Of Holy Hell itself – which marks the band's first record since the passing of Tom Searle – Dan Searle (drummer and brother of Tom) says: “In those first months after Tom’s death, I didn’t deal with it at all and I felt so unhappy and anxious. I’d ignored it and just tried to cope. But I knew that at some point, I had to learn from it.”
“It’s at times like that you ask yourself, ‘What is left?’” adds vocalist Sam Carter. “As a group of friends, we had to find something.”
“Ultimately, there were two choices,” Dan says. “Feel sorry for yourself and believe the world to be a horrible place and let it defeat you. Or let it inspire us to live the life that Tom would have wanted us to live. I was very worried about people taking away a despondent message from the album. I felt a level of responsibility to provide a light at the end of the tunnel for people who are going through terrible experiences.
“For me, broadly speaking Holy Hell is about pain: the way we process it, cope with it, and live with it,” he concludes. “There is value in pain. It’s where we learn, it’s where we grow.”
The tracklist for Holy Hell is as follows:
1. Death Is Not Defeat
2. Hereafter
3. Mortal After All
4. Holy Hell
5. Damnation
6. Royal Beggars
7. Modern Misery
8. Dying To Heal
9. The Seventh Circle
10. Doomsday
11. A Wasted Hymn
And the artwork looks like this: