Interview: Tribe Of Ghosts
The journey of the whole album is this continuing movement towards collapse and through moments of excess, trauma violence and debauchery.
Tribe Of Ghosts have just released their debut album CITY and it sees the Brighton industrial metal band producing a powerful album that tells the tale of “a dystopian society living in an unnamed metropolis, and how the ruling classes continue to abuse and harvest the population until it is a society of punishment, violence and debauchery”. Gavin Brown caught up with Tribe Of Ghosts guitarist Adam Sedgwick who gave us the lowdown on the concept of CITY and how the creation of the album went and also discussed the highlights for Tribe Of Ghosts this year.
E&D: You have just unleashed your debut full length album CITY. Can you tell us a bit about the album and its sound?
Adam: CITY is kind of a concept record. It tells, a story and a journey of this dystopian, unnamed metropolis, and the journey of the whole album is this continuing movement towards collapse and through moments of excess, trauma violence and debauchery. It’s a very, very grim album to begin with, and it moves through all these different moments whilst there is a continuous, perpetual sense of this is coming to an end, which it does. The concept is where this metropolis is flooded at a biblical scale, to the point where it’s miles and miles beneath these rainwaters and sea.Then the last remaining survivors of the metropolis are saved. But instead of being like, yeah, now everything’s brilliant, everyone saved, they’re left with the residual trauma of everything that’s happened, what do they do now? That’s kind of where it ends. It details a journey of trauma, in a way that build through and then being left at the end and going, Well, what now?
E&D: So it’s quite a bleak album?
Adam: It’s very bleak, but there’s moments of hope.
E&D: How did the creation and recording process of the album go?
Adam: The thing we’ve got in the band is very much that I’m the band’s human AI, if that makes sense. I write all the instrumentals and Becky and I write the vocal melodies I’ve written. Most of the lyrics for this album, apart from ‘FALSE GODS’ which was Becky’s, and Becky helped me arrange and edit some of the lyrics that I’ve written, but the vast majority of the writing of the instrumentals of the demos came from me, including all the electronics, the guitar parts, the bass, those kind of bits and pieces, and then Danny and Ben added their touches on it. So when it got around to us practicing it, Danny would add in his little bits for the drums, and Ben would add in his bass thing there. We got to a point where all of the songs that we’d written, have existed well before this iteration of the band. If you know about the history of the band, this is the final version of it, in terms of, this is the sound. This is what we’ve been aiming for. But the some of the songs have existed as, prototype demos or riffs that have existed and been there for years and years, but they’ve only really been given a place where they’ve been able to breathe and become what they want to be. It was very much, the songs kind of started off as this move, and back when we were a five piece, they were very guitar driven. But then the addition of the synths and electronics, we started adding that in after our last guitarist left. It has been a really exciting time doing the album recording. We went to our dear and oldest friend Paul Winstanley at PaulWinAudio and recorded with him. We did all of the drums at our favorite studio, Brighton Electric.
E&D: As it is your debut album, did you feel any pressure when you were creating it?
Adam: There wasn’t really any kind of pressure to be like, Okay, this needs to be the best version of us. I think all of us, collectively, especially Becky and I, have that kind of understanding that we know what a Tribe Of Ghosts song is meant to sound like, and whenever we put pen to paper or vocal track to recording, drum recording, whatever that version of that song is going to be the is one that we want to release. So it wasn’t exactly daunting to write this album, because it was so much of a departure from what we’d done previously. We weren’t trying to break the mould on something we’ve already done. It was like, we have no mould. We’ve got no idea what we’re doing, and we’re just kind of making up as we go along! We just know what a Tribe song sounds like. It was just really fun to explore, and to finally click into something that felt right to us, and just to explore where those boundaries are, and from what it turns out, there are no boundaries.
E&D: With the album telling a story from start to finish. Did you want CITY to have a cinematic element to it?
Adam: Oh, yeah, musically, a lot of stuff that we are inspired by like Vangelis with the Blade Runner soundtrack.I was inspired heavily by Cyberpunk 2077, quite a lot as well. The atmospherics and the sound design of that was really inspiring. Ghost In The Shell was really inspiring as well. It was those moments of when I was writing the songs and the instrumentals, at least.
E&D: What is your favourite ever city, and what makes it so memorable for you?
Adam: One for me would be, me and my best friend went to Reykjavik a few years ago, and she and I had an incredible time. It’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to. The most peaceful. I remember staring out of the hotel room, at nine in the evening, and the sun was just setting, and just looking out at this beautiful, clear, gorgeous, beautiful sunset. It was stunning. Reykjavik, it’s such a beautiful city. I want to go back there at some point. I would love to.
E&D: Are you looking forward to playing the album in full in Brighton in October?
Adam: We’re really, really excited. We’ve got some really cool stuff planned for it, some very fun things. We we’ve put the show together so, we’re really excited to bring our Bristol babies, the ones that we love, Moon Reaper. They’re gonna be coming as main support. We’re very excited for that. I believe it’s gonna be their first Brighton show as well. So that’s gonna be really exciting, and we’ve got the psychedelic sludge of Crowgod, they’re so good!
E&D: Will it be a challenge playing the album in full?
Adam: It’s going to be a bit of a challenge, there’s a lot of the songs we’ve got in our set already. So we’re feeling pretty good for that. think it’s more experiencing, playing the album for the first time in that full run together, in that order. It’s going to be a very exciting experience. We know how it goes together, and it feels so good on the record to move through that way. When we’ve done playthroughs of the album before, like before we went into the studio, it was incredible to do, and we loved it. I think the challenge is more of just seeing how everyone experiences that journey and goes on that journey with us. So we’re really excited to see what that what that journey looks like.
E&D: Will Tribe Of Ghosts be hitting the road in support of CITY going into the next year?
Adam: We’ve got some plans for it. They’re not announced just yet, but we do have some things in the works for early next year. Fingers crossed, we’ll have something to announce towards the end of the year about what we’ve got planned, but we’ve got some very exciting things coming up.
E&D: What have been some of your favourite gigs that you’ve played this year?
Adam: There have been so many good ones, and they’ve all been amazing for their own reasons. Our show in Hitchin, the first gig of the year was a big thing for us. It was also after I’d come through the other side of a mental health crisis. So it was good for all of us to be back on stage again for the first time in what felt like forever. It was also the first time that we transitioned over to using live amps again on stage. When we played Colchester and Brighton in May for our first headliner of the year, and when we headlined Metal 2 The Masses in Colchester. We did Uprising, everyone went a bit like, what the fuck just happened, which was very fun. We had our first London headline. That was amazing. We played in Colchester again, and that was incredible as well. Radar was incredible. Northampton Rocks was really fun. The Midnight Club was incredible. It’s hard to pick a gig that hasn’t been amazing!
E&D: Has this been the best year for Tribe Of Ghosts since your inception?
Adam: I think each year has just got equally more exciting because it’s moved along. So I think yes, in terms of, it’s definitely felt really exciting for what’s happened, and it definitely feels like the next best year for us as well, but that’s nothing to go against the last few years as well. Each year has been an amazing step on every journey, and we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing now, without the steps previously taken last few years.
