As Witch Fever announce FEVEREATEN – the follow-up to 2022’s breath-taking debut Congregation – Amy Walpole unpacks the clash of fiction and reality in album number two, how the band are forever drawn to creating angry music, and why the Bible’s Eve is actually kinda “hot”…
Amy Walpole is buzzing right now. Painful memories have been confronted. Incredible riffs have been summoned. Bold new musical ideas have been explored. Now? Witch Fever’s vocalist just wants you to hear the fruits of their labour.
“The album sounds immense,” she grins as she begins unpacking details about their highly-anticipated, compellingly-titled second record, FEVEREATEN. “It’s not the same old Witch Fever. We’ve had so much fun writing and recording this, and we’re just really excited for it to actually be out in the world.”
She isn’t the only one counting down the days to FEVEREATEN’s release on the none-more-appropriate date of October 31. After all, the Mancunian doom-punks – completed by Alex Thompson (bass), Alisha Yarwood (guitar), and Annabelle Joyce (drums) – made quite the impact with their searing debut Congregation back in 2022. Stockpiled with brilliant riffs, and freighted with some incredibly powerful lyrics documenting Amy’s religious upbringing, it not only scored a perfect 5/5 from Kerrang!, it also changed their lives. Well, kinda.
“We played a stadium with My Chemical Romance and the next day I was back in work cleaning up a flood in a kitchen,” Amy quips at one point about the psychological and professional whiplash that has occasionally accompanied their rapid ascent. “It’s very grounding. It feels like we have completely separate lives sometimes.”
You suspect, however, that FEVEREATEN could change that. Very much a record primed to take them up a level or 10, it has already sent shockwaves with the fantastic lead single DEAD TO ME!. But this, it turns out, is only part of what they have in store this time.
“DEAD TO ME! was bridging a gap between our old album and the new album, but there’s stuff on FEVEREATEN that’s a little more experimental, a little less typical ‘riffy’,” Amy explains.
For proof, look no further than Witch Fever’s excellent new single THE GARDEN. Released today, it’s a spellbinding gothic ballad showcasing a whole new side to the band. Here, Amy tells us more about what to expect from their next chapter, including reappraisals of biblical figures, possible hauntings and the power of confronting a traumatic past head-on…
Amy, you have at your disposal a whole dictionary of existing words you could have named your new album after, but instead you’ve coined your own. What does the word FEVEREATEN mean to you?
“It has lots of different layers, but it’s a feeling of being consumed by something, and not being able to move past it or look past it. I like it because it can relate to mental health and it can relate to trauma, but [for me] it also relates to another idea. I grew up being told that God was all around me, constantly watching me for sin. So it plays on the idea that, for a lot of my life, I felt like I was being watched or haunted by something. I had never known whether it was my trauma, God, or something even more supernatural than God. I did a Master’s degree in English literature, but I specialised in horror and gothic fiction and I always felt like I could relate to characters like in, say, [Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s] The Yellow Wallpaper – women that had been diagnosed with hysteria, which was actually just a blanket umbrella term for any woman experiencing anything that a man didn’t like. I had an affinity with those women in films and books that were possessed and were ‘hysterical’. I just find it so fascinating. FEVEREATEN treads the line between my reality and fiction, as well. There are themes of hauntings, ghosts and stuff like that. There’s even a lyric about furniture in my house moving around…”
Not to go all Unsolved Mysteries or anything but, to clarify, have you ever actually seen a ghost?
“I’ve had weirdly ghostly experiences, but I’m one of those people where it’s like, ‘It might be true, it might not be true.’ I’m not like, ‘Ghosts are real!’ but I’ve definitely had odd experiences.”
Your debut was incredibly candid in dealing with painful parts of your past. What do you think the Amy that created Congregation would make of these new lyrics on FEVEREATEN?
“I’m still the same person, but between then and now I’ve been diagnosed with autism, so I understand myself way more. I like myself way more, too – I know when I need support and I know why I need support, instead of not understanding why I’m struggling in a situation where everyone around me seems to not be struggling at all. I feel like I’ve grown up more, I’m more secure and less confused about myself. But also, a lot of Congregation was obviously about dealing with my experiences growing up as part of a church. In terms of writing lyrics [on Witch Fever’s debut], it was the first time I was really working through all that stuff, and I was like, ‘Fuck, I can’t stop writing about this – something in me is pushing me to keep writing.’ It felt very on top of me and very immediate, but now it feels a little bit further away. I’m still writing about it, but I’ve gone through a few years of growth and dealing with trauma. It’s quite a dark album, but I feel lighter. I just needed to write this second album.”
What healing had to be done in order to get to that point?
“I’ve done a lot of work on myself, so that always helps, but a big part of it is just getting older and being further away from that time. And, really, understanding that some of the things that happened weren’t my fault – that is quite a big thing to realise if you’ve been a kid and you felt like things that have happened to you have been your fault. But then, having said that, the first line of the song FEVEREATEN is, ‘I thought I’d gotten over it.’ I’m not interested in forgiveness for certain things. That might change, but at the moment no part of this album is about forgiveness. Men in power get away with abusing their power all the fucking time, every single day, and they get forgiven too easily. I’m not talking about by their victim; I’m talking about by the public. I understand a victim’s need for forgiveness sometimes to move past the trauma they’ve endured. I also understand that forgiveness and second chances are important. But when you’ve got famous men, or men in powerful positions within churches whose job it is to protect you doing atrocious things, or being complicit with harm, and still being able to have a career it is sickening. So yeah, I’m not trying to forgive the people in the church that failed me and my family, I’m staying angry.”
As you’re a horror aficionado, it’s often observed that, beneath the obvious scares inflicted by the, say, ghost/killer/monster, works in that genre typically speak to the underlying social traumas of the day. Looking at your music that way, what tensions do you think Witch Fever’s new songs mirror?
“Just anger at the fact that there are so many marginalised communities that are suffering. It makes me and the rest of my band so furious that people can’t live in peace, basically, and be who they want to be. Obviously, the album was written before this year, but even then it feels like history repeats itself all the time. The government demonising trans people at the moment, that’s so fucked up. Everything going on in Palestine is so atrocious to witness so viscerally, and it feels like there’s nothing that you can really do aside from boycotts and donating money. I guess that’s why we’ve always been drawn to writing such angry music, because it’s really infuriating existing in a world where right wing politics are taking over.”
As well as rage, what’s so interesting this time is that your new single THE GARDEN showcases a very different side – what was the vision for that song?
“THE GARDEN is a little more of a ballad, a little more radio-friendly. It’s showing our softer side, because the album has both of it. We wanted a song that was a little bit softer, that would maybe prick the ears of people that wouldn’t necessarily choose to listen to us because we’re too heavy. I really love that song. Actually, it very nearly didn’t make the album, but we changed our mind. When we were first writing it, we were just playing it in the practice room, and I came up with the basic melody, Alisha did the basic chord progression and we played it a few times around and I was like, ‘Does this sound like a Christian rock song?’”
We can answer that: it doesn’t…
“The chord progression does something that makes you feel uplifted, which is something that is very ‘Christian rock’ – that’s the way they write it, they’re trying to make you feel like God’s in the room. So, I was like, ‘Is it too churchy? Oh, God, yeah, maybe it is, maybe we won’t put it on the album.’ But we played it to Chris [W. Ryan, FEVEREATEN’s producer], who loved it and said, ‘Let’s just do it, and if you don’t like it, we won’t put it on the album.’ We did it, and then I finished the lyrics and I love them. The song is about Eve in the Bible, and about how the church always told us that Eve was this sinful woman that caused the downfall of all humans. But I always kind of thought she was hot (laughs).”
You know what? That’s not what we expected you to say after talking about “the downfall of all humans”…
“I’m like, ‘You eat that fucking apple!’ I just had this idea of her not being demonised anymore, maybe it’s a little bit of a queer [thing]. It’s a love story to Eve – it’s me being like, ‘I’m so sorry that for all those years I thought you were bad.’ Because, actually, I don’t. In a weird fucking way, she and other stories of women that were outside the norm and did things that they weren’t meant to do by patriarchal standards, they’re the kind of women that have inspired me.”
FEVEREATEN is due out October 31 via Music For Nations / Sony. Catch Witch Fever at Outbreak and 2000trees this summer, and supporting Volbeat later on in the year – get your tickets now.
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