Architects: “Everything needed to be at 100 on this record… If we’re going to be heavy, it needs to be absolutely ridiculous”

Architects are playing, of course. Frustrated as Seeing Red is, it’s part of a longstanding dance with those for whom it’s impossible to do right for doing wrong.

Actually, the band are comfortably bigger than ever. On the day Kerrang! catches up with Sam and Dan in London, they’ve not long been announced as support on part of Linkin Park’s massive European summer run, including Berlin’s enormous Olympiastadion. They’ve had good training for such a gig, having spent the past two years warming up stadia for Metallica. Each night, they’d step onto the metal legends’ enormous, in-the-round snake pit stage, and play as if they were standing on different continents to one another.

“They moved all their stuff offstage so we could basically run laps on it,” says Sam. “It was very strange, starting so far away, it was crazy! I got to move around and see how we were doing everywhere else. But I think Dan was stuck staring at either one side of the stadium, or playing to the snake pit.”

Dan nods. “It made me realise I need to up my game!”

When they haven’t been doing that, they’ve been sitting atop the bills at Europe’s biggest metal fest, like Bloodstock, and Germany’s 85,000-cap Wacken.

And for all the talk, people very much like Architects’ new music. Sam notes that The Sky… is already looking set to be even bigger than 2021’s chart-topping For Those That Wish To Exist. But typically, there’s a gag coming. The reaction to everything they’ve done lately has been a little too good.

“I get worried now when we release a song and [the response is] too positive,” says Dan. “I've created this reverse correlation – the more hate we get, the more tickets we sell. I get worried, ‘What if it's too positive?’ It was really positive back when we were fucking broke! Now I've got, like, a car and kids – I can't go broke!”

The Sky, The Earth & All Between is an album of extremes and contrasts. From the beginning, opener Elegy trickles in on an arpeggiated synth, before suddenly tumbling into a scalding riff, one of the heaviest the band have ever written.

Single Whiplash pounds along on a mechanical, industrial beat, while Everything Ends takes a more Linkin Park tack, with Jordan Fish’s fingerprints everywhere. Brain Dead is furious electro-hardcore, with a chorus both massive and biting. The clubby Judgement Day, with its female vocals from LA-based artist Amira Elfeky is oddly reminiscent of French synth-metal terrorists Carpenter Brut.

As distinct from its beginnings, Chandelier ends the album on a more plaintive note, all major keys and big melodies in what might incorrectly be called a ballad by some. Either way, it fits with the ideas of extremes, of every idea being pushed to fulfil its own personality – war and peace, heaven and hell, light and darkness.

“It felt like we could bring all the best bits from various eras of the band into one place, and that was going to make a pretty diverse record,” says Dan of the big plate Architects are serving up. “But we felt like we really needed to take those qualities and push them as far as we can, and improve upon what we've done in the past.

“We opened lots of doors over the last couple records. That was the whole thing – that we were going to cover a lot of new ground and shake off the labels of what people thought the band was supposed to be. On this record, we liked the idea of surprise. You want the album to take you to places you're not necessarily expecting it to go. You don't want to watch the movie and know how it's going to end from the very beginning, you want there to be twists. We’ve very purposefully done complete U-turns and done very jarring changes in style, because it catches you by surprise.”

Lyrically, Dan says that his words, sung by Sam, are more direct and clear than they might have been in the past.

“There’s a level of vulnerability that didn't used to be there,” he explains. “Some of it is quite on the nose, and it's not really hiding behind anything wordy. I think, again, for some fans that's jarring for the because a lot our older stuff was a little bit more ambiguous.”

A first enquiry as to where his lyrical pen headed this time around returns the answer that it’s “All over the shop. Lots of ‘My head's poorly’ and ‘Why am I such a dickhead?’ stuff. A little bit of, ‘God, the world is so stupid and annoying. Why you all such idiots?’”

"It's all quite specific,” he reveals when poked a bit more. “Whiplash is about tribalism. Judgment Day is about living under the cloud of digitally-induced impending doom. There's lots of bits and pieces, but the more emotive songs are definitely examining my own inner world and my own inner dialogue and the troubles I have and self destructive behaviours that I don't do anything about.”

As the man who has to sing the words, for Sam it’s important to find the common ground in them – having to put himself in them on record and every night onstage, and so that those listening can hear the point as well. Between them, Dan wants to be honest without getting into “suicide fodder”, or become “tasteless and cringey”. To counter his bandmate’s darker tendencies, he tries to stop things getting consumed needlessly by the mire: “I’m trying to pull it out of the dark side. I'm more of a Jedi.”

“I think a lot of people will feel the record,” he ponders. “Especially as someone that didn't write the lyrics, going through the sort of journeys of what Dan's talking about, I have to make it feel like it's me. I think people all around the world will resonate with mental health issues that we've all been through, and we've been very vocal about it for a long time.”

Dan jokingly addends his description of such lyrics as “same old shit”, but this is also a good example of Sam finding that relatability. Because some things don’t just go away.

“With mental health, I really struggle with people that are like, ‘I'm fixed. It's over,’” he frowns. “I can only speak on my behalf, but I think it's an ongoing thing where you need to constantly check yourself and be aware of what's going on, and make sure you have your routine so you can take care of yourself. Because I don't think it's a thing that you can ever fully be healed from. You can be in a good spot, but I think it's a dangerous place to be if you think you're ever fully out of a bad place. You can be pulled back in very quickly. And if you're not prepared for that or not making steps towards that, it can feel crushing.”

Even here, the pair can point to a certain misunderstanding of what their band is and what they ‘should’ be doing. As they say, though, if nobody’s sure of what you are, you can be anything.

“Everyone thinks that we're either the grief band, the climate band, whatever we were back at the start,” says Dan. “For some people, we’re definitely frozen in time. Maybe that’s the way we feel it because we're in the centre of it, but people definitely have expectations of us that we're never going to meet. We’ve written an album or two that covered certain topics that really spoke to them, but then we’ve gone from writing about my brother dying to calling people dummies on the internet, and that's a jarring change.”

This hasn’t been a sudden switch, though. Architects have, for 11 albums, been on the move. Some of their material, out of context and sequence, does seem unfathomable placed next to earlier stuff from their ultra-technical Nightmares debut, or scalding Hollow Crown. It’s not about chasing a bigger prize, they say, it’s about figuring themselves out. Still.

“To be honest with you, the band has been in a process of coming out of its shell since the day it started,” says Dan. “We started with these really conservative ideas about what the band could be. When we began, it was very self-conscious, and it was like we were hiding ourselves behind the technicality of the music. There was nothing vulnerable about it. It was like we couldn't do anything that was perceived to be remotely tipping our hat towards accessibility. And over time, we realised how much there is inside of us if we're able to just take the shackles off and do whatever we want, and now it's gotten to the point where it's a bit of a piss-take. ‘Right, if we're gonna write something heavy, I've got to write a joke song and then turn it into an Architects song, where it's almost on the edge of a piss-take.

“If the listener isn't listening to it, laughing at the extremity of it, then we've not done our job.”

That this was all happening following the departure of guitarist Josh Middleton to focus on his own band, Sylosis, and he himself joining the band following the passing of Tom Searle in 2016 underlines Architects’ journey. They are both tenacious and fluid, that they have continued because both they and their music are reactive to change. Success – the proper success they enjoy these days – didn’t even begin to blossom until they were halfway here, five albums in (“We could have been done after five albums and still making zero pounds a month,” says Dan, with a more optimistic tone than normal).

“We’re like a cat, aren't we?” he laughs. “We've had the most unique journey. I can't think of any other bands that have had this sort of weird, late trajectory. It seems so extraordinary, what with losing Tom, and then we've had to adapt to having parted ways with Josh. It’s strange, but at the same time, having been forced to reinvent ourselves has been probably one of the key ingredients to maintaining what we've got. It's very cool. It's a miracle.”

“We've had so long to figure out what makes Architects great,” adds Sam. “It's been a hell of a journey. Every step we've taken has opened the door to something else, or given us the license to learn. We've never fucked it that badly. We've always tried to be creative, and we've always learned a lesson. And every time we’ve done something slightly leftfield, it has opened the door.”

“We're just late bloomers,” smiles Dan. “We’re just figuring it out as we go. I’m glad that we eventually managed to suss it out. You know, it took us a minute.”

And so, on the Metallica timeline, what’s the plan for the next 20 years?

“We feel very grateful to be in this position; to be on our 11th album is not something that a lot of bands get to say,” says Sam. “So, yeah, just keep going. We're going to keep writing music. We’re not showing any signs of stopping yet.”

To his right, Dan rolls his eyes at his bandmate’s criminally boilerplate response.

“What you're meant to say is: we're going to kick ass. Wembley Stadium. Here we come,’” he laughs. “‘Watch out, Download headliner. Leave that slot open, motherfuckers. We're coming for you. We’re coming in hot.’ You know, all that stuff.”

They both laugh. Stranger things have happened. Not least to Architects. With or without a ‘Blegh!’

The Sky, The Earth & All Between is released February 28 via Epitaph.

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