As metal bands grow in both maturity and popularity, it seems almost commonplace that they take a different approach to appeal to a wider audience. They will continue to stick to their roots and pay their respects to their core sound, but will add new aspects to their music to make them that little bit more accessible to new ears. Blood Youth have just done the very same, but not in the way you'd expect. They're just getting heavier, and their goal remains exactly the same as it’s always been. To play huge shows.
“We’ve always been used to fitting any bill,” explains front man Kaya Tarsus. “When we first started we played little shows with Neck Deep and PVRIS, and obviously we played metal shows. The shows just got bigger and bigger.” The run up to this point in their career has already presented them with some huge opportunities, with their last record ‘Beyond Repair’ keeping them on the road for almost two years solid. “We played an arena with Prophets Of Rage,” recalls Kaya. “We did think to ourselves “how have these songs got us on this stage?” So we wanted to write songs that would fill up those rooms better and provide more of a show.” One listen of their new record ‘Starve’ will clearly show that’s exactly what they’ve achieved, cramming it full of tracks huge enough to slay giants.
“When we came to the end of the ‘Beyond Repair’ cycle, we were very uncomfortable with the idea that we’d been pigeonholed as a band,” Tarsus explains. “It did so much for us and we love that album, but there were a lot of people that thought “this is what they’ll sound like forever”, and we really didn’t like that. We were always gonna go heavier and darker, that was always the plan.”
The end result of that plan is by far their heaviest effort to date, with nu-metal vibes oozing out of every pore. But it doesn’t sound like a different band – it is without doubt a Blood Youth record. Kaya puts this down to the varying influences in the band. “Everybody in the band has their own tastes and listens to different things. Chris, our guitarist who writes the riffs, loves nu-metal and extreme metal. I’ve always loved lyrics-based music like hip hop, bands like Touché Amore and La Dispute. The writing process was like all of our influences head-butting each other – in a good way.”
This isn’t just a musically different affair for Blood Youth – it’s lyrically different too. The words delve into territory that the band haven’t walked in before, it’s very sensitive and personal ground for them. “I fell into this mad depression and it fucked me up so much,” Kaya painfully described. “‘Starve’ makes the all the other releases look like a wedding party.”
“I really wanted to stop writing about an ex girlfriend,” he continued. “After ‘Closure’, and even after ‘Beyond Repair’ I felt like I was so done with that era. We toured that album so much, and we do love doing that. But by the time I came home and I was back in reality, back in a room with no one to speak to, it felt really strange. By the time it came to writing lyrics for the album I had a stomach ulcer, I was coughing up blood, I was seeing doctors because I was so stressed, and that inspired all the lyrics – it’s why it’s so dark. I didn’t know depression until that exact moment.”
It turned out that Kaya wasn’t alone, though. After opening up to his bandmates, it seemed they were all very much in the same boat. “They all said they’d been going through the same things,” he remembers, “but didn’t want to tell anyone because “surely you can’t complain about touring all the time”. That opening up inspired a lot of the songs. I still wrote all the lyrics, but they came from a different place.”
