UK alt-rock band Boston Manor have been on a roll for quite a few years now, with one of music’s most stunning musical transformations. Seriously, it’s hard to find much fault in songs like “Passenger” or “Foxglove”, that’s for sure.
To nobody’s surprise, that hot streak continues on new single “Sliding Doors”. No doubt having some serious Deftones, Quicksand, and Orange 9mm influences, it’s one of their most post-hardcore oriented songs. To be honest, it’s a song with all the elements you could want to get stuck in your head – slick guitar riffs, fantastic Henry Cox vocals (this guy is awesome!!!), and unexpected heaviness that might throw you for a loop. Even if everything in the world is just getting worse, Boston Manor is here to buck the trend.
“Sliding Doors is named after that movie of the same name. I called it that because when we were writing it I started thinking about all of the decisions that I’ve made that have led me to the life I have and how circumstantial a lot of it is. It got me thinking about how BOSTON MANOR started. I’d had a few conversations with Dan [Cunniff, bass] and Mike [Cunniff, lead guitar] (who I barely knew at the time) about starting a band. But at that time I was in art school in a different city and I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I was also starting like two other bands with different people so I figured it was just something that you talk about.
I’d gone home to visit my parents for the weekend and had taken a bus up to north shore to go and visit a friend, I was on my way home and the bus basically crashed. It wasn’t bad, no one was hurt or anything but I had to get off. It was super late and buses basically stop running at that time in parts of Blackpool. I had been texting Mike and it turned out the bus had crashed at the bottom of his street, so I just went round to his. We basically ended up writing the first song from our demo that night. We played our first show a few weeks later. If that car hadn’t pulled out on that bus, we probably never would’ve started BOSTON MANOR & been all the places we’ve been, I wouldn’t have met my wife & half of my friends. I don’t know if I would even be playing music now.
We tried to reflect this in the music video, the idea being it’s loads of different realities, some of which I’m a musician some of which I’m doing something totally different. The die hard fans might recognise the final location which is where we shot our very first music video, long since scrubbed from the internet. In a way the band we’re in now feels like an alternate reality to the band we started. I look back at old videos and I barely recognise us!” – Henry Cox
