Sleeping With Sirens are back with their first new music in four years, and their first release on Rise Records in 13 years.
Titled ‘An Ending In Itself’, it’s a song that finds the band pulling from their roots without simply bathing in what has already passed. A complexly built, atmospherically dense and wonderfully catchy piece of post-hardcore brutality and beauty, with Kellin Quinn dealing out as many caramel-coated melodies as throat-shredding howls, it is as quintessentially Sleeping With Sirens as it gets.
To find out a little bit more about where the song stemmed from and what it represents for the band, Rock Sound had a quick catch-up with Kellin.
Rock Sound: Where did this new song stem from for you? What does it represent in terms of how Sleeping With Sirens functions these days?
Kellin: It’s funny, because the song is called ‘An Ending In Itself’, but it’s actually the first song we wrote together as a band with Will Yip. I think the biggest thing for us was returning to our origins. Getting together in a room, playing together as a band and bouncing off each other. In the past, it was more of Jack [Fowler, former guitarist] and me doing everything in the studio with a producer. That’s kind of how a lot of bands operate now. For me, I knew that I didn’t want to do that again; I wanted to get back together and have everybody contribute and work organically as a band.
Everything feels like a return to form and a reminder of why we do this in the first place. You get to a point, as any artist or band, where you have to think back to why you started it. It can become very confusing to understand who you are. That’s especially the case with the resurgence of this genre of music and with everybody who is now discovering it for the first time, or who remembers what it was like to be a fan of this music. I think the best thing for us to do is to go back to where we started, and this song is the leading track towards doing that.
RS: What would you say were some elements within that thought process that uncovered themselves whilst you were writing it? What does stepping back into those old shoes, but from wearing them in the way that you function now, show you?
Kellin: To me, it felt a lot like being back in the days of ‘Let’s Cheers To This’. I don’t know what it was about us at that time, but we put out our first record, ‘With Ears To See And Eyes To Hear’, and I feel like we were dismissed as this certain sort of band. Told we were a poor man’s this or that. Going into ‘Let’s Cheers To This’, we had much more of a carefree attitude. We’re being dismissed anyway, so let’s make music that makes sense to us. We then threw the kitchen sink at that. I think a lot of it came from being unprepared going into it. We had three or four songs going in, and then the rest were just written on the spot
This song returns to that same carefree mindset. Let’s focus on what we want to make, and it should be something that makes sense to us, regardless of what everybody else is doing. I think in a lot of ways, this song and the attitude of the band are who we want to be right now.
RS: Lyrically, it’s a song that talks a lot about struggle, and serves as a song for anybody who is going through any struggle right now. What was it within your own life at the moment that made you focus on that word and experience? What was it that made you feel like it was the right time to write a song to let people know that they can overcome whatever is in front of them?
Kellin: The perspective that I’m starting to realise is that the determining factor of how you see life is realising that it doesn’t always get easier. It actually gets harder as you get older. To understand that, in whatever moment you’re in, you can break everything down, take it one day at a time, and focus on what you can do today is one of the most important things you can do. If you think about it in that way, then it makes it a lot easier to overcome challenges and struggles that you’re going through. But if you’re making this some larger-than-life thing, it can weigh you down and feel like a burden all the time.
Trying to think in terms of what I can do today, how I can approach it, and how I can change my thoughts and be a better example has been my mentality as of late.
RS: The first hurdle is being able actually to tell yourself that. Question your own way of viewing yourself. People will look to you for that guidance, but if you’re not practising what you preach, then how can you hope to help anyone else?
Kellin: I mean, it’s not always easy. I definitely have days when I say, ‘Screw this, I’m going back to bed’. It’s just the act of trying, I guess. That’s all you can really do. I think now more than ever, we build on each other as humans through the way we connect and interact. If we can be vulnerable and honest, then I think that we can change a lot more things. I think that’s the hardest thing about navigating life nowadays, like we have to put our best foot forward all the time. If we can do away with that and just be honest about what we are going through, it makes it easier for other people to say, ‘Okay, I can do that too’.
So, now you know.
Now it’s time to listen.
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