Devil Sold His Soul: Loss & All Its Friends
Imagine whittling away in the wonderland of experimental esoteric post-metal, blurring boundaries between the emboldened beauty of melodic metalcore and the destructive dirge of post-hardcore, for years on end only to drift off away from shore and get lost at sea. There are few bands that can find their way home, and for many, the journey of self-discovery can summon the sound of the death knell. For DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL, they found their way back to the land of the living by bringing their past and their present together as one.
When the band bought founding vocalist Ed Gibbs back into the fold for a string of anniversary shows celebrating their debut album A Fragile Hope, few would think they’d stick it out with his replacement Paul Green. Rather than spell a recipe for trouble, the two were a match made in heaven, and without those shows, or that meeting of minds, DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL, to put it simply, would no longer exist.
“If the Fragile Hope anniversary hadn’t happened, we would’ve definitely packed it in as a band because it was going absolutely nowhere,” explains Paul, reflecting somewhat solemnly on a chapter of his band he’d much rather forget, adding, “reconnecting was important for sure, because no one was getting on. It was a case of everybody being so demotivated because literally nothing was happening.”
By revisiting the rivers they once swam in they found solace in the sensation of playing music together. In turn, this led them to a period of self-discovery, ending in an epiphany that brought about a leap of faith for them all.
“I think it really highlighted that it was kind of the start of the band as an enjoyment outlet, rather than being about success,” suggests Ed, whose attitude towards his second turn in DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL is nothing short of enchanting, adding, “like everyone’s kind of motivation in terms of being a success, and I’m not saying we don’t want to have any success, but it just stopped being important that we be successful to everyone. It was the start of the band as something to really enjoy and savour, and I think where we’re at now is just about enjoying the fuck out of it I think.”
This sense of freedom that Paul, Ed, guitarists Rich Chapple and Jonny Renshaw, drummer Alex ‘Lex’ Wood and bassist Jozef Norocky found in enjoying themselves allowed them an escape from the burden they felt barricaded into by their everyday struggles. From the loss of family members to brazened battles with mental health, pouring their heart and soul into DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL became the light at the end of the tunnel. After nine years without a studio album, and five without any original material at all, their fourth album Loss would finally see the light of day.
“The start of the writing process really was underlined by Lex losing his mum unexpectedly, and that really just shaped the whole process alongside a number of things we went through” explains Ed, surmising that the loss of one thing led to a reflection on the loss of several things, in which they found an album materialise out of. As a band, DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL were eager to embellish the concept of loss as more than just a one-sided throw of a dice, colouring it with their own individual experiences.
“Ardour is about how we felt we were slipping away in the music industry, it’s a bit of a fuck you to everyone. We tend to write one on every album, but it’s more about where we’re going and us questioning are we losing our place in music,” expands Paul. “Witness Marks is about mental health, and losing control over that, and from there it kind of flows through different themes, like I had a relationship breakdown, which inspired a song and that’s another loss. We just wanted to make sure we weren’t trying to stick to a theme 100% but it ended up being that way just because life at that time was pretty cruel to be honest.”
Considering much of Loss was completed in the early hours of COVID-19’s descent upon us, which included Ed catching the vicious virus himself, the songs they had been striving over for a number of years were suddenly taking on newfound meanings, bringing yet more understandings of what ‘loss’ means to the fore, as Ed explains. “Even now, the whole sort of loss of living at the moment, like not even being able to go outside and see people, it harks back to that idea of how things resonate with you. It’s happened to me in the past with my own songs, and it’s happened on this album already for me, where songs change meanings like the way you relate to things, and they can evolve and mean different things to you at different points in time, like Beyond Reach meant one thing to me when we were writing it but it means something entirely different to me now because of things that have happened in life, and that’s something I really love about music.”
It’s not just in it’s lyrical labyrinths that Loss lends itself to the circumstances civilisation is circumnavigating these days, but in it’s musical output too. At its core, it’s the meeting of molten post-metal with the fireside ferocity of post-hardcore. Dig beneath its surfaces, tear back the skin and look between the bones to find an album that lingers and lurks throughout the breadth of the body, slowly dysfunctioning like selenium poisoning. It’s a journey that blurs the lines between the meaning of beautiful within extreme music, a sentiment that strikes a chord with Ed.
“It’s definitely about turning it into a journey and having a bit of a rollercoaster with it, like there’s no accident that The Narcissist comes out of Tateishi straight into Beyond Reach, that’s some of the biggest tone shifts you can go for and it’s all about making all of the songs stand out in their own right,” he muses, likening the whole process to that of a pernickety tinkerer tinkering away. “If you have a bunch of songs, you could order it completely wrong and it would have way less impact, and not only are you trying to juxtapose everything against each other, you’ve got to make sure point A to point B is telling the correct story mood-wise. It’s more like putting a puzzle together sometimes, it feels like once you’ve hit the right one, there’s no other way to put it together.”
Loss is a special album made by a special band. DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL have long flown under the radar of the British metal wasteland, and having finally paid their dues, they’re here to claim the acclaim they deserve once and for all.
Loss is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
Like DEVIL SOLD HIS SOUL on Facebook.