This Is The Six came out this week in 2012 – so let’s have ourselves some noisy nostalgia.
Time flies when you’re rocking the fuck out, huh? So it seems, given it feels like yesterday that British metalcore heavyweights While She Sleeps truly burst onto the scene with their debut LP, This Is The Six – a set actually released way back on August 13, 2012. Five years!
And what a racket they made before the album came out, lest we forget. Daniel P Carter played their track Dead Behind The Eyes twice on the same show, in April 2012, due to listener demand. Don’t know if that’s unprecedented, but it’s a rare day when any DJ drops a song twice in the same set. Impressive stuff – and followed by the album’s raging and raw lead single proper, This Is The Six, which you owe it to yourself to watch the video to below (be that as a first-time experience, or welcome reminder of its gut-punching power).
Of course, there was an EP before the first album took shape, The North Stands For Nothing, released in 2010. But it didn’t land with the impact of This Is The Six, which immediately stamped this five-piece’s reputation not simply as ones to watch, but ones to get on board with right now – and hold on tight to as they kicked and thrashed through subsequent tours and albums.
Kerrang! played its part, naturally – a review for This Is The Six spoke volumes as to its quality, and the band’s place in the ever-evolving British rock firmament. The title track was followed by two further singles, the caustic and confrontational Seven Hills and the phenomenal Our Courage, Our Cancer – the latter a track that comprises a mid-point highlight of its parent LP, mixing terrific turbulence and aggression with a surprising tender side.
So, if you’ve only just been turned onto While She Sleeps by the band’s third album of earlier in 2017, You Are We (a top-ten hit in the UK, and damn right, too), time-travel a little today to celebrate the record that, really, started all of this. Listen to the whole thing below, because this really is for the times we don’t want to forget.
Words: Mike Diver
