Bullet For My Valentine have, by many accounts, had an uneven yet interesting career. Debuting with The Poison in 2005, the Welsh metalcore band found that a tough effort to top, given its overall success. Of course, that doesn’t mean the rest of the band’s discography is worth overlooking – sophomore album Scream Aim Fire had some huge moments – but for many BFMV fans, it’s still far and away their best effort.
Anyway, the point here is that the band’s 7th full-length effort, which has actually been worked on for a little while now, is highly anticipated by fans. Given that the band has once previously followed up an extremely disappointing album (Temper Temper) with a “return to roots” followup (2015’s Venom), they can probably do it again after 2018’s disappointing (though not irredeemable) Gravity.
Matt Tuck had plenty to say about the new album, too. In a new interview with Rock Sound (thankfully transcribed by Blabbermouth), Tuck discussed the band’s upcoming new record:
“We’ve never had this much [material] at this stage pre-recording. There are seven [songs], I think, which are finished — in my eyes, anyways — vocals and everything, demoed up and ready to go. So it’s good. We’ve got a good head start. And then this [coronavirus pandemic] happened, and it’s kind of stopped the train. So it’s not ideal, and we did have a lot of plans for the rest of the year for writing and making the record, which are on the backburner now until further notice. It’s not the end of the world, but we’re really glad now that we took the time last year and the beginning of this year to write and record a demo rather than just sit on our asses, like we are being forced to right now.”
“Looking back at the last year, and then taking the decision to take this year off to write and record, take our time, don’t rush anything, was the best decision the band could have made,” he continued. “‘Cause we don’t have any of the touring headaches that a lot of bands have that obviously had festivals booked this year and touring schedules, and it’s just stopped all of that. So we’re lucky in the sense that we don’t any of that going on, but it’s still kind of spoiling the flow factor that we had six weeks ago when things were on fire again and we kind of have to put the brakes on for a bit. But it’s okay — we’ll be fine. We weren’t scheduled to start making the record till September at the earliest anyway. So we’ll just see this out and do some writing in the meantime.”
“It’s pretty brutal, to be honest. It couldn’t be more of a contrast with ‘Gravity’ in a ferocious style. It’s very technical. I don’t know why. You’ve just gotta go with what you wanna go with — as a band, as a musician, as a songwriter, you’ve just gotta go with what’s floating your boat, and this time around, the heavy stuff is just coming out in masses. The riffs are crushing. There’s probably 60 percent aggressive vocals, 40 [percent] clean, which is a ratio we’ve never really dabbled with before. It’s very heavy, it’s very technical. For the BULLET fans out there that kind of like that side of this band, it’s very cool and very exciting. It feels good.”
It appears, for all intents and purposes, the band’s upcoming record will be a throwback to the heavier side of the band, but still with some melodies. This isn’t a surprise after many fans and critics derided Gravity as going, well too soft. With some of the tracks definitely bearing similarities to what Bring Me The Horizon were trying to do on That’s The Spirit, it looks like we’ll be hearing the heavier side of the band emerge yet again.
