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When the one-night-only headline date at the capital's O2 Academy Brixton was first announced, bassist Jim Riley enthused about the legendary venue: “Brixton has so much history for rock music, but in particular for bands like us. We’ve watched lots of our friends do amazing headlining shows there – Architects, Parkway Drive, Bring Me The Horizon, and so many more – that launched them to heights that seemed impossible for bands that do a lot of yelling. I can’t wait to see our name up there on the marquee.”
Discussing the current situation that the world finds itself in – and the reason for releasing their new record as planned, rather than delaying it – Jim told us recently, “I mean, what are we gonna wait for? To me, this situation that everyone almost parallels what we went through, and some of the topics on the record, in ways that are uncanny. For all of us, it went from normal life to crisis life overnight. The uncertainty of how you’re going to pay your phone bill without a job. This isolation – each of us was alone. There’s all this uncertainty over people’s health, which loomed over us for so long.
“But there is also this increasing sense of unity amongst the 10 of us [involved in the accident] that you’re starting to see develop through the current quarantine situation. We don’t know when things are going to go back to normal, so if we just sit here and wait for things to go back to normal, we could be sitting on this record for six months or a year. And what do we have to lose? Life is gonna be fucked up enough. Why not do one thing that gives us a little taste of normal?”