontman and lead guitarist, has time and again showcased himself as a true virtuoso of metal songwriting and guitar playing. However, despite Sylosis delivering remarkable records like Edge of The Earth (2011) and 2015’s painfully overlooked Dormant Heart, Middleton’s immaculate musicianship and song-craft has never quite found the home it truly deserves.
It’s possible this was in part due to the band’s early sound being a clear pivot from the trending sub-genres at the time. The onslaught of metalcore and deathcore acts may have played both favorably and unfavorably to Sylosis making a grander impression early on in scene. On one hand it was refreshing to see a band like Sylosis wield a classic approach to metal songwriting, especially at a time where 808 breakdowns, downtuned guitars, and gimmicky stage theatrics were hot in the scene. But despite Sylosis not compromising their sound, which certainly played to their benefit artistically, one can’t help but speculate if their potential was still overshadowed by these trends at time.
Fast forward to 2020, Sylosis come out of a 5 year long hiatus and drop their most uncompromising and ambitious album yet, Cycle of Suffering. Between 2015 and 2020 the heavy music scene had undoubtedly seen a shift, as audiences and bands alike seemed less fixated on fitting within a specific sub-genre. Whether or not this shift can be attributed to the band’s new found success is unclear, but if one thing is certain it’s that Sylosis are now bigger than they’ve ever been — the band’s current streaming numbers surpass any of their previous album cycles by large margin. And the success from the band’s 2020 album cycle, mind you which didn’t include any touring, has not dissipated even slightly but only grown since the announcement of their sixth studio album, A Sign of Things to Come.
A album title like this could not be more fitting. With the record now out into the world as of last week, Sylosis are gearing up for what could be their long overdue breakthrough, as A Sign of Things to Come is slowly but surely deeming itself a classic metal record.
Sylosis’s lead songwriter and frontman, Josh Middleton, spoke with Forbes to discuss all things Sylosis and why it took the band the amount of time it did to write their seminal sixth studio album, A Sign of Things to Come.
How soon after Cycle of Suffering did you begin writing for A Sign of Things To Come? Was it always the plan to have these two records release within 3 years of each other? Considering the 5 year gap between Dormant Heart (2015) and COS (2020)?
The plan would have been to do it sooner, usually just like two years would be the ideal. In terms of writing it was straight away. Cycle of Suffering came out February 2020 and the pandemic hit a few weeks after. So we had been like ‘cool we’re finally back after a bit of a hiatus,’ and we we’re going to be touring and trying to make it work with my Architects schedule and then yeah the pandemic hit and it took all of the wind out of our sails. But I think it was for the best because we really had a lot of time to refocus and spend time writing. The band’s manager actually really pushed us to do better. Not to take anything away from Cycle of Suffering but he was just kind of ruthless, he was like ‘you need to write a classic metal record.’
I think Cycle of Suffering is good and his point was it is still a good record but it needs to be more memorable, like more hooks, more moments in it, and he wasn’t necessarily talking about going radio rock or anything like that. After a while I kind of got what he meant. It’s been rejuvenating for the band and the band’s sound and reconnecting with the roots of the band, which is kind of widely undocumented because we were a band for like four or five years before we ever released any music. The way we sound now has probably more in common than when we first started when we were like kids, in terms of the influences and stuff. I think as time went on and the better I got as a guitarist and songwriter I got more interested in the finesse of things and the writing and stuff. I lost maybe a bit of touch with where the band started from — we just wanted to be the heaviest ugliest band listening to records like The Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera or Iowa by Slipknot. I was discovering all of the death metal stuff at the same time, but there was a real intensity of what we wanted to do in the early days and we wanted to kind of re-inject that into the band’s sound in 2023.
Speaking to what the band’s manager said, something’s that has been really interesting to see is Sylosis’s monthly listener count go up quite significantly since Cycle of Suffering. The singles off that record have surpassed any of the singles from prior records and that’s also been the case with the newer singles. Have you seen a noticeable shift that reflects this growth in the band’s audience?
It’s kind of hard to know really. Obviously everything is on Spotify and around Dormant Heart’s period people would buy a bit more physical copies, and also we haven’t actually toured since 2016. We did one comeback show for Cycle of Suffering which was going to be the start of us coming back and since then we’ve played a handful of shows but it’s just been like a festival appearance. The last show we did was awesome, it was with Lamb of God and Kreator at Wembley Arena in London, but we haven’t done a tour so it’s really hard to gauge what our demographic looks like or how many people are turning up to our shows. But yeah the Spotify numbers have been great, we’ve just been releasing music consistently. Part of the reason we’ve done the singles in the middle [between Cycle of Suffering and A Sign Of Things to Come] is to make sure we keep the numbers up and to just make sure that we haven’t dropped off the face of the earth and keep things going. But yeah it does feel like the band is bigger than ever I’d like to think. It’s hard to know until we get on the road but yeah it feels good.
As far as the input the band’s manager gave you after COS, was that what lead you guys to work with Scott Atkins and work more closely with a producer for this new record?
Yeah a bit more. I think our manager was a bit like ‘you should try working with a producer,’ and we’ve worked with Scott Atkins before — he did the first two records Conclusion of an Age and Edge of the Earth. He did some recording on Dormant Heart and he mixed it but his involvement back then even on the first two records where he was credited as a producer, it was a bit more like ‘press record’ and he’d maybe give us something here and there. But not to this degree, this time around it was sending him all of the songs demo’d, all the vocals six months ahead of going into the studio and just being like ‘tell us if it’s crap,’ like be honest and really get involved.
He used to play guitar in quite a big UK metal band called Stamping Ground, so he is a musician, but he’s really good at just putting his mind in his friends who are just metalheads who go to shows and aren’t musicians. Like ‘what does the average metal fan want, or how do they connect with the music?’ He’d be really good at producing those moments that are going to connect with the crowd, like ‘aw you need this bit where the blinders are coming on and the crowd is singing this bit,’ and helping shape the songs and get that kind of more ‘anthemic’ stuff coming out of us, which I think had been missing. Even the stuff I grew up listening to like really heavy Pantera stuff or some early Slipknot, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re trying to go radio rock when I say “anthemic,” even those bands would be super heavy but have hooks that you’d sing along to. I think part of me was scared to do that in the past if it was too obvious or it didn’t come naturally, but Scott really helped with that and this is the first time we’ve really had a proper producer.
One thing that really stuck out to me for this record is how well the vocals are carved out for those ‘anthemic’ moments like you were mentioning. It works really well, and it actually reminded of Pantera and an album like Vulgar Display of Power with having those clear cut vocal and riff hooks.
Yeah that’s definitely been pushed on us, well not on us as if we were reluctant to it, but it made me think about it and consider it more. I was a guitarist before being a vocalist and I think stupidly on my part I would think ‘well if the riffs cool you can just scream on it and people will be cool because if the riffs great it doesn’t matter.’ And that’s not necessarily been the case, I’ve always put a lot of effort into the vocals and the lyrics but not to this degree on the new record. I really wanted to push myself as a vocalist and as a frontman and become the frontman the band has needed and try and connect lyrically and vocally and just make sure the vocals will stand out and not feel forced or anything. Yeah that was definitely a big conscious effort.
Correct me if I’m misrepresenting this but prior to Cycle of Suffering you were somewhat of an ‘E standard’ apologist, as Sylosis exclusively wrote in standard tuning despite having some monstrously heavy riffs. What ultimately lead you start experimenting with different tunings for these recent records as the new ‘standard?’
So when the band first started for the first four or five years we were in Drop B, so we started off lower and then Lamb of God started getting bigger and we were like “alright let’s go up to D” and then after that it was around that period where you play local shows and every band is a metalcore band doing a really bad generic metalcore thing playing the same breakdowns. I was listening to And Justice For All a lot and I was just like ‘we’re going to tune our guitars up, we’re not going to play breakdowns and we’re going to be a proper metal band.’ I also came from an era of like…I was into Nu metal and whatever was popular in the early 2000’s, but I was also getting into extreme metal and I had friends that were into extreme metal that were very elitist. So I was like ‘well alright, if we’re going to appeal to elitist people we’re going to be in standard tuning, no breakdowns, and we’ll not be a metalcore band.’ It definitely helped, it really did set us apart and put us on our own trajectory and then on Edge Of The Earth we kind of refined things a bit and there was a bit more of that Death and a lot of Mastodon influence on that album as well.
Admittedly, as time went on I felt like we just had to stay in E standard tuning because we had started doing that and that was like our thing on our own. I also didn’t like when bands I liked would tune down old songs and play them lower live. So I was like ‘if we wanted to write stuff in a lower tuning well we can’t take double the amount of guitars out on tour,’ like a band our size can’t afford to fly out four guitars each and a spare guitar. Part of it felt like we were just stuck in E standard sort of against our will like with the logistics, and also just the fact that was part of our sound.
Obviously the tuning that the guitars are in completely changes the feel of the riffs. If you play a Metallica riff from And Justice For All in drop B it doesn’t sound like the same genre of music. People will be like ‘oh it’s Swedish Death Metal,’ and I didn’t want anybody calling us melodic death metal or anything. I was like ‘no, we’re like Metallica.’ So to be honest, all of those restrictions that I had self imposed, like no breakdowns, no down tuning, it’s kind of what lead to the band going on a hiatus because I felt too boxed in. I want to be able to just ‘chug chug chug,’ even Pantera has stuff that would be called ‘breakdowns’ now but I was too scared to incorporate anything that was a bit more stripped back. We didn’t want to down tune so I felt too restricted by it all and that’s why we went on hiatus. After a while I kind realized it doesn’t matter as much, and people don’t really mind.
That’s fascinating to hear that there was so much of a thought process behind the choice of being in standard tuning in the past. Do you think that elitism mentality has somewhat dissipated within the metal scene in more recent years?
Yeah for sure, it’s definitely there but it was so prominent when I grew up. I maybe don’t give the fans or the genre in general the credit they deserve for having got past that elitism. It used to be that a deathcore band… people that were into death metal would hate it, where as I think people are a bit more accepting of that stuff now and they get out of their own way and their own ego. Like if there’s a breakdown who cares, Suffocation pretty much had breakdowns. Generally speaking there’s less of it, I’m sure it exists but not to the same degree.
Lastly, when can fans expect Sylosis to hit North America for this record cycle? It sure has been a while!
I think we’ll be there in 2024, we haven’t got anything locked in but I can say with great confidence it’s very likely we’ll be over there next year for sure.
Read the full article here