Black Veil Brides frontman Andy Biersack opens up about the band's new concept album, The Phantom Tomorrow.
In case you missed it, Black Veil Brides are making this coming Friday 13 a whole lot luckier with the release of their brand-new single, Scarlet Cross. To celebrate, the band hit the Kerrang! Cover Story this week, with Andy Biersack teasing that the track is a “very” good indication of what else is to come.
“Over the years we got away from the heavy-riff-big-chorus dynamic, which is what makes Black Veil Brides,” the frontman explains. “Our previous full-length record [2018's Vale] was very soft, with a lot of shine to it, so the goal [this time] was to find a way to make it grand, with a lot of string elements and everything, but still feel like there’s an edge built from the riff.”
And the album from which Scarlet Cross is taken, The Phantom Tomorrow, has even bigger ideas than just its sound.
“I don’t love the term ‘concept record’, but [The Phantom Tomorrow] is a concept record,” Andy reveals. “There are themes and ideas and moments that are hugely different from one moment to the next, but the goal at the end of the day, the heart of everything, is to write a heavy rock record and build out everything from there, as opposed to writing a pop record and putting riffs over it.”
Read this: New era, new fire: Inside the rebirth of Black Veil Brides
Of his past work with conceptual narratives, Andy ponders, “One of the issues I’ve had with projects that were concept orientated is that I never really had the opportunity to fully build out the world I wanted [the narrative] to live in, as a lot of it was working on the fly. Something like [BVB’s third album, 2013’s] Wretched And Divine [The Story Of The Wild Ones] was this complex world, but it was also a collaboration amongst three different artists on the story side, and the collaboration with [producer] John Feldmann when it came to the record side. We were trying to figure out the world as we went along.
“When I did [solo project Andy Black’s second album, 2019’s] The Ghost Of Ohio, it was a record that was entirely separate from a comic book. Then we tried to build the connective tissue backwards. I always felt that if I could have the time to do it, I would love to write an original story, with original characters and character design, and then determine if that’s something I’d like to write music about.”
With The Phantom Tomorrow – which is “about 75 per cent, soon to be 80 per cent” finished – however, it sounds as though BVB are very much on course to fulfil Andy's goal. Read the full story here – and brace yourselves for Scarlet Cross…
