How Creeper Created An "Entirely New World" For Their New Album

It's been two and a half years since Creeper unveiled their stunning debut album Eternity, In Your Arms, and the punk heroes have since been hard at work on its highly-anticipated follow-up.

In fact, the band – Will Gould, Ian Miles, Sean Scott, Dan Bratton, Oliver Burdett and Hannah Greenwood – were thinking about the concept for album number two pretty much as soon as they launched their first LP back in March 2017. Having been on the road in the U.S. with Houston trio Waterparks around the time of their brilliant debut's release, the band looked for new ideas around the places that they were touring – as opposed to studying their hometown of Southampton on Eternity, In Your Arms.

“Whereas before we’d transformed our hometown into something more fantastical than it was, with a first record that told people where we’d been, this time we felt we needed to show people where we’d gone since,” frontman Will tells Kerrang!. “We started thinking about creating an entirely new world not reliant on landmarks that already existed, but building from the ground up.”

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So what can Will tell us about this new world?

“To give you the elevator pitch,” he says, “it’s about a small town in America, based on Dunsmuir [in Siskiyou County, northern California, with a population of fewer than 1,700], and about our feelings of being Englishmen in America and feeling alienated in a lot of ways. We decided to encapsulate that with this character from another world, an angel who falls to earth, who’s an outsider in a small town and who falls in love with a woman, while learning to be human and feel again. That’s based on feelings I had being on tour, especially the Warped Tour, where I was stuck in a shell, struggling to emote and ingratiate myself, which was odd for me.”

By way of fleshing out this new inspiration, Creeper then met with a new collaborator to work on bringing album number two to life.

“It was a real teething process,” Will says. “On the last day of one of our many trips to the U.S., we met a producer called Xandy Barry, who typically works on film soundtracks and pop music. For a guy who’s so successful, he was very unassuming and down to earth. We played him a lot of bands we really liked, including one called The Protomen, who are very theatrical, and he loved it. Ian and I got back to the hotel afterwards and agreed there was a real vibe there, so we decided he was the man to do the record with. He’s an unusual choice, having never worked with a punk band before, but he’s stretched us a lot further than we ever thought we could go.”

There's still time to pick up our very special Creeper issue of Kerrang! to read the band's full comeback story. Don't miss out.

Catch Creeper supporting BABYMETAL live at the following dates next year:

February 2020

19 Glasgow Barrowland
20 Cardiff The Great Hall
22 Manchester O2 Apollo
23 London Eventim Apollo Hammersmith

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