In Conversation With - Blood Youth
Blood Youth’s second album ‘Starve’ is out this month, and it sees the band getting more heavier and personal than ever before. We have a chat with vocalist Kaya Tarsus about the release.
You mentioned before that with your sophomore album you wanted people to feel uncomfortable, what drove this desire?
I think that after we finished the album cycle for Beyond Repair, a lot of people in the industry and media felt that they had us figured out as a band. So we really wanted to flip everything on its head and go down this really dark route.
Writing and recording Starve really took us to the edge and we want everybody to feel what we were feeling when this album was being put together.
We really wanted to step away from this ‘Small town scrappy underdogs’ title that we had been given. The only way to do that was to make the most brutally honest and aggressive album that we could.
What’s something that makes you uncomfortable?
There's a lot of things in life that make me uncomfortable. You never know what's round the corner or what hardships are on the way, but you can’t let those things play on your mind too much, otherwise, it will destroy you!
Being in a band is also filled with glorious highs and many personal lows, so it that can really mess with your head at times.
The album is a lot heavier and takes a darker sound; would you say this is reflective of changes happening in your life, or just a more open approach to your feelings?
2018 was a very rough year for me personally, we accomplished so many great things but my head was a complete mess.
I think that we each went through our own bad patch, so the entire album is really a culmination of a lot of stress and anxiety that we carried as individuals. We wanted everything to be on display and everything to be 100% real. You can really feel it all when you listen to this record.
How do your more recent videos for the album tracks complement the music? What inspired you to create the visuals that you did?
We’ve always wanted to get across that feeling of claustrophobia we felt in the studio, so every video for this album has to perfectly reflect that overall mood. When it comes to planning it all out, we just go with what the songs are saying and try to reflect that as well as we can. I think Keep You Alive is our overall favourite so far, but we do have some other ideas on the way!
Any behind the scenes stories on the recording process of the album?
I don’t think we will ever forget recording of this album. We were in the middle of nowhere, on a farm with no signal, no shops or other people. It was just us and our producer (Robin Adams) locked away for 3 weeks. We would record till about 2 am every day and then watch horror movies until the early hours. By the time we finished the album, it felt like the outside world didn’t exist. You can really hear all of that tension on certain songs. We knew that to record this album we really had to submerge ourselves and that's exactly what we did.
What inspired the ‘{51/50}’ and ‘{stone.tape.theory}’? How did those names come about?
We have never really experimented with interludes but it was something we really wanted to put on this record.
51/50 is a law code in America given to people who are unstable.
That refers to when we were writing and putting together this album. I can really relate to it because there were times when I was actually questioning my own sanity. I think that It's something that a lot of people will be able to relate to and it really is the perfect opener.
Stone Tape is an idea that inanimate objects can possess or carry bad energy after a traumatic event has occurred.
Both of these tracks were produced by Ghilburt, who is a producer we are very close to and he actually created these tracks with us in the studio.
When explaining ‘Starve’, you mentioned life is full of ‘events that we have never been taught how to deal with, but we all have to face at some point.’ Do you have any advice for people going through these events?
It took me a long time to realise that you need to surround yourself with positivity and good people. The worst thing you can do is lock yourself away and try to deal with things in your own head. I did that and I got so stressed out it started to physically affect my body. Once I started talking to my friends, band and family things started feeling a lot better.
Feature by Athena Kam
‘Starve’ is released the 22nd February via Rude Records
Blood Youth will tour the UK this March. Supporting the quartet on their biggest headline tour to date are Palm Reader and Lotus Eater.
STARVE UK TOUR
W/ SUPPORT FROM PALM READER AND LOTUS EATER
01.03 Southampton, Joiners
02.03 Leeds, The Key Club
03.03 Glasgow, Audio
04.04 Newcastle, Think Tank
06.03 Manchester, Star & Garter
07.03 Birmingham, Mama Roux’s
08.03 London, Underworld