“Modern society suffers from a serious lack of love”: Inside Higher Power’s surprise new album

Stepping back a bit has been good for Jimmy Wizard. Because the music industry rollercoaster can really take its toll. Stop-start as the last few years have been, this is the third time we’ve caught up at length with the Higher Power frontman to celebrate the release of new material since his band dropped outstanding second album 27 Miles Underwater in January 2020.

Their being heralded as the UK’s answer to globe-straddling hardcore heavyweights like Turnstile and Knocked Loose seems like a distant memory five years down the line. But slipping from the grasp of an all-consuming machine has allowed the Jimmy and his Leeds-based brothers – guitarists Max Harper and Louis Hardy, drummer Alex Wizard, bassist Ethan Wilkinson – to rediscover who they really are. Those learnings are baked deep into long-overdue, just surprise-dropped third album There’s Love In This World If You Want It.

Greeting Kerrang! on a breezy afternoon lunch-break from his day job as a tattooist, Jimmy flashes a broad smile and invites us to pick his open mind. Even more than before, it feels like there’s a lot going on in there. The importance of taking ownership of your art bubbles continually to the surface. As does the need to not sacrifice the truly important things at home – family and relationships, financial stability and furry friends – on the unstable altar of rock star success. Everything can be boiled down to the a desire for real connection, however, rejecting sterile transactional exchange and cold online liaisons in pursuit of the truth and warmth of love…

Last time we spoke was for the release of Absolute Bloom back in February 2024. What’s been the delay in getting There’s Love In This World If You Want It out in its entirety?
“It was a classic music industry thing. We were going on tour [with Neck Deep in the U.S.], so there was a pressure to get the single out. But we didn’t have the album finished yet. We were supposed to be finishing it on that tour: have the instruments down and I’d do the vocals as soon as we got back, in the groove after singing every day. But we recorded hardly anything during that tour. There just wasn’t time. Then when we did get home between us all working, Alex being away, then Louis being away it effectively took us another year to finish it…”

Has that forcibly drawn-out nature of recording affected the content of the finished album?
“It’s not even a forced thing. It’s more that we’ve agreed that this isn’t going to be a ‘job’ for us anymore. Higher Power isn’t going to be a career for anyone. So we do it as and when we can. Just when it feels good and right and it’s not eating into other areas of our lives. After having been in a band for 10 years touring pretty much full-time we realised we’d neglected things. We learned the hard way that we’d missed spending time with loved ones, being there for people being born and people dying. So if we didn’t record one week, that was fine. I’d go to see my mum or my nieces and nephews. I started a new relationship. I moved to Hull. Everyone had all these other things they were trying to catch up on or invest in. It’s become a fun process rather than an obligation.”

These nine songs are your most melodic to date. Is that truer to who you are as a collective?
“I think so. It’s very much a progression. Being in a band is a process of evolving and trying new things. And that snowballs. You listen to our older stuff and you hear us realising that we can do melody and harmonies. This is about asking, ‘Where do we take that next?’ We know where we can take heavy music, and there is a heavy song on the album, but the fun is seeing where [else] we can go. It’s been a mixture of growing in confidence and ability: 10 years of writing Higher Power songs and another 10 years for some of us in other bands. Some of the songs on there also just started with me writing on a guitar in my room, and taking those simple songs to the guys.”

Do you see that level of simplicity and melody as compatible with being ‘hardcore’ in 2025?
“It’s an interesting question. As we’ve aged, we’ve let our guard down. We’re not writing with our minds on how the music will go down with a hardcore crowd anymore. They’re just songs, not specifically for one crowd. And some of the songs that we’re writing, the influences we’re touching on, and the things we’re trying to achieve, have nothing to do with hardcore. But at the same time, hardcore as a genre is sonically so wide open now. We could still say that this is a ‘hardcore’ album and no-one would bat an eyelid – even if that’s not the perspective we were writing from!”

The album title, There’s Love In This World If You Want It, feels like a valuable sentiment in these troubled times. Was it meant as a kind of salve?
“There are two answers to that. On one level, it’s about how in this modern society, and this fast culture, our relationships with people often aren’t based in love. It’s all apps to meet people and hook-up culture. On another, it’s more of a message to myself. A lot of my interactions had become quite transactional, which is normal nowadays, especially in the music industry. I’m the frontman in this band with so many people trying to get things from me, and me trying to get things from them. And I got lost in it. It really hit for me one year we were playing Slam Dunk, in a situation which some kids would give their left arms to be in, but I just felt so empty. Then you feel selfish for feeling bad when you have so many things that people dream of. But I realised it was because I didn’t really have any connection to the world around me. Through that guilt, I realised that I have so many people around me and that love is there for me if I’m open to it. You don’t need to [put up those walls], you don’t need to live life through a screen, the connection is all waiting there in front of you. A big part of the process was getting sober enough to realise that. I hadn’t been sober for, like, two years, so how could I see what I had or feel what I needed to feel?”

That sentiment is directly reflected in songs like Wide Awake, Better and Count The Miles...
“Very much so. I journal a lot. Whether that’s just me writing thoughts on my phone or listening to podcasts and making observations on a notepad, it sparks me to capture what I’m thinking. Lyrics and journalling are very similar in that. On the chorus to Better, I could hear the word ‘better’ and the melody. Then I had pages about what that means to translate into the song. It’s like a diary!”

Speaking of Better, is there a guest vocal on there?
“It’s not a ‘guest vocal’ as such, but because we recorded the album ourselves in our practice room, there were always people coming through. Our friend Howie was there the night that Louis and I were doing vocals, she can sing, and we asked if she wanted to sing harmony. It turned out to sound way better with a female voice in the song. She’s never even been in a band!”

Did that freewheeling approach extend to the sample in Wide Awake?
“That’s a section from The Black Crowes’ 1991 live album Talking To Angels. Wide Awake is a song about how Higher Power ended up where we have. The thing that’s going to make this band work and make everybody happy is to love each other and love the process. I really like The Black Crowes and I love that quote: ‘It’s been a strange and beautiful year…’ That’s what being in a band on tour is really like. You look back at how strange or insane things have been but how beautiful it is to experience them. Plus, it’s a way of saying thank you to the fans for letting us do it all!”

Are there any other Easter eggs buried in there?
“On Kaleidoscope, Andrew Fisher from Basement does the middle-eight. That came about purely because we’d been sending each other demos of new music and he came up to Leeds to hang out for a couple of days, just as friends, working on songs. I showed him that one, and I was thinking about having someone else singing the middle-eight just because my voice is already all over this record. Eventually, I asked ‘Do you want to do it?’ It’s not a credited collab because we wanted to keep it as organic as it was. Our label wanted it as a ‘feature’ because it would help on Spotify and with social media, but both Basement and Higher Power are burnt out on that transactional side of the music industry so we kept it as friends helping each other out rather than us trying to sell a song off Basement’s name because they’re a bigger band than we are.”

Were there other unexpected benefits that came from self-recording?
“It was nice not to have any outside influence. We were going to go with a producer, but there was an awful lot of talk about us ‘needing a festival banger on there’. But we didn’t give a fuck about festival bangers because for all we know Higher Power might never play another festival again. It was all about writing the songs that we like and believe in and which satisfy us creatively. We needed to reconfigure the model and regain control. So we decided we should just do it ourselves. Louis loves recording and he wants to try his hand at producing, so we already had someone to do it for us. And it meant that we had so much time to write and try things out without the pressure of set time in the studio, even if sometimes that meant we overthought or took too long. It was all about freedom, in the end, and trusting each other – which is a essential to do as a band!”

You dropped the single Stillpoint between Absolute Bloom and today, but it doesn’t make the album. Why?
“That was another example of the music industry cat-and-mouse game. We had Outbreak coming up, so we needed to release a single to boost it. We love that song, but we had it written around the same time we were writing the 27 Miles… stuff. I’d asked Mikey from Never Ending Game to come on and do the middle-eight harder than I possibly could – I’d almost written it as a Never Ending Game part – and they were also playing Outbreak. Basically we got talked into putting it out as a standalone thing even if we were never really thinking about having it on the album.”

It almost seemed out of place with its artwork, which is in keeping with what you’ve gone for with There’s Love In This World… Was there a decision to change things up aesthetically?
“We’d never done a hand-painted album cover before. Previously it was all that ’90s-style Helmet-type aesthetic with a [photographic] image zoomed in and the band logo stamped on top. This was a chance to do something different. The artist George Addy is someone I knew from Leeds who’d worked on one of Louis’ projects years ago. He’s a nice guy who does great work!”

It also feels quite ’90s, though more evocative of the softer alt.rock imagery of the era…
“It wasn’t specifically going for a ’90s theme, but I think George was translating the songs, lyrics and my explanations of what they were about. The original idea was to have a massive Where’s Wally-style fold-out image with practically a whole town where people can pick out clues and try to match them with the songs – sort of an interactive puzzle. I wanted someone to pick up the vinyl and find something new every time they looked at it. It didn’t end up being quite that complex due to constraints on time and our vinyl-pressing budget, but you can still see that influence in there!”

Well, at least one dog made it to the finished cover art. Which pup is that?
“At first, I’d wanted to get everyone’s dogs on there. As it ended up, there’s just the one. I had a dog called Milo, a brindle staffy who died just before Christmas. I asked if he could be on there as it would mean a lot to me and my girlfriend. I sent a bunch of pictures of him but in the end, George painted the dog on the cover grey, which looks much more like my other dog Harley. So I guess it’s partly Milo, partly Harley and partly a mixture of all the rest of our dogs, too!”

Surprise releases are in vogue with the hardcore community at the moment. What made this kind of drop right for this record?
“My dream as a musician has always been to surprise-release an album on Christmas Day. Everyone is so bored, so someone should definitely do it. But everyone else just thinks that’s one of my wacky ideas. With There’s Love In This World… the pressure was to do the standard three videos and a roll-out. But when we were talking to our label Nuclear Blast it was clear that we probably didn’t have time to do that. The goal was to just to get the album out as soon as possible. Literally two weeks ago they were like, ‘Fuck it, okay!’”

Was the notice really that short for you?
“Absolutely! Initially, I was like, ‘Fuck yes!’ Then I looked at the date and realised it was only two weeks away. We needed to get our merch pre-orders finished and to figure out who has the password for our website to get that updated. We’re not fussed on this being the biggest record in the world. It’s all about getting an album out that we’ve been trying to for the last four years.”

Does that mean there’s no tour plan in place? Higher Power have always been best onstage…
“I would love to play these songs live in some capacity. We’re all burned out on touring – especially me as a singer – but there will at least be a UK tour for the album, even just as an excuse for us to get together and hang out. Nothing is booked at the moment, and anything we do will be super DIY as we don’t even have a booking agent. But rest assured that we are in agreement that we’d like to get There’s Love In This World If You Want It out on the road!”

There’s Love In This World If You Want It is out now via Nuclear Blast

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