Malevolence insist they aren’t psychic. In late February 2020, days before Covid-19 lockdowns started being implemented around the world, the Yorkshire metalcore band released their breakthrough single, Keep Your Distance. It was a melee of growls and beatdowns that propelled them to new heights – in part thanks to a title that foresaw the next year of government messaging.
“It was completely by coincidence,” guitarist and vocalist Konan Hall tells me on a video call from his home inSheffield. “But everyone started tagging us in signs saying ‘Keep your distance because of Covid’.” Lead singer Alex Taylor can’t help but laugh, joining the call from his place just up the road. “It was free marketing!”
The song amassed millions of streams by the time restrictions were lifted, and that momentum has only been built on in the years since, as the band toured with scene megastars such as Lamb of God and Trivium. Their impact on live crowds is now as famed as their high-octane music: footage of a venue-wide circle pit that they incited at the Hammersmith Apollo went viral in 2023, and last year they set a new record for crowd-surfers at Derbyshire’s Bloodstock festival, scoring 901. There was pandemonium when they played a secret set at Download festival last weekend: “Make these security guards fucking work!”, Taylor told the crowd. But their music isn’t just mindless mayhem, reflecting as it does on mental health struggles and online hatred.
Thanks to its heaviness and richness, their upcoming album Where Only the Truth is Spoken is one of the most anticipated heavy releases of the year. Much of it was made at the California studio of vaunted metal producer Josh Wilbur (Korn, Gojira, Avenged Sevenfold), while its drums were recorded at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in California. “We used the same console Fleetwood Mac used for Rumours,” Hall says. “There was a Nirvana Nevermind drum kit photo on the desk. Going from being a kid, loving those bands, to using the same gear was a dream come true.”
Malevolence were already well over a decade into their career when the pandemic hit. Co-guitarist Josh Baines, bassist Wilkie Robinson and drummer Charlie Thorpe have been playing shows since they were 11, and they started jamming with Hall in the mid-2000s, when he was 15. Taylor completed the lineup in 2010, and Hall calls the five-piece’s early days gigging in the north of England “some of the best years of our lives. We’d play for free beer.”
The members had to balance their touring schedule with full-time careers, and they still take the occasional outside job to this day. “Konan’s done a bit of building work, I’ve done security, Josh was working in bars,” Taylor says. He adds that the jobs were “a means to an end to allow us to go on, like, two-week European tours in our friend’s Vauxhall Zafira”.
In April 2020 they released the ballad The Other Side, which was about the trauma of a serious break-up and featured melodic vocals from Hall. Performing it at Download festival the following year, Taylor told the audience “It’s OK to not be OK”, and talked candidly about losing loved ones to addiction and suicide. The singer later revealed that four of his friends took their own lives within a two-month span during the pandemic.
He tells me that that experience inspired him to open up lyrically. “All I’d ever really known was the band,” he says. “You kind of have this thing where you have your band life, your personal life and your work life, and it’s almost expected to keep them in separate boxes. But, having such sad things happen, it made me realise: this is all entwined.”
As a result, Where Only the Truth Is Spoken exposes more of the vulnerabilities behind this barrel-chested band. Through its acoustic verses and climactic choruses, Salt the Wound is about the question, in Taylor’s words, of “how far do you expect the people around you to fix your problems before it then becomes an issue for them and drags them down?”
Meanwhile, hardcore rager If It’s All the Same to You is about the singer cutting ties with family members “who’ve had their minds warped by what they’ve read on the internet. I just don’t have the time for people who just repeat and recycle the same old racist bullshit. It’s very much a song of: you keep that energy well away from me. You get people who are like, ‘Oh, he’s just stuck in his ways. He’s always been like that.’ I’m like: well, no, that’s not acceptable any more.”
In November, Malevolence will play their biggest-ever headline shows in London and Manchester. Taylor wants Where Only the Truth Is Spoken to crack the UK Top 10, while Hall wants to headline Download one day: “You can’t get bigger than that!”
But there’s a larger goal: the band hope their honesty regarding mental health and real-life struggles will guide fans through their own challenges. “That’s way more important to me than, like, playing a bigger room,” says Taylor. “It’s about bridging that gap [between artist and audience] and hopefully helping people through whatever it is that they’re going through in life, whether it be mental health struggles, loneliness, anger or sadness.”
Where Only the Truth is Spoken is released 20 June on Nuclear Blast Records
In the UK and Ireland,Samaritanscan be contacted on freephone 116 123, or emailjo@samaritans.orgorjo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text theNational Suicide Prevention Lifelineon 988, chat on988lifeline.org, ortext HOMEto 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support serviceLifelineis 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found atbefrienders.org