INTERVIEW: Kaya Tarsus – Blood Youth

Ahead of the release of their second album Starve, we caught up with BLOOD YOUTH vocalist Kaya Tarsus. With the new album being somewhat of a departure for the band there was a lot to catch up on and find out exactly what pushed the band into this darker territory.

So your second album Starve is out very soon, how have you been feeling in the build up to its release?

Kaya: It’s mixed feelings really. We’re really excited obviously, and a bit anxious but I guess that’s what happens when you release new music. It’s a weird one, my anxiety has been all over the place but in a sort of good way. I am excited but it what it is, that’s the music industry.

So what would you say are the defining characteristics of Starve?

Kaya: Well it’s just a very heavy and honest album. It’s a real nightmare, that’s how I sort of hear it. When I listen to it and when I was putting the lyrics together I wanted it to sound like a sort of horror film in a way. The sort of theme we were going for, we wanted it to have this real dark shadow over it.

The samples and interludes you included this time definitely add to that vibe. Do you think that darker tone is what really separates this from your first album?

Kaya: Yeah, after Beyond Repair we were just pretty tired and felt a bit uncomfortable. I read a lot of stuff where people thought they had us completely figured out as musicians and as a band. We were the “scrappy small town underdogs”, that sort of thing. “The British BEARTOOTH” and blah blah blah… I love BEARTOOTH and they’re really good friends of ours but we kinda want to do our own thing. We didn’t wanna be this scrappy young band anymore. So we thought if we just made everything 10 times heavier then maybe we’d start ruffling a few more feathers.

Yeah it definitely is heavier, it feels like there’s a strong nu metal influence this time too. Was this something you really set out for from the start?

Kaya: I don’t really listen to nu metal at all, I mean I used to. Obviously I love SLIPKNOT and stuff like that. I’m way more into stuff like TOUCHE AMORE and LA DISPUTE. I’ve always listened to those kind of bands, and then like RNB and stuff. I love lyrics so everything I listen to is very focused on the lyrics. But Chris (guitar) is the biggest nu metal and heavy music fan in the world. He listens to stuff like CANNIBAL CORPSE constantly and just loves riffs. So when we were writing the album we never sat down and decided we wanted to write a nu metal album. It’s just that Chris would come to us with these riffs and we were like “that’s fucking sick”. Then we’d just write the rest of the song around that riff. So obviously with him being the main riff writer and loving nu metal that influence is gonna flow through it.

That guitar tone just has that nu metal bounce to it right?

Kaya: Yeah exactly…

It’s definitely got more going on as an album though. Songs like Keep You Alive are a lot more sinister than anything you’ve done before…

Kaya: Yeah we wanted to have some evil tracks, that’s what we called them during recording. Just stuff that sounded really dark. There’s a song called Nerve which I find hard to listen to now cos lyrically it’s a very personal song for me. I can only listen to a bit of that song without feeling uncomfortable but that’s exactly how we wanted it to be. There’s definitely an injection of that really menacing and evil vibe.

You’ve spoken about lyrics quite a bit, that’s one thing that does separate this album from a lot of stereotypical nu metal. It’s a lot more personal than what some people might expect from the genre. Do you feel like that combination of your lyrics and the straight up heaviness give this album its edge?

Kaya: Yeah well I’ve always written the lyrics for the band and I’ve always used it as my kind of therapy. I feel like I’ve been a bit selfish with how I write songs. If something bad happened in my life I’d turn it into a song. And I’ve done that since Inside My Head. All that stuff is like a diary and that’s always how I’ve written my lyrics. I did the same for this album but 2018 was particularly bad for me, my physical and mental health and just everything. I felt like I was falling apart. I was suffering from really bad depression and we’d be on tour with STONE SOUR. I’d come back home after being on tour with Corey Taylor and just feel so depressed and in a really dark place. I got so stressed I got a stomach ulcer and would literally wake up in the morning coughing up blood. All because I have really bad anxiety. In a way I wanted to show people how I was feeling at that time with all these lyrics. I was talking to the band and they were all going through their own things as well. We did so much touring on the Beyond Repair cycle. It was just constant, I mean we love touring and would never wanna complain about it but we didn’t realise how big the shows would be. And by the time we came home we were just so tired and burnt out. We all talked about how we felt and I didn’t wanna write another album that was just about me. So a lot of the songs are about us as individual. What Matt (bass) and Chris were going through, that inspired me to write those lyrics. It really has gotten a lot darker though.

So do you think that was just representative of what that time was like as a band, and just channelling those emotions into the music created the sound for this album?

Kaya: Yeah that’s exactly it.

There’s some really experimental stuff for you on this album too, was this something you wanted to try from the start. Beyond Repair is quite a straightforward album when compared to some of the curveballs you’ve got on this album. There’s those songs where you aren’t screaming like you usually but it still feels heavy…

Kaya: Yeah it’s almost like a spoken word thing. I don’t like to speak ill of Beyond Repair because it did so much for us. And we wouldn’t be where we are without it, like we wouldn’t be having this chat right now if it wasn’t for that album. It was such a springboard for us.

I guess as a debut it just sets you up to grow more on future records

Kaya: Exactly, that album was just an extension of our EPs, we knew what we were writing was very safe an we knew everybody that liked BLOOD YOUTH would like these songs. That’s what we thought a debut album had to be for the people that liked us. We had people coming up to us saying it’s too safe and “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, all those kind of reviews. As I said earlier we didn’t really like that so we just decided lets go all out and just do what we want to do and everything we like in music. Just inject that into what we do, it feels like it was such a risk and well the albums out in 10 days so we’ll see if it paid off. But for us, we’re so happy with it. We brought in a producer to the studio called Gilbert. We grew up with him in our home town, he went to school with Chris but lives in London now. We brought him and he made all of those interludes with us. We’re really bad with music production, cos all we do is just plug in and play. We don’t know music theory or anything like that. We’d just make noises at him be like “you know this kind of noise” and his reaction every time was just “for fuck sake”, that’s how those interludes came together. He really helped us do that.

These interludes help with how the album flows too. It’s not just 11 individual songs, the whole thing feels more like a complete body of work.

Kaya: Yeah we really wanted this album to flow more, keep everyone in that same mindset. Instead of just having a collection of songs you can put on any album. I want people to listen to a song from this and be like “fuck, that’s from Starve“. We wanted that continuous flow and for everything to just make sense, for there to be like this domino effect throughout the entire album.

Lots of bands tend to take an almost playlist approach to albums now. Where it is just loads of songs and people will pick out their favourite. This feels like you really want people to just listen to this from start to finish

Kaya: Yeah that’s what we wanted. I mean we see what everyone writes, know it’s getting compared to SLIPKNOT and Iowa but we never sat down and decided we want to write an album that’s exactly like Iowa. We’ve always just wanted to write a BLOOD YOUTH album. But we’ve always been inspired by bands like KORN, SLIPKNOT and MACHINE HEAD. That whole era of bands who wrote albums that when you listened to them it terrified you. And that’s what we wanted to do. Like when I first heard the self titled SLIPKNOT album I was terrified, like what the fuck is this.

Yeah it was the same for me…

Kaya: Exactly it was scary. Like my mum opened up the lyric book and saw “Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand for” and then she took it away from me. We wanted to do something like that where someone could be scared by the lyrics or the music but you’re still hooked in. We’re talking about an album that came out like 20 years ago and it still has that effect. And that’s what we’d love to do with this album.

The closing track is the one that really stands out. It’s way beyond anything you’d done as a band before, do you feel like a song like this was something you might not have been capable of in the past?

Kaya: Yeah I couldn’t have seen an 11 minute track on our EPs, nobody would have got it. Honestly we just wanted everyone to feel how we were in the studio at that time. We were so secluded when we wrote and recorded that song. We were really in that mindset and I want people feel what we were when they listen to that last song. It was just so secluded and out of the way. I think we’ve earned that right to be more experimental now. Me and Chris have always been the main song writers, everyone gets their say but he does the riffs and I do the lyrics. He first suggested we do a 15 minute long song I was like no we can’t, no ones gonna get it. We’re not like MASTODON, that’s like DREAM THEATER shit and none of our fans would get it. He thought it would be cool if someone listening to this album and was drifting off and then snapped back in eight minutes into that song and not having a clue what was going on. The way he described it to me convinced me to give it a shot. It turned out to be 11 minutes long and I was terrified by that song when we were writing it thinking oh god I hope people understand what we’re doing here, we’ll see though.

I think with where heavy music is at right now, people are more open to bands experimenting again

Kaya: Exactly, I think people will enjoy it and understand. Like it’s not just 11 minutes of verse, chorus, verse chorus songwriting. It makes it’s own point, there’s this anguish at the start and then just acceptance at the end that everything is miserable. Hence all the screaming and crying. All those screams at the end was just me in a room just dripping with sweat going nuts. It’s another track that feels very strange to listen to.

How you describe it gives it a more authentic feel too…

Kaya: It’s 100% real, no body was telling me to scream a certain way at any point. The recording for the vocals was just left on and our producer was just like do whatever you want at this point. My instinct was to just go nuts and sort of speak in tongues. And that’s just what came out, it was the one take and that’s what we used.

So do you think this might be a more extreme and difficult album for some of your fans to get into?

Kaya: I’m not sure, people have reacted really well to the singles and seem to really understand what we are going for. I was really nervous about putting out Keep You Alive because it was the most different we’d sounded at that point. I think people reacted well though. People should get it though cos while it is different there’s still a shout of BLOOD YOUTH running through it. The choruses, riffs and breakdowns are all still there. I feel it’s just a different take on what we’ve done before.

Do you think genre boundaries being less rigid now help bands experiment and try new things as well?

Kaya: Yeah I think we’re quite lucky to be in this sort of age of music, if that’s the correct way to describe it. I feel like people are more accepting of more genres now. The UK scene used to feel very clicky. The hardcore kids would never go to a pop punk show, pop punk kids would never go to a metal show.We have people that come to our shows that are like NECK DEEP fans or whatever. They listen to everything and I like that. I mean I listen to loads of stuff, I hate showing people my iTunes cos it’s so embarrassing. There’s even some hip hop beats on this album. So it’s cool to be able to put those sort of things instead of it just being the same sort of thing over and over again.

So once the album is out you’ve got a headline tour coming up, are you excited to get back to touring even after what you said earlier?

Kaya: We always love touring and we’re always gonna tour forever and ever. If we could tour for 365 days a year we would. Regardless of what it does to us. We’re just really excited to go back on tour. We haven’t toured since November because we had to do everything for the album. The last tour was with CROSSFAITH which was sick, we’ve done so many support tours so it’s gonna be really cool to be the headline band. We rarely get to headline, so now we get to bring some of our own production now, big back drops and all that stuff.

And so to close up, what is it you’re really hoping to achieve with BLOOD YOUTH by the end of 2019?

Kaya: That’s a tough one. I guess I just wanna continue pushing us as a band and playing bigger shows. Playing with the bands that we love. Four years ago I was just working in a restaurant washing dishes, then last year we were playing shows with PROPHETS OF RAGE and STONE SOUR, crazy stuff. It could all end tomorrow and I could be back to washing plates. We never forget that as a band so as long we can still keep doing this and hopefully build our fan base so we can keep doing this forever.

Well thanks so much for your time, it was great to have this chat.

Kaya: Awesome, no worries it was really good.

Starve is set for release on February 22nd via Rude Records. 

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