Announcing their return last year Sikth were the ones to watch. Performing live for the first time in years at Download Festival the band went on to perform a mini tour culminating in London’s Koko performance. With no one wanting to tempt fate the band went into slight hibernation once again until the announcement of their brand new EP. Quickly snowballing in part due to the fans rabid reaction to the announcement and the band’s supply of new material the EP morphed into a Mini album. Celebrating its release the band have been on a small UK tour ending at London’s Forum, no doubt one of their biggest shows to date. Prior to being floored by their exceptional performance we were able to speak to the rhythmic brain behind the Sikth juggernaut, Dan Foord. Giving us a temporary fly on the wall look into Sikth’s year we spoke about what it was like getting back into the writing process after such a long absence, what Sikth’s plans for the future might be in the form or a potential new album and a fantastic surprise in store for next year that will no doubt make Death of a Dead Day fans very excited indeed…
Listen to the unedited interview below this excerpt!
What was the writing process like for the mini album after you guys hadn’t really written for such a long time together?
Everytime we write it’s different to be honest with you. People are always like how did you do this? Obviously some of the really early material was written with all of us in the room coming up with all sorts of ideas but this one was different. One tune, “Under The Weeping Moon” most of that song was actually written before we split up. So me and Dan had made a start on that song right before we had split up me and Pin wrote the verse for it and then Dan and Pin put a mid section to it. That was a kind of pre existing song, most of the song anyway. But the rest of it was yeah, new ideas! Me and Pin got together a lot on this one, just because Dan was really busy throughout the year and then kind of came in six weeks two months or so before the ending and kind of brought in some other stuff and re wrote some stuff with us. Me and Pin started off the writing process, sketched out the four tracks. “Days Are Dreamed” we were keen to do something that was written in a more organic way where we just jammed. Literally did that, James just had a bass line and I just went and made up a load of nonsense on the drums for ages and then Mikee sort of turned it into a tune.
A lot of the stuff I have a really strong idea about what I want to do structurally or rhythmically and things are very set in stone, predefined. So that song was the opposite, kind of getting back to the way we used to figure it out and put it together piece by piece. Yeah everything is written differently, there are some things we haven’t done before but I think it was also a kind of record for the fans, kind of a combination of the first two records in a way but everyone seems to like it so I guess it went well!
By you saying its a combination of the first two, maybe you didn’t experiment as much as you could have?
I would say that there is a much bigger difference between the first album and the second album than there is between the second album and this mini album. Really we were still kind of working out what we were doing on the first album, we were still kind of working out what we were doing on the second album to be honest with you! Whereas this is more kind of like we know what we’re doing now. I think there is a lot more that we can bring to Sikth’s sound, when we’ve done two records already you’ve got a lot more to call upon whereas when we did the second record we wanna to something that was more metallic. I don’t know if we intended to make it less proggy than the first one with the drop downs.. I think it was more to make the riffs more technical, more unison riffing, I wouldn’t call it like classic Metal but more of a Thrashy kind of Technical Metal approach rather than the first record which is quite proggy. I think for the mini album we’ve got a kind of really tight unison riffing we had on the second record with structures that are a bit more to the point but we’ve got more drop down melodic elements that were missing form the second record that were on the first record if that kind of makes sense?
The interview picks back up at 8:45 in our Soundcloud file below, listen for much more Sikth news. Including the potential of one off live performances of Death of a Dead Day performed in its entirety next year…
Sikth’s brand new mini album Opacities is out now!
