Interviews: Bleeding Antlers
1. Bleeding Antlers originally came together following what was intended to be a stag party adventure across Europe in 2016. How did that unlikely beginning turn into a serious band?
As with everything in Bleeding Antlers, it was completely by accident, and all in the pursuit of having a good time, all the time.
Four of us were at a beer festival in a gothic former sanatorium in South London, ostensibly choosing which beers we wanted to serve at my wedding, and talking about what we should do for the stag do. I remember us talking about which European cities we could go to and what the theme of it should be, but at some point, and genuinely, to this day, nobody can remember who, someone suggested that we should start a band and go and play a show. At this point, the ideas started spilling out of everyone, and things started to spiral rapidly out of control. As the drinks continued to flow, we decided we weren’t just going to play a show; we were going to go and play a festival in Europe, and someone came up with the name Bleeding Antlers. We decided we were going to dress up as Satyrs, and have massive prosthetic penises, while playing super slow drone covers of pop songs. A bit like witch house, if it was being done by SUNN0))), but with giant plastic erections. That’s how our cover of ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine came to be the first single.
The next day I woke up bleary, but excited, so I booked the rehearsal studio, and we started playing around with songs. We ditched the penises as they would make it difficult to play guitar, and we discovered we really enjoyed writing together, so the idea of being a covers band went too.
Pete took the early demos I made and booked Roadkill Festival in Belgium. We were telling our good friend and ‘6thAntler’ Mark Latham about it, who thought it was hilarious. He brought Hobgoblin on board and filmed the documentary about it. We realised with some trepidation that once we had the festival show booked and sponsorship in place, it had a momentum that we couldn’t control. We got matching band tattoos during the stag do, and that was it; the bond was sealed for life. After the documentary cycle was finished, we kept quietly writing and rehearsing and doing our annual Halloween show at the Dev in Camden because we were having such a good time doing it.
Accidentally, we ended up with a whole album of tracks that we wanted to capture for our own enjoyment more than anything. Good Luke and I had played on Pete’s solo record, and really enjoyed working on that with Pete and Matt Elliss, so we booked in to record Stagmata with him. We had such a good time recording Stagmata; we knew there was another one written in the stars.
2. Where did the name Bleeding Antlers come from, and what does it represent to the band?
Multiple different things that are all confused, I think probably because we were so drunk.
We were riffing on names, and someone suggested it as a stag pun, with ‘bleeding’ attached because it made it sound more ‘metal’. We then moved on to talking about satyrs, so ended up with goat masks initially.
When we started looking into it later, we discovered that as stags mature into adulthood, they undergo a process called ‘shedding the velvet’, where the soft outer layer of their antlers peels off in a bloody goo, leaving the hard bone layer exposed. We thought that related well to the transformation themes that we had been using in the early songs for the first LP.
3. What was the original vision for Bleeding Antlers when you first started?
The original vision was to play one show of incomprehensible covers, in masks and prosthetic cocks, for my stag do, and then never speak of it again. That vision failed comprehensively.
4. Look back at ‘Stagmata’, how do you feel that album established the identity of the band?
I think Stagmata proved to us that we had accidentally become a proper band. The band had started off as such a chaotic sequence of events where we were just winging it all the time. So, getting to a place where we had 13 songs we were really proud of, and to be able to do them justice in a studio setting, solidified our sense of us as a band.
Externally, the masks, the pun in the title, and the cover of ‘Pony’ would have given people every excuse to write us off as a joke band. But then when people put the album on, I think they were surprised to find we were a proper band with proper songs. I think Stagmata established that we could be tongue-in-cheek about something, and still be a serious band. That's the identity, really: the jokes are real and so are the songs; they aren’t mutually exclusive.
5. You describe ‘Stagmata’ as finding the sound of Bleeding Antlers and ‘Songs of Praise’ as learning what to do with the silence around it. What does that mean to you?
My early demos and the first single (that we recorded live in a day) were ropey, so we didn’t really know what we were capable of sounding like on a record. We knew we were drawing on a lot of different styles and influences, but didn’t really have a plan for what the structure of the album was going to be; we just knew we had these songs that we wanted to capture for our own enjoyment. It was really supposed to be a time capsule that captured all the fun we had had playing together in the preceding few years. We ended up with 13 songs that we loved equally, so the thought of relegating some to B-sides etc., was off the cards.
With ‘Songs of Praise’ we had a strong sense of who we are as a band. It’s darker in tone, and I we’ve approached the arrangements differently. With the first album we gave Matt so much content that it was hard work to find space for everything. I think we have kept the arrangements simpler on Songs of Praise.
6. What inspired the title ‘Songs of Praise’?
For any non-British readers, Songs of Praise is a very long-running religious TV show that, when we were kids and there were only 4 TV channels, was the most disappointing thing to find on TV. It was on every Sunday afternoon and was/is congregations in cardigans, singing hymns in a parish church. You can find their compilation albums on Spotify, and Luke really liked the idea that when you searched for them, ours would come up too.
But it's not purely a piss-take. It's a genuinely accurate description of what's on the record; these are songs of praise. Devotional music. We've just been slightly loose about who's being praised.
7. Despite the title, this obviously isn't a traditional collection of hymns. What are the "different altars" these songs are devoted to?
The central conflict in the album's theme is between turning inward to adopt a narcissistic mechanism for sustenance, vs. looking outwards to gain sustenance from others.
There's a comfort in turning inward, feeding yourself off your own supply, your own myth, so nobody else can starve you. Psychoanalytically, it's the idea of the self as a closed circuit: you can build a grandiose version of yourself that doesn't need anyone else.
But there's another school of thought that says that's a lie we tell ourselves to survive. That we're not actually built to run on self-supply at all; we're wired to seek being properly seen by someone who's real and separate from us. That requires trust and vulnerability, and carries its own set of risks.
The inward route risks a hollow, contactless self that's stable but starved, as we hear in The Ghost of Oliver Reed. The outward route is exposed to the risk of identity disintegration if the ‘other’ leaves, as we hear in Blue Jeans, or the ‘other’ is engulfing, as we hear in When the Sun Bursts.
So the album's not really 'inward bad, outward good.' It's that both routes are attempts to solve the same terror of fragmentation/disintegration, and neither one is without risk. One costs you contact, the other costs you control.
8. What inspired the darker and more spacious direction of the new album?
Again, largely accidental. We had ‘When the Sun Bursts’ and ‘Fimbulwinter’ down first, and they were both inherently dark tunes, so that set the tone for the rest of the album.
The more spacious direction I think was a mixture of consciously deciding to make the song structures a bit simpler for this album, and partly because when you are producing it yourself, it’s your problem to work out where everything is going to fit in the mix, not someone else’s!
9. Was ‘Songs of Praise’ conceived as a complete journey from the beginning, or did the themes develop naturally during the writing process?
This one was developed. I have returned to the theme of inward vs. outward-looking responses across several songs before, but the sequencing, the title, the artwork, all of that came after the fact. The next album is probably going to be a whole pre-planned concept album though; I’m working it up at the moment.
10. What themes of temptation, loss, mythology, mortality, and spiritual conflict run through the album?
A key theme running through the whole album is the consequences of shortcuts to relief. The temptation to act in a way that avoids or provides immediate relief from feelings that feel unbearable is a temptation that humans face over and over again. Once those patterns of coping with emotions become established, they can become destructive and self-perpetuating.
We’ve used the spiritual conflict as a metaphor for turning inwards or outwards, as I was describing before.
11. How important is storytelling to the Bleeding Antlers songwriting process?
Storytelling is of central importance to Bleeding Antlers songwriting. None of us are interested in songs that are just a mood with some words on. Every track on this record has somebody in it, in a place, with a problem that evolves throughout the song. I used to have a goth country band, and I fell in love with country and bluegrass music in part because you need to be able to tell an entire story end to end in a maximum of 12 lines of verse. When that is done well, it’s really special. That's partly why the folk element sits so naturally for us; it is the original storytelling format.
12. The band's sound incorporates doom, progressive rock, folk shanties, gothic atmosphere, and sleaze. How do you decide where all these seemingly different influences fit together?
The songs are built from a palette of styles that we love to listen to; Bleeding Antlers has always been about music that we would want to listen to ourselves.
Our songwriting process is different to how I have approached it in other bands; I used to write the lyrics first and then fit the music around the lyrical theme. But here, we play with the different musical elements to get the vibe of a track, and then the story evolves out of the mood that the song is painting musically. I’m not really sure why that changed, but it has worked for us.
13. How do you maintain a cohesive Bleeding Antlers identity while allowing the songs to move into such different musical territory?
I think we all have a deep love for the genres that we draw from, so we are pulling on them because we think that how we are using them is genuinely interesting, and something we would want to listen to. I think we all know how each other work musically now too. We all know each other’s tics, and we can conceptualise how each other is going to interpret and inhabit what we are writing.
14. Which song on Songs of Praise best represents the band's current identity?
‘The Devil of Mariazell’. Its riff is heaviest as balls, with a more grunge-oriented verse; it has the religious metaphor in there, sexual/seductive undertones, and a dark laugh in the middle of it. If someone played you one track and asked what this band is about, that's a pretty good summary.
15. What was the most challenging song on the album to write or record?
‘Blue Jeans’. Covers are treacherous. Go too reverent, and there's no reason for it to exist; go too heavy-handed, and you've made a comedy metal cover; get the balance of the pastiche wrong, and you run the risk of sounding like Alien Ant Farm.
I think it’s really important that you can properly inhabit a cover and make it your own. Otherwise, I think you tend to either sound like a wedding band, or like you are trying too hard to be clever.
16. ‘The Devil of Mariazell’ immediately suggests mythology and darkness. What's the story behind that song?
‘The Devil of Mariazell’ refers to the case described in Sigmund Freud's 1923 paper “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” Mariazell is a tiny Austrian town with a shrine that has been a major holy pilgrimage site for 900 years. Freud analysed a manuscript preserved at the shrine, documenting the case of Christoph Haizmann, a Bavarian painter. In 1677, Haizmann suffered convulsions and violent fits, and confessed that nine years earlier, after his father's death, while depressed and unable to work, he had signed two pacts with the devil, one in ink and one in blood, pledging himself as the devil's son when the term expired. With the deadline looming, he broke down and was sent to Mariazell, where the Virgin Mary appears to him in visions and compels the devil to abandon the pact. After liberation from eternal damnation, he entered religious life and lived out his days as a monk (still troubled by the Evil One, the record notes, when he'd had too much wine), producing paintings of the dark lord that are still archived alongside the accounts.
Freud thought that Christoph had a neurotic breakdown, with the torment originating from the tension between his hostility towards paternal authority and simultaneous wish for protection by it, rather than a demonic possession.
A lot of the antlers songs on ‘Stagmata’ were influenced by psychoanalytic theory, so this felt like a good transition into the new album as an opener.
17. "Meet Me in the Woods at Midnight" has a strong folk-horror atmosphere. What inspired the imagery and story behind it?
I wanted to capture an excitable, sexualised energy for running through the woods to get drunk and naked in a kind of Bacchanal celebration of the great god Pan. I wanted to capture the folk horror tradition of the willingness and excitement to engage in the ritual. There’s always an invitation, and the only question is whether to go. Everyone goes.
18. What drew you toward Norse mythology when writing "Fimbulwinter"?
Norse myth doesn't do sudden apocalypse; it gives you the full, inescapable disintegration of society. Three years of winter and famine, and only then comes the final battle. There's something deeply oppressive about the long, grinding forewarning of collapse that you're required to keep trying to survive. Its bleakness feels like it’s relevant to the cycle of collapse in societies across the ages.
19. How did Lana Del Rey's "Blue Jeans" become part of the Bleeding Antlers world, and what made you want to reinterpret that particular song?
I think she’s a doom writer. The tempos are funereal, the subject is devotion to something that's going to destroy you, and the whole aesthetic is death and glamour holding hands. All we did was change the instrumentation and let it be as heavy as it already was underneath. It resonates with the band's whole thesis, and I think the distance between the right pop song and a doom song can be just about production and nerve.
20. What can you tell us about "The Ghost of Oliver Reed"? What inspired that track?
This song, like ‘The Forefather’ on ‘Stagmata ’, is about the corrosive effect of feeling hollow, and feeling trapped and tormented by having a grievance fill that space. If you turn too far inward, then that sense of hollowness can drive a sense of powerless victimhood and needing to denigrate the value of connection with others.
We love Olly Reed as an artist and as an icon. He's a patron saint and a cautionary tale in the same body. He’s the original hellraiser, but his demons caught up with him in the end. As with all public spectacle, the audience plays a part in it. Everyone wanted the hellraiser. Everyone bought him the drinks.
21. The album closes with "Crooked Lines." Why was this the right song to bring the journey to an end?
Crooked Lines uses the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and being subject to eternal torture in response, as a theologically influenced summary of the themes explored elsewhere in the album.
Prometheus/Lucifer is the narcissistic solution. Self-generated fire, self-authored defiance, a closed circuit that never has to answer to anyone, purchased at the cost of eternal isolation and torment. Choosing God is the object-seeking solution. Real relief, real relationship, but only by handing control of your own story to something outside yourself.
That's why the narrator in Crooked Lines is torn on which master deserves the worship; it's the same unresolved tension the album has been circling across the album.
22. How important was the sequencing of the seven tracks when constructing the album?
Very much so. We are of the era when albums mattered, and sequencing and flow mattered. While you can now call up songs in any order you want, we want to present albums as cohesive bodies of work with a narrative arc, so the rhythm that you present those in is really important to us.
Plus, we wanted to keep this one under a single side of a 90 min tape deck like the best albums of the early 90’s, so when you only have 7 tracks, positioning really matters!
23. Did you approach the record differently from ‘Stagmata’ in terms of songwriting, arrangement, or production?
Yes, we did. Luke and I wrote fewer songs together on this one, again, more by accident than design. The arrangements are definitely simpler, and the songs are more stripped back. This is the first record that I have produced myself, so I think that has influenced how the record has come together, partly down to ragged technical skills, and partly down to creative choices. On reflection, whilst I have really enjoyed immersing myself in this record, I do value having the input of a good producer, like Matt Elliss who did the first album. Having an external perspective from a ‘third’ can be really useful when being creative.
24. What did producer Simon Bismarck bring to ‘Songs of Praise’?
He's a nightmare, and he doesn't know when to stop. He was cheap, though.
Honestly, it’s been a double-edged sword. I originally decided I was going to produce this one because Matt Elliss is up in Doncaster and I had used all my annual leave entitlement on an extended trip to Thailand for Muay Thai training, so I couldn’t go to him to do it. There’s no substitute in music for experience and repetition, so it also felt like it was the right time in my development as a producer to jump in on putting a record together for the Antlers.
The disadvantage is that you’re not on a fixed clock of X number of studio days to get it done. There’s a temptation to endlessly tinker with things and never get anything finished. As a result, it has taken far longer than I initially anticipated. They say art is never truly finished, only abandoned, and I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
We all know each other well enough to be able to execute a veto on crap ideas, though, so I am confident the band would have told me if I had been disappearing up my own arse.
I suppose the risk of having taken on multiple roles is, if it’s shit, I have to carry the responsibility for that, and my ego will have to be able to bear it!
25. How did the production process help you achieve the heavier, darker, and more spacious sound you were looking for?
Firstly, it meant I could take the speed that we naturally played it at in rehearsals and drop it 10bpm for recording, much to Pete’s chagrin.
I think one thing I did enjoy doing myself, rather than in a studio, is the vocals. I spent quite a lot of evenings wailing into the void, which I find therapeutic, and it meant I got to play with the vocal delivery more than you do when you’re on a clock.
26. Was there anything about the recording process that surprised you or changed the way you viewed the songs?
‘The Ghost of Oliver Reed’ changed character a lot; I think Good Luke had originally intended for what is now the pre-chorus to be the chorus, and what is now the chorus to be a riff after it. When I started playing with the initial recording, I heard this big bombastic chorus section popping out at me, so I started working the arrangements and vocals around that. I think Luke was initially quite surprised and perplexed about it.
27. Bleeding Antlers has always had a strong theatrical and visual identity. How important are the band's imagery, characters, and sense of humour to the music?
The imagery and theatrics are fundamental. The masks aren't a gimmick; they're about inhabiting the character of the Satyr in all its glory.
It’s part of the ritual of folk tradition: you put on the horns, you drink the wine, you become the thing, and after the ritual catharsis you take them off and go about your daily life. We're just doing that with a PA.
28. How do you balance the darker subject matter with the band's more irreverent and eccentric personality?
I think the balance of irreverent things and the darker subject matter comes quite naturally to us; it’s not something we have to work at, or give conscious thought to. I think it’s because the British humour has an established history of being quite bleak while also absurd.
29. Your previous album received some pretty memorable descriptions from critics, including "sleazy psychedelic doom shanties." How do you feel about people trying to put a label on the Bleeding Antlers sound?
We liked that one so much we put it on the social media bio. Genuinely, if a writer coins something good, take it and use it. I think it is best to leave it to critics and fans to interpret and articulate where they think a band sits genre-wise. When you hear bands trying to do it for themselves, they tend to come up with some overly-long pretentious bullshit that doesn’t make sense to anyone else.
I think my favourite one to date is ‘party doom’ by our journalistic buddy Gareth Endean. Short, sweet and to the point.
30. What do you think separates Bleeding Antlers from other modern doom metal bands?
I think there’s a few things that we do that mark us out from a lot of other doom bands. One is the country/folk infused storytelling songwriting structure; we love a good narrative and a catchy chorus. There's the shanty element that was present on the first album, which we hadn’t heard anyone else doing before, but one of the reviewers turned us onto an Irish band called Primordial, who do something similar but more black metal, which was cool. Finally, I think the biggest thing is the tongue in cheek/party doom vibe that some of the tracks have. It’s one of the reasons we tend to reference Type O Negative when people ask us for references.
31. How important are classic doom bands such as Candlemass and the wider history of doom metal to your approach?
Weirdly, none of us really listen to a lot of doom metal, either modern or classic. I think Candlemass set the template for modern epic-doom, both musically and through the framing of it as ceremonial music that should be staged like a rite. The vocal tradition matters too; we use a lot of clean singing, and love a bit of vibrato. And of course everything comes back to Sabbath, but we’re proud of not being a Sabbath-a-like band. We probably listen to more grunge than doom metal, and I think you can probably hear that in the tracks more than some of the conventions of the doom genre.
32. Do you think the underground metal community has changed significantly since ‘Stagmata’ was released?
Logistically, I think things are getting harder every year for grassroots venues. Small venues are suffering from all the tax, wage, and supply price rises outstripping what they can expect to earn, and they are so much harder to replace once they are gone.
For bands, it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, Brexit has made Europe unviable for UK bands, and the shrinking pool of small venues is an existential threat. On the other, technology has made a lot of stuff more accessible. You can tour with a pocket-sized modeller rather than 4x12 cabs, and anyone can distribute and promote their music DIY to the world. If I could go back in time and explain that myself as a kid in the 90’s that only knew 4-track tape recorders, I don’t think he would believe me.
Having said all of this, because there is no one getting rich in underground metal, the people still doing it are doing it purely out of love for the scene. Our friends at the Dev in Camden, for example, they put on bands most nights of the week; they don’t charge door entry to punters; they remunerate and look after the bands, and they’re just the nicest people you could ask to work with. We feel very privileged to be able to work with them.
So, it’s the zines, the college and online radio shows, the promoter putting on a doom night in a back room in a market town somewhere - that network remains generous and undiminished, because everyone is there for the right reasons. I feel really fortunate to be able to self-release this record and to have been carried the whole way by people with no financial interest in us whatsoever.
33. What has been the biggest challenge in following up an album that received such strong underground attention?
We put ’Stagmata’ out in lockdown of 2021, and it found an audience within the underground community without any meaningful promotion by us, through being a certain kind of fun. When you and the listeners are happy with the first album, knowing where to go with the second one can be anxiety-provoking. We knew we didn’t want to repeat ourselves, but I also knew I wasn’t ready for the folk power ballads LP yet. We’re saving that for the 4th album.
The other challenge is more mundane: five people with jobs, families and lives, six years apart, trying to find space to rehearse, play shows and write, record and produce the album was hard. The attention was lovely; the scheduling was and always is the enemy.
34. What do you hope longtime Bleeding Antlers fans hear in ‘Songs of Praise’ that they didn't hear on ‘Stagmata’?
I think there’s a lot more suffering in Songs of Praise than there was in Stagmata, so I want people to feel that bleakness when they listen to it.
35. What do you hope someone discovering the band for the first time takes away from the album?
That we meant every note of it, including the wrong ones.
36. How does Bleeding Antlers translate its theatrical atmosphere and storytelling into the live environment?
The songs are only half-finished until there's a room shouting them back.
The masks come out, and we’re beer drinking and hellraising through every set. We’re not a click-track band; it’s all crotch grinding, foot stomping, and rolling around on the floor, whatever time of day or night we play. I think that energy communicates what the band/songs are about well.
37. You're preparing for UK headline shows beginning in September, followed by appearances at Rustfest, North West Doom Fest, Godivageddon, and other festival dates. What can fans expect from the live ‘Songs of Praise’ experience?
Expect the full ceremony. Expect to dance. Expect to have a good time. Expect to be asked to sing.
38. Are there particular songs from the new album you're especially looking forward to playing live?
"Meet Me in the Woods at Midnight," because the chorus is built for a room full of people and it's going to be genuinely beautiful when they are singing it back to us. We have a real love for closing the show with ‘The Last Prayer’ from ‘Stagmata’ because we love having everyone singing the outro along with us.
39. After ‘Songs of Praise’, where do you see Bleeding Antlers going next?
We definitely don’t want another 6-year gap. Otherwise we aren’t going to get very many albums in before we die. So I think we need to write another album, and get up to see Matt Elliss to get it recorded ASAP.
40. Do you already have ideas for what the band's next chapter might sound or look like?
The next album is going to be a full concept album. I loved ‘Bat out of Hell’ and ‘Operation: Mindcrime’ when I was a kid, so I think we are ready for that for the 3rd album.
41. If ‘Songs of Praise’ were performed as a midnight ceremony in an old abandoned cathedral somewhere deep in the woods, who or what would be waiting at the altar when Bleeding Antlers played the final note of "Crooked Lines"?
Nothing. The realisation of the ordinariness is the horror of it.
You'd have the candles, the horns, the smoke machine, the whole congregation, the last chord ringing out, and when it faded there'd be nobody at the altar at all. No devil to bargain with, no god to answer to, just ordinary people, making choices about who they are and how they want to live. Every day, until one day they die.
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