Darkest Era - Bring Doom Metal to London!!!

It's not dark times for the Darkest Era!

Joe Denby catches up with Darkest Era backstage at the Relentless Garage in London whilst the band are on their first UK headlining tour!

Music Trespass: How are you all today?

Sarah Wieghell: All good!

Music Trespass: How has the tour been so far?

Krum: It's been alright! Quite the adventure I guess.

Krum Maguire (Pictured Above)

Ade: It's been our first headline tour so we've been to many of these city's before Glasgow and Manchester were good. Some slightly smaller but it's been a good experience, a good learning curve for us. We've had a really good time with Ancient Ascendant and Hundred. We've got two more shows after this in Ireland but we're excited about tonight. It's going to be good.

Music Trespass: Lets talk about the new album "Severance." I think it's a mixed bag, there's a lot going on on there. I hear later Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy a bit of Candlemass maybe.

Ade Mulgrew (Pictured Above)

Ade: Yeah I think your right. There's quite a lot of variation on there. There's different sort's of sub-genre's of Metal on there. There's elements of Doom and Black Metal but I think ultimately it's a Heavy Metal album with Celtic element's. Its the natural progression from our first album. We are holding a more unique sound on this one. A sound we can really call our own. The first album was a little more formative maybe but there is more of our own identity on this album.

Sarah: Yeah, on our first album the songs were quite long and drawn out. I would say while with this album we wanted to make it more concise.

Sarah Weighell (Pictured Above)

Music Trespass: Cutting of the fat.

Sarah: Yeah that's what I mean. t's one of those thing's. We sat down and we talked about what we wanted on the new album it's was one of the main things we wanted. We just wanted to play good songs. We are a live based band and we wanted the songs to feel good whenever we played them that was important.

Music Trespass: Krum do you want to tell us a bit about the lyric's.

Krum: You might want to talk to Sarah and Ade they wrote them!

Music Trespass: Sorry!

Krum: The stereotype singer writes the lyrics.

Cameron Ahslund-Glass (Pictured Above)

Music Trespass: So you didn't anything!

Krum: I sang didn't I!

Sarah: He brings the voice!

Krum: (Sings quite high) I bring the voice!

Music Trespass: It's actually refreshing to hear a modern Metal album that has a classic influence but doesn't sound like a parody and also a classic singing approach. There's no screaming or Death Metal growl's at all from what I remember.

Krum: Oh there's a few scream's here and there. But it doesn't interest me to do a whole song like that.

Sarah: He's got a good set of lungs on him so we like to put them to work!

Daniel Baldy O'Toole (Pictured Above)

Music Trespass: So lets go back to the beginning and talk about the history of the band.

Sarah: We formed when we were about fifteen or sixteen. We started playing cover's these two (points to Ade and Krum) were in a cover's band. We started out playing cover's then one day we just had a jam and wrote this riff and we harmonized it and it felt good from then we just ran with it.

Music Trespass: So what's next for Darkest Era?

Ade: So after this tour we'll probably start writing the next record because "Severance" is actually an old record for us now. It recorded in February 2013. So we've had these songs for quite a while. We had a transition period between record label's by the time everything got sorted and the time the album finally came out in June. So will start preparing the new album. We will be touring again I think in the spring in Europe. We are looking forward to hitting northern Europe as we've never really hit those territories and we have a substantial following from there so it will be great to get out there and hopefully do some festival's in the summer. First and foremost we're going to lock ourselves away and figure out what we are going to do on the next album.

Music Trespass: What's the scene like in Northern Ireland? Any bands we should be aware of?

Ade: Considering Belfast is such a small place it does have a really healthy scene. A lot of touring bands stop by at Belfast. If they don't then they will definitely hit Dublin, it's got a really great scene there. You've got quite a few Black Metal bands Malthusian and older bands like Primordial but in the north you'll find a bit more Rock and straight up Metal so for example there is a band called Terminus who are a straight up Heavy Metal band they will be playing with us in a couple of days time. So the scene is very healthy. There's a lot of fans and gigs in general are very well attended. Where there's only on agent in each city they don't really book anything if it's not going to draw a good crowd. It's a nice scene to be part of I have to say.

Depeche Mode 'Violator' album cover (Pictured Above)

Music Trespass: Your top five albums?

Ade: Iron Maiden 'Powerslave', Depeche Mode 'Violator', Queen 'A night at the Opera', Rainbow 'Rising' and Slayer 'Show no Mercy'.

Sarah - I'd say Rainbow 'Rising' as well In Solitude's new album 'Sister' I'm really obsessed with that, I really love it. Primordial 'To the nameless Dead' and everything by Deep Purple!

Interview and Questions by Joe Denby