My Dying Bride: The Apocalyptist’s

You know the world’s gone to pot when even MY DYING BRIDE thinks it’s too doom and gloom out there. 2020’s The Ghost Of Orion was coloured by the emotions of lineup splits and vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe’s daughter’s battle with cancer, dropping into our ears just days into lockdown – the band were ready for a break from doom’s dark depths.

“The Ghost Of Orion shook the band, obviously it shook Aaron, and you can sense that” sighs founding member and guitarist Andrew Craighan from his home studio, reflecting on hitting turbulence in the MY DYING BRIDE timeline. “It’s so dark and so miserable; I didn’t want to do that again and I’m in this band.”

Battered and bruised, it was time to keep their heads down low, their hopes up high, and fight on. Battling through a pandemic wasn’t on their bingo cards, but it did bring a new perspective. “We went through the pandemic and it was like ‘fuck, really, this is what we’re doing now?’” he laughs looking back, as traumatised as he is changed by the experience. “When common sense started to be revived, there was a new sense of relief, so it was like ‘does anybody need any more misery?’, probably not because there’s plenty of that, the thing we’ve just been through brought everybody right down, and people are still suffering.”

MY DYING BRIDE aren’t exactly known for writing soundtracks for whimsical walks through the woods, so don’t worry, they’re not changing tact – but on new album A Mortal Binding, you can hear traces of misery washed away by the joy of making music, something that was missing last time around. “When we were at rehearsal, and we were all having fun, and I know these are pretty doom songs, you could sense the joy in the style of the riffs, and the movement of the sound as it ebbs and flows; it was just the elation that we were back doing it.”

That elation, that joy, at simply being back in the room, with a stable lineup that felt like “a breath of fresh air for a change” gave MY DYING BRIDE a renewed sense of purpose. It was their weapon of choice against a tidal wave of personal struggles, global pandemics, and a little too much time inside their own heads that left them drained after The Ghost Of Orion.

“After 34 years, it’s hard to come up with something that’s new, but the same, because you reinvent yourself to the point where people dislike it so much to think ‘this is no longer MY DYING BRIDE, I’m out, I’ll see you later’,” says Aaron, taking time to collect his thoughts on a difficult time for the band. “You can’t do the last record or the one before, because everybody goes ‘they’re just a parody of themselves, I’m out’, so you have this [sword of] Damocles hanging over your head of any decision, and that causes an element of overthinking and self-judging.”

The musical side of the band – Craighan, bassist Lena Abé, guitarist Neil Blanchett, keyboardist and violinist Shaun MacGowan, and returning drummer Dan Mullins – slaved away, rehearsing “heavily for just shy of 18 months” where they bought “riffs to be doomed out”. For Craighan, it was like slipping into James Bond’s suit, mixing business with pleasure. “Suddenly we had a really well oiled, and I don’t mean in the drunken sense, band at rehearsals, and we rehearsed man, we rehearsed over and over again, round and round and round, to make sure we got these where we wanted them, and then we figured we’ve done enough, we were straight into the studio.”

Teaming up once again with producer Mark Mynett, MY DYING BRIDE brought A Mortal Binding to life. Its seven tracks fire up the pallbearers for a funeral march through death-doom’s murky waters, with added heavy metal pomp and accessibility. Opener Her Dominion revs up the riffs, as Stainthorpe’s death growls stab into the soul. Simply put, they mean business, and it’s all by design.

“When we were writing this one, and we haven’t done this for many, many years, we deliberately and decidedly focused on larger riffs, with simplified harmonies and less complexity” explains Aaron, throwing his hands up for mercy from doom metal’s gatekeepers for his follow-up statement, “This might get me crucified, but we tried to make it like an honest, pure, ancient record from the seventies like BLACK SABBATH might do”.

Taking the SABBATH approach seriously, which saw them titling the rolling hills of riffs they were churning out as “SLAYER riff times four, CANDLEMASS riff times two, CELTIC FROST riff times three,” MY DYING BRIDE channelled their creativity into carving out grandiose funeral marches like The 2nd Of Three Bells, one of Andrew’s favourites. “It has the sombre elegance of the twin harmonies of MY DYING BRIDE, the death metal part which breaks it down towards the end, and the funeral march as we lead the song out; we absolutely fluked that one.”

Having opted to make A Mortal Binding “a bit more standard metal rather than these eclectic doomy, dark passages masquerading as actual funeral marches”, they swapped out ethereal soundscapes for symphonic funeral marches. Close your eyes and listen carefully, and you’ll soon find yourself slipping through its cracks, transported away from wherever you roam.

“I don’t know where, but it’s outside of your own psyche,” laughs Andrew as he reflects on the deeper meanings that meander under the surface of A Mortal Binding. “You’re in a different world – Victorian, Shakespearian, just something better than this which has more depth, more honesty, and more integrity than regular life.”

Whilst much of A Mortal Binding sees MY DYING BRIDE exploring the apocalypse in all its masquerading lights, you’ll need to make your own version of events. As Andrew explains, “there’s a strange sort of romanticism to hiding in music; it’s not in the future, or into outer space, but it takes you out of yourself, it’s part of the escapism music brings.”

After three and a half decades of carrying the coffin of death-doom through its many processions, MY DYING BRIDE are by no means buckling under the weight of it all. With not one, but three albums – 1999’s The Light At The End Of The World, 2004’s Songs Of Darkness, Words Of Light, and 2009’s For Lies I Sire – reaching milestone anniversaries this year, A Mortal Binding is being offered up as one of their strongest.

Whilst Andrew is “under no illusions of where MY DYING BRIDE is in the world” and has no “weird and wonderful expectations”, he feels the future is uncharacteristically bright for A Mortal Binding. “I’m already proud of it. It sits well in my mind amongst the back catalogue of what we’ve done; it doesn’t take anything away, if anything I think it’s gonna be a solid member in time, and it might sink in and become one of the favourite ones.”

A Mortal Binding is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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