Bury Tomorrow: “I want to promise you, our band is never giving up”

Reflecting on all this today from his home in Southampton, the thing that’s really spinning Dani’s head is that almost two years have passed already. “How the fuck has that happened so quick?” he laughs. “It’s almost scary.”

This Friday, Bury Tomorrow will release their new album, the aptly numbered The Seventh Sun. Even if, from the outside, Cannibal sounded nothing like a band developing rust from within, here they are visibly gleaming and renewed. Featuring by some of their heaviest-ever riffs – and some particularly virulent screams from Dani – it lands the traditional Bury Tomorrow punches with a refreshed vigour and, somewhere, a joyous glint in its eye.

The Seventh Sun also finds the band bending more to their creative whims than previously they might have done, going off on diversions, a marked change from what the frontman admits have been, in the past, purposeful exercises in “making the best metalcore album”. The spine of things is still very much recognisable as them, but by taking time to wander down an avenue more Tool-ish, as Dani’s vocals do on Boltcutter, or embracing a much more melodic impulse on the grandstanding, electronic-washed Majesty, it’s satisfyingly liberated as well.

“It’s the best thing we’ve ever done – of course I’m gonna say that, right?!” he laughs. “It seems like such a mental switch, but it was so easy to do. If you're going in to write the best metalcore album, you're only gonna ever come out with a metalcore album. We were trying things and letting it take us to new places. Things before, we probably would have inherently been like, ‘No, that's not really us.’ Well… actually, it was.”

Ask Dani to put a name to his mood as he heads into release week, and he’ll reply, “Weirdly confident."

"I’m trying my hardest to reframe my nervousness as excitement," he says. "They're very similar feelings.”

As COVID took hold and Britain entered lockdown, and Cannibal’s release was pushed back by what seems now like a laughable three months, in the hope that the world would have improved by then, Bury Tomorrow for the first time in about a decade, had time to think. When they did convene to rehearse, there was a stiffness. Far from the pressure-release of getting together to block out a world that was insisting on impressing its realities on its inhabitants, Dani remembers thinking: what are we actually rehearsing for?

“We tried to force some stuff during the pandemic,” he says. “That probably highlighted some of the turmoil that was going on.

“What the pandemic did, having that space and time away, it was a weird silver lining – it gave us space,” he continues. “I wouldn't say it's a ‘good’ thing, obviously, that we couldn't, you know, perform the album and get it done. But do I think it helped us reassess and readjust and really understand what we're doing this for.”

Dani had other things to be thinking about, anyway. As an NHS manager in charge of wellbeing – and not the only member of the band to work for the health service, with brother and bassist Davyd and drummer Adam Jackson also employed there – the pandemic saw him working “90-hour weeks” in a senior role. He couldn’t have done the band if he’d wanted to.

“I remember at that point, I just been promoted to program lead for staff wellbeing across Southampton University Hospital,” he says. “It was just carnage. One of the best times of my life – because of seeing wellbeing and supporting people and just feeling like I was actually doing something that benefited the world, which was really unifying – but it was also brutal.

“I look back on that as one of the most grounding, but also beneficial times in my life, undoubtedly,” he continues. “I've worked for the NHS since I was 18. So nearly the entire duration of this band, and [the pandemic] is a period of time that I'll never forget. And not just from a traumatic point of view, but from feeling gratified and feeling like I'm making a difference. So I'm doing something that's right.”

Having previously worked in patient-facing roles, Dani’s new tasks involved keeping an eye on the wellbeing of NHS hospital staff (“The societal heroism that got held up at the start got dropped pretty quickly,” he says with a wry smile, “The NHS was the best thing ever, now [politicians are saying] it’s the worst thing ever”). It made him even more aware than he had been previously that, “actually, we need to give a crap about this stuff”.

“I'm head of organisation development across the ICB, which is six hospitals – 55,000 people,” he explains of what he actually does. “I look after equality, diversity and inclusion and wellbeing. The reason I bring that up is, it shows how beneficial that was in in my life, not just getting me a job. But, I was like, 'This is so important. I want to dedicate my career towards this stuff.’”

To this end, Dani admits that “I'm glad I wasn't touring. Because if I had to do any kind of band stuff [at that point], even though we did release the album, I could do it in my own time.”

As he says, though, had things continued as they were in the band, they might have broken anyway. When Jason left in July 2021, they had to ask themselves some serious, existential questions. “What does this band mean?” was one. “What are we continuing?” was another. “I'm not going to bastardise the memory of Bury Tomorrow just to try and prove my own ego that I think we're really good,” was one thought bouncing around Dani’s head. “That would just be utterly pointless.”

In some ways – and when the notion is put to Dani, he nods in agreement – it’s good that such things came up so far into Bury Tomorrow’s journey. After 18 years, and looking at doing their seventh album, they are older men than they were, where the wins and losses of dedicating yourself to a band are more self-evident and tangible. Dani’s job and home life, for example, mean that time dedicated to the band is at more of a premium. But here lies perspective: that just means that you have to cut out the crap.

“I think the biggest part was, if we are continuing, we cannot continue this ‘Woe is me Bury Tomorrow, aren't we hard done by?’ crap,” he says. “It's utter rubbish. My biggest thing at the moment is putting things into perspective. If you put it into perspective with of all the stuff that's going on in the world, and how fucked it is, if a member leaving a metalcore band from Southampton in England is the biggest issue for people to talk about, [after] the pandemic, and all of the loss that we've gone through, then, God, we haven't done that the right way.

“We're lucky that we survived the pandemic,” he continues. “There's plenty of bands that couldn't survive the pandemic because of financial issues, jobs, loss of life. I've managed to put a lot of things into perspective over this time. And whilst I've always been incredibly appreciative, it's almost been like, ‘Come on, guys. I know is this is really good to be in a band, isn't it? It's really fantastic. It's great.’ And now it feels like we're all aligned. We're all like that. This is who we should be."

Perhaps even more importantly, the enforced look in the mirror also reminded Dani and his bandmates that what they do is bigger than five – or, as the case now is, six – people. More than once he makes reference to Bury Tomorrow as “a metalcore band from Southampton”, in the context of things that are worth genuinely worrying about (“There’s a fucking war in Europe – that actually matters”), but his are a group for whom connection with the fans is paramount. It’s something they’ve fostered and nurtured, the idea of Bury Tomorrow fans as a collective. Dani’s openness when he’s spoken in the past on subjects like the importance of good mental health care has found home and resonance with the people who have chosen to sit closest to his band. Had things taken a different path with a dead-end at the bottom of it, Dani says that he now sees that he would have been “giving up on them”, and “they’re owed more than that”.

“If we gave up because one member of a five-member band left, we're not doing it right. And we're definitely not keeping in mind, ‘Who's the people that actually are important?’ It’s the fans, the people who actually care about our music that won't get to see us,” he reflects. “If this band ended tomorrow, I'm happy that I've gained much more than the band has taken from me. I've had an incredible time. But it's much bigger than just five members, or six members now, it is a whole community of people. They’re the ones actually waiting for us, who get something out of it as well.”

Out the other side of all this, Bury Tomorrow’s outlook is brighter than ever. Already a pragmatic man, Dani today says that this is a more positive age for the band. What he’s learned is almost like something he knew already.

“The [positive] mindset is so important,” he says. “I'm not going to do some kind of inspirational TED Talk on a positive mindset shift, but it is important. There is science behind this, and if you can really dedicate that energy to doing something positive and enjoying the ride, then everything's a win, right? And that opens those doors. We genuinely put more effort into this album. We've given more of a fuck, we genuinely care more.

“I don't believe that things happen for a reason,” he continues. “I believe that you make decisions and you've got to go with your gut. Sometimes you've got to make decisions, you've got to push forward, and sometimes it's really difficult to do so and you need support. And, and other times you need to readdress, and you need to think about things differently.”

Bury Tomorrow have. And they’ve found their groove again and more. When Dani jokes that he feels almost ready for a future with “another seven albums” in it, it’s hard not to see where he’s coming from.

“I think we didn't realise or appreciate what an amazing position we’re in,” he smiles. “We've toured around this planet numerous times. We’re about to go and do our first headline U.S. tour. We're just about to go over and do our first headline Australian tour. I reckon we’ll hit a million monthly streams in a couple of months.”

He reflects again, and then laughs.

“What the hell have I got to be bitter about?”

The Seventh Sun is released March 31 via Music For Nations – available to pre-order and pre-save now.

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