Veiled: The Beginning Of The Story
Since their inception in 2022, VEILED have been climbing the ranks of the UK’s underground deathcore scene since their debut single Rituals, supporting bands such as OSIAH, PALEDUSK & VISCERA on their rise. Now they’re unleashing their debut album SE/CT just two years after their formation.
“It feels like we’ve come a long way in such short time, considering we’ve been around for only two years and have an EP and an album under our belt,” chuckles guitarist Rob Hemmingway. On the eve of the release of their debut album, some people would be nervous and possibly queasy with anxiety, but not VEILED. “At the moment we’re all pretty positive. We’re pretty self-deprecating, so we just expect the worst and hope for the best. But we’re just eager for it to come out so we can play some new material and see the reaction from the crowd in the flesh!” Hemmingway grins.
VEILED have released two singles from their album The Sentence and Hellbound, and they’re a different shift from the material that they put out on 2023’s EP The Black Rite, shifting from a more symphonic deathcore approach to the straight forward assault with smaller symphonics that SE/CT delivers. “We can’t shy away from having the symphonic elements in our music, it’s inherently cinematic, which is what VEILED is all about. Our music, the videos we put out and our stage show is all cinematic. We’re all fans of horror, games and multi-media storytelling. Something we’ve strived for from the beginning is storytelling.”
If you go back and listen to The Black Rite then you’ll find a small story confined within the small EP. But SE/CT on the other hand is much more of a storytelling virtue. While it does have more time to tell the story through the album, it’s crafted with precision. “While nothing has actually inspired the story we’re telling, it’s within the world of VEILED where the story has come to fruition, and throughout the album, and more visually the music videos. you’ll have more puzzle pieces to put together between songs. The interludes spliced into the album do add another layer to it, but the videos give a clearer indication of where it’s going. And it just looks terrifying. The main thing we wanted to convey across the album was the looming feelings of both terror and fear.”
Not satisfied with just the visuals being to their liking, they’ve gone a step further with the album, being very hands on with the audio production. “The amount of time I’ve spent studying film and sound design for this album is looming on the strange side of a hobby.” Hemmingway laughs. “But without it, there wouldn’t be much of the intricate samples that we’ve included. I mean we have the sound of a gunshot reversing that I don’t think many people will notice, but we’ll know it’s there.”
One thing many deathcore bands are facing today is backlash from using clean vocals in their songs. VEILED hasn’t shied away from this and stand their ground with it. ‘A lot of our material doesn’t include clean vocals, but the sections of songs that do have the, we think find their place very well. Myself and Sam [McEvoy, guitars] we both sat down and thought, where can we put this and where would it be better utilized, and not just us, but the whole band were very happy with the final product. A lot of the songwriting we did was trying to break out of the traditional songwriting rules, so to speak.”
To stand out from the crowd, newly appointed vocalist Kyle Dawson pushed for more cleans in the music. “When Kyle came into the band he was up front about adding more cleans into the songs, telling us it would make us more unique and recognizable. And he’s right in the sense that a lot of bands are ‘scared’ to do it because of the stigma that surrounds the use of them.”
Speaking on Kyle coming into the band, Rob touched upon his vocal talents. “I mean Kyle‘s vocals are unique anyway, he’s deathcore through and through and he has plenty of power in him to back it up. On Lament, toward the end of the song, you know which growl I mean.” He laughs. “He recorded it, sent it back to us and just nonchalantly said ‘Is this alright?’ We were all stunned really because of how visceral it is. And the best part about that is, he didn’t even do it at his full power, so that in itself blew us away!”
Stood out from the crowd they have as SE//CT pushes the boundaries of the use of clean vocals in deathcore. “We’re going to continue to evolve and experiment more through our time, so you can expect us to ‘up our game’ for the future, but for now we’re going to take everything coming at us, and deal out more damage wherever the Sect takes us.”
SE/CT is out now via Seek & Strike.
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