THE STORY BEHIND
How tragedy healed the rift between the DIY Sheffield crew and Bring Me The Horizon, resulting in a unifying British metalcore anthem
EVERY BAND THAT makes it has that one album. That career-changing moment that propels them to the next level. And for While She Sleeps, it was their third release, 2017’s You Are We. The Sheffield crew’s promise had been clear all along. With 2010 EP The North Stands For Nothing, 2012’s excellent debut, This Is The Six, and their criminally underrated second album, 2015’s Brainwashed, they’d proved their belligerent, bruising metalcore could unite rooms and lungs. Ajuggernaut of a record that sounded purpose-built for arenas, You Are We was the sound of a band starting to test the boundaries of their sound, introducing a ton of melody into their punk-infused savagery, and constituted a massive step towards metal’s upper echelons.
The album was written and recorded during a period of intense change for While She Sleeps. In 2015, they’d started renovating a 19th-century industrial warehouse in Sheffield’s Kelham Island neighbourhood, building their own Six Audio studio and band HQ with their bare hands.
“We watched so much YouTube,” remembers guitarist and vocalist Mat Welsh. “My partner would wake up at night and I’d be on my phone, watching Craig [Phillips] from Big Brother show me how to hang a door. She’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’ And it was always the most boring response of, ‘I’m looking up how to fit UPVC windows.’”
Feeling like they didn’t belong on their major label, Sony Music, Sleeps left to go it alone in 2016, and crowdfunded You Are We via the now-defunct PledgeMusic platform.
“We’re from that part of the music scene where you go from fan to artist,” adds vocalist Loz Taylor, who says the band relished the opportunity to take things back to a grassroots mentality. “We said, ‘Why can’t we just say to the audience, you give us a tenner and if everyone does that, we’ve got enough money to make the record and make all the videos?’”
“We smashed it. Like, we doubled the target,” says Mat.
It was solid proof, after years of faltering momentum, that, in fact, there were a ton of people who cared about the band. “We were in the warehouse in the evenings watching people join the pledge, just buzzing. We were filled with this ‘Fuck it, anything’s possible’ attitude.”
In late September 2015, having already written a handful of tracks for You Are We, including singles Civil Isolation and Hurricane, While She Sleeps headed out on the road, supporting Bullet For My Valentine at a series of intimate UK venues. It was when the tour pulled into Bournemouth that Mat started writing the track that would become their career best: Silence Speaks, a monstrous Yorkshire lov
