SKYND: “Sometimes it seems like the goth and metal scenes are painted only in black and white. I’m here to add a little colour”

Step into the blood-curdling world of SKYND and you’ll find that those five capitalised consonants might refer to any of three macabre entities using the moniker. Front and centre, SKYND is the vocalist who greets K! backstage at a jam-packed St Luke’s in Glasgow, her pale-blue contacts, powdered face, bright green topknot and pitch-black bondage gear simultaneously fitting with and in defiance of the icy conditions outside. Beyond her, SKYND is the wider band including producer and multi-instrumentalist Father, and drummer Deadbeat, who perform this evening in dark cowls and ghoulish masks reminiscent of late-2000s Slipknot. Perhaps most pivotally, however, SKYND is the “imaginary friend” who’s been stoking the singer’s fascination with true crime her entire life.

“I was only five or six years old when I heard [notorious Ohioan serial rapist and murderer] Gary Heidnik speak for the very first time,” she winds back the years with a piercing gaze. “I had this little TV in my bedroom that SKYND would turn on sometimes, late at night. I remember watching this medical detective show about those horrible crimes with him sitting beside me, asking how it made me feel. ‘It scares me,’ I told him. ‘But not enough to make me turn away.’ Even then, I think I realised that I was drawn to it. I guess I still feel that mix of horror and attraction to this very day.”

So far, so Stephen King’s The Shining. SKYND smiles at the thought of an alternate universe Danny Torrance, then continues to describe her invisible companion with detail that would do Stephen himself proud. He’s the same age as her, with the same blue-grey skin that she wears onstage. He’s grown up by her side. And though others might be scared if they could see him, he’s a good friend.

So, is he with us right now?

“Oh yes.”

What is he doing?

“Just sitting here, listening.”

Does he like the conversation?

“If he didn’t, he’d let me know...”

He was there when the then-teenage vocalist discovered the music of Pink Floyd – specifically 1979 masterpiece The Wall, which used the Londoners’ real-life alienation from the outside world as a basis for its sprawling narrative – and when she realised that music could become an outlet for the dark stories swirling inside. “I was a loner,” she shrugs. “I have ADHD, so I’m in my head a lot. My imaginary friend helped me get that creativity out there. I’ll always be very grateful for that.”

The full realisation of SKYND’s vision would require real-life collaborators, though. While the vocalist speaks in a lilting northern European accent, she prefers not to discuss the specifics of her origins (“I grew up in a very dark place. That’s all you need to know”). More important, she insists, was the trip to Australia where she’d find a connection to properly spark the project into life.

“I actually made the trip to interview Katherine Knight,” she smiles. As in the first woman sentenced to life imprisonment without parole down under, who murdered, skinned and cooked parts of her partner John Charles Thomas Price, intending to feed them to his adult children. “Sadly, when they found out that I wanted to write a song, they decided against it. But I went to a ‘bush party’ while I was in the country and met someone else. I remember seeing this guy with his hood up, sitting separate to everyone else, just rocking back and forth by the ocean. I was drawn to him, so I sat down and we began to talk. That was Father. We had this immediate, twin-flame connection. I guess I always knew that he was out there somewhere, waiting for me. I think he felt the same. Finding each other meant we could pour everything we had into this genre we created.”

Flash forward a few years and that genre – the band simply call it ‘true crime’ – feels like a living, breathing thing. The titles of their 14-single discography read like a roll-call of some of the worst humans in history. Los Angeles’ Night Stalker Richard Ramirez rubs shoulders with infamous German cannibal Armin Meiwes. Peoples Temple cult leader – and ringleader of the Jonestown mass suicide – Jim Jones gets a song, as does child-murdering ‘Killer Clown’ John Wayne Gacy.

SKYND’s music is a strange, striking blend of big electro beats, industrial textures and staccato, trap-influenced vocals that veer between almost childlike high notes and otherworldly lows. Each track is accompanied by a highly stylised music video, focused on key facts, but unnervingly removed from reality. Although she is a fan of bands like Slipknot and Korn, SKYND stresses that she does not consider this music anything like metal, and her presence in the heavy sphere (she headlined the Thursday at this year’s Bloodstock) is more to do with finding kindred spirits there, from the fans themselves to musicians like Jonathan Davis, who they collaborated with early on.

“I’m a storyteller,” she gestures. “It’s about unpacking that fascination with what brings humans to do inhuman things. It’s something normal people can never understand. It’s good that we can’t!”

Watching SKYND rattle through their whole discography over a pummelling 75-minute set is an experience as confronting as it is invigorating. Even for indoctrinated fans, there is something inherently uncomfortable about pumping fists to the school shooting-inspired ‘Ra-ta-ta-ta / Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta’ refrain of Columbine or singing along ‘Bang bang, boogie boogie bang bang’ to Tyler Hadley: an ode to the twisted Floridian teenager who killed his parents with a hammer then threw a house party to ‘celebrate’. Those visceral reactions are all part of the intended experience.

“There’s a very thin line between telling these stories [and being exploitative],” the vocalist reasons. “It’s one I’m always wary of. I never want to be disrespectful to the victims. I just stay true to the facts of each case without romanticising or glorifying anything about them.”

More than that, SKYND’s whole release structure is geared around giving each case the focus it deserves. Dropping one song at a time isn’t about playlist culture; it’s giving each story room to be digested. No effort is spared, ever, even if a song like Columbine required 96 takes to get right. And, although the vocalist chooses which cases to write about from her bulging notebook primarily by instinct, she stresses that she gravitates towards modern cautionary tales, often with technological aspect. Michelle Carter, for instance, reckons on the Massachusetts teen who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after sending text messages to her partner Conrad Roy, coercing him to kill himself. Most recent single Bianca Devins, meanwhile, is a stark rumination not only on the murder of that young woman from Utica, New York, but also the years of online bullying she had experienced in the lead-up to her sorrowful fate.

“I want Bianca’s story to be known,” the vocalist sighs. “And if you look at a song like Elisa Lam, it’s about a case that was never solved. If we keep talking about it, maybe one day it could be.”

More than anything, SKYND is passionate about about confronting taboo questions around mental health. While certainly not defending the perpetrators about whom she writes, she alludes to the idea that perhaps evil is best seen as a spectrum, and that every individual carries their experiences and traumas like a “backpack” where sometimes that baggage grows so heavy that even ostensibly good people are dragged into darkness. Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wuornos are two of America’s most notorious serial killers, for example, but they’re hardly comparable: the predatory former tortured and killed animals from a young age while the latter suffered childhood sexual abuse, getting pregnant and being forced to give up her child, and complete destitution after being abandoned by family, before she broke into murderous frenzy.

“Even though a killer like Aileen feels relatively sympathetic, she was demonised and sentenced to death,” the singer continues. “That’s why the movie about her life is called Monster. I don’t feel like she was a monster. She was just worn down and eventually lashed out.”

SKYND might never be able to stop an individual slipping into that kind of bloody spiral, but in the same way that the vocalist and Father have found release through their art, they’re already helping countless fans around the world to find theirs. On one level, it’s about offering people with a similar fascination in macabre true-life tales an in-the-flesh community in which to participate, away from endless nights spent binging Netflix documentaries and surfing the darkest corners of the web. On another, it’s about pro-actively helping those who’re struggling. One day, that might go as far as having professional counsellors ready to talk with fans who need help at gigs. For now, it’s about emphasising how good it can feel to wear your weirdo tendencies loud and proud.

“I’ve never been a fan of just being miserable,” the singer concludes. “Why be miserable about these subjects that we really need to talk about? Before I met Father, people would always say to me the things I could and couldn’t do. Like, ‘You cant have green hair and go around singing about Richard Ramirez!’ Maybe they can’t, but I can. Sometimes it seems like the goth and metal scenes are painted only in black and white. I’m here to add a little colour.”

Help people. Do Good. Keep digging into history’s most inhuman moments to better understand what it is to be human. As mission statements go, maybe SKYND’s isn’t so macabre, after all.

“Exactly,” a warm smile leaks out from beneath SKYND’s unsettling onstage visage. “This music was always about helping people be better. If that’s something I can do, it’s all I want to…”

SKYND’s latest single Bianca Devins is out now

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