From the outside looking in, things seemed pretty quiet on the Black Veil Brides front in 2019. Frontman Andy Biersack’s experimental solo album and comic book had been occupying much of his time, and, up until last week, fans were wondering when they’d hear the vocalist return to the hard rock stylings of his day job.
Then, on November 29, the band made an almighty comeback, dropping two new singles – Saints Of The Blood and The Vengeance – collectively known as The Night, out of the blue, along with a video to accompany each track.
Moreover, as well as signing with Sumerian Records, Black Veil Brides revealed that the man to replace bassist Ashley Purdy – whose departure was announced earlier in the month via a short statement on the band’s social media – was Lonny Eagleton, a long-time member of the BVB Army and friend of their frontman, who’d previously toured with the Andy Black project.
READ THIS: How I wrote In The End, by Black Veil Brides' Andy Biersack
And the debut release from this new line-up won’t be the last of its kind. In fact, the quintet have discussed a series of ‘duologies’, whereby they’re seeking to create successive album campaigns based around pairs of songs (hence the name), rather than full-length records.
To get all the info on their grand new plans, Kerrang! sat down with Andy to talk music, the impact of their line-up change, Black Veil Brides’ plans heading into 2020, and much more…
When did you start work on these new
Black Veil Brides songs, Andy?
“Elements of these songs pre-date me meeting Jinxx [guitar] and Jake [Pitts, guitar]. The guitars on Saints Of The Blood are one of the first things I ever heard the two of them play – I believe it existed as part of a demo from a previous project of theirs of which CC [drums] was also a member. So it’s a riff that’s been around for a long time. Originally, it was insanely fast – I described it as ‘guitar madness’ – and I thought it was cool, but I didn’t think we could write a melody over it. It was pure shredding, and one of those things that’d hung around. We’d tried to use it over the years without ever really nailing it. When we got together to work on the anniversary rerecord of [2010 debut album] We Stitch These Wounds, we found ourselves having such a good time that we decided we should get some new material going based around these old riffs. We wanted to write songs in the way that we used to: just the five of us in a room with no outside influences or producers. It was thrilling to get in the studio and be like, ‘Let’s write some fucking Black Veil Brides songs!’ We were going for something that sounded like the band we used to be and have perhaps strayed away from in recent years – we wanted to recapture that sound and energy.”