It's a rock concept album about a 1980s vampire band on the run from an assailant. Of course. Watch Creeper's bonkers video for Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual) now...
Hot on the heels of recent single HEADSTONES, Creeper have confirmed that their fourth album Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death will emerge on – when else? – October 31. To celebrate, they've unleashed the video for Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual).
Speaking exclusively to K! recently, frontman William Von Gould promised the sequel to 2003's Sanguivore would be "sleazier and sexier." Aptly, the new clip, following the continued adventures of a fictional, undead '80s metal band as they throw themselves into fantastical excess, is “a blood-soaked, sexed up, psychedelic vampire rock fantasy and easily one of the wildest videos we’ve ever made.”
Watch it below, and see how the man could win a truth-telling competition, there...
Elaborating on the album, Will explains that it follows the fantasy band on tour in the 1980s, trying to keep one step ahead of a deadly assailant, the muscular Mistress Of Death. As a sequel, it had to go harder.
“Sequels are always ‘more explosive, faster, more intense, louder!’" he told us. "This sequel is sleazier and sexier. And we’re pastiche-ing some of the tropes of rock music that we love, which is really fun. Everyone who's been involved in it thinks it’s the best thing that the group has made, and we're really proud of that. At this point in our career, that's all we can really hope for. Tom Dalgety [producer] told me that he listened to it in his car, and it made him cry!
“When we were coming to write this record, one of the suggestions was that we made it an all-killer record, like Painkiller by Judas Priest, where it’s bang after bang after bang. We love the last record, but it goes on tangents here and there, which is fun, but we wanted to get to a place where we had a bunch of hard rock songs we could just bust through live.
“The Satanic Panic is a theme of a lot of these stuff across the record. There's a really cool song called The Black House, which is about [Church Of Satan founder] Anton LaVey and Jayne Mansfield. There’s a lot of rock’n’roll lore that we play around with. Obviously the Jim Steinman stuff is a really big deal to us, and he’s still a massive influence. But I suppose on the last one, we were doing a lot of Lost Boys tropes, with the vampire thing, which Jim Steinman has done for years and years.”
On the titular baddie, Will found her at a wrestling convention and realised he'd found the perfect icon for the record.
“I can't give too much away, because it's an ongoing thing. I gotta keep kayfabe. But the idea was that we would take Sanguivore to a different part of the universe. As you can see, they’ve got this executioner’s mask we made for them, which draws on loads of heavy metal tropes, all mashed together. The person playing her is this incredible woman called Sarah, who I met at a wrestling convention in Manchester – she was a Chyna impersonator. I had this vision in my mind of what the Mistress Of Death should look like, and I walked in and saw her and just went, ‘Holy shit! That's her! That’s the Mistress Of Death!’ She's training for a bodybuilding exhibition out in Italy, and she's shredded at the moment. And in that weird way that everyone involved in Creeper has some kind of connection to this world, she was a scare actor for a bit as well, in a horror maze.
“So, yeah, now we have a pro-wrestler in our weird gang of misfits. We've got this crew of freaky individuals going around making these things together. It’s become this cast of characters, this unbelievable mesh of people, and it’s so much more than a band and songs. That was always our intention from the offset.”
Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death tracklisting
1. A Shadow Stirs
2. Mistress Of Death
3. Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual)
4. Headstones
5. Prey For The Night
6. Daydreaming In The Dark
7. Parasite
8. Razor Wire
9. From The Depths Below
10. The Black House
11. The Crimson Bride
12. Pavor Nocturnu
Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death is released on October 31 via Roadrunner. Creeper play Bloodstock Open Air on August 9.
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