To Kill Achilles: A Road To Recovery
What does it take for someone to fear leaving the house, when there’s no pitchforks on their lawn? It’s difficult to approach the everyday when the problem lives in your head alone, even more so when attempting to get a band off the ground. Picture the most dreadful situation you could leave your friends in, not trivial or sticky but dreadful, something that you think could break them. Feel that never ending anxiety set in. An album, good or bad, wouldn’t exactly be a consolation prize for having to feel that everyday. Still, TO KILL ACHILLES frontman Mark Tindal lived with that after turning 28, resulting in the post-hardcore outfit’s debut album Something To Remember Me By.
“When we came to writing Recovery things started looking up a bit by then, we had our own coping mechanisms and ways of dealing with things that helped.” The healing process that the band have undergone almost ushers in a new era for them, very much remaining an emotional hardcore band but Recovery sees them learning how to love themselves, their flaws and the class things about them.
Recovery itself is faster and much more fun, pulling in more punk influences that run away with the music, an effort to distance the record from the darker themes of their debut makes sense. Still slightly depressing Tindal reckons but just not as much dread involved. “Every time I’d leave my house I would have mad visions of just dropping dead on the side of the road whilst being with my best friends and them having to deal with that. I found hope in getting a lot of therapy and learning about what I was experiencing.”
You often hear people proclaiming that music is their therapy, whilst not actually seeking professional help that they might need, we raised that point with Tindal and his thoughts on it are mindful. “That was one of the issues that I had with the last record, I wasn’t seeking any proper help at the time so I just threw all of my horrible emotions into the record.” Instead of living in a constant state of uncontrollable fear, he exists within clarity even when there’s times of anxiety and that shows on Recovery. It’s a very literal title, like a journal entry.
It’s not about much more than getting better, not cured or anything like that, but being able to see the forest from the trees a little better. Being able to experience joy again like a breath of fresh air. “Well it’s an emotional hardcore band so it’s always going to feel a bit negative, but the positive notes for me are that I still deal with all of those things but the point is I can deal with them. There’s a song called Fifteen Years which is about meeting yourself at fifteen years old when you’re thirty and being proud of who you’ve become. With that song I think that people don’t really give themselves the chance to say what’s class about themselves, but I think it’s another one of those British things where we don’t want to brag.”
“I never used to leave the house, this album sounds like walking outside because I can do that now. If it’s a half hour walk through a park that I live near in the sunshine. You know that human moment that you might get and you just think ‘this is proper, I’m meant to do this’.”
Despite all of the dread, anxiety and pure fear of being a burden to your friends it’s going to get better, no matter how condescending or annoying it may sound, things will get better. Tindal knows that now, resulting in being able to craft something that feels so pure to him, Recovery is the cold Scottish air on his skin for the first time in so long. Even if it is slightly depressing in some parts, it turns out that it’s pretty subjective and that the context of an album really does matter. The personal growth of the members of TO KILL ACHILLES matters even more than how their new album sounds or its influences, hell it matters more than the fact that it’s a body of music. Recovery ended up being hope for Tindal, after years of struggle.
Recovery is out now via Arising Empire.
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