In a strange way, this feels like a second debut, we have the same excitement and nervousness around releasing it, like it’s the first step of the band's career. Our youthful inspirations have taken the forefront on this record. We find the scene that we’re associated with overcrowded, diluted, and for the most part uninspiring. This isn’t an admission of some cocky attitude towards our ‘superior’ music, more so that we’ve been drawing inspiration from an array of misfit artists far from where you would usually pigeonhole While She Sleeps rather than the typical metalcore movement that surrounds heavy music. Each member has brought in a different perspective of inspiration so far apart in genre that it has left us with a very odd and satisfying sonic. To name a few, Kendrick Lamar, Aphex Twin, Prodigy, Fat Boy Slim, Limp Bizkit, Radiohead, Gorillaz, Bicep, Rammstein, AFI, Janes Addiction, Placebo, Deafheaven, Alice In Chains. That old-school buzz of the Brit-pop scene in the 90s has somehow made its way back home into our melodies and the whole swagger of the album. We were all brought up in mining villages and considered common lower-class folk. As kids, we all grew up on the ‘sounds of England’, the sound of nothing to lose and everything to gain. On past Sleeps records the weight of the writing process rested with only a few members. Self Hell is a reimagined version of the band where the combination of all of our childhood inspirations has resurfaced and animated this whole album. We have found an incredibly powerful and creative way to make everyone’s essence and vision find a path in each song. This has turned the music into a free-spirited collage of each member's desires and ideas thus creating a real-life musical fusion that has kept this entire process alive from start to finish. The name of the album is the foundation of how we view ourselves and the world. Everyone has a subjective experience like no other. Yet the constant that binds us is the differences between us and the fact that we are all suffering in our own way. Don’t be too quick to judge and demonize, your time will come for redemption or damnation. We are all on the path of Self Hell which will lead us to either our liberation or our own demise. As friends and humans, we keep our mortality close to our chest in this band. This allows our carefree attitude to continue to grow. We aren’t here forever and While She Sleeps will continue to keep the world guessing on what we will do next. Not only for the fans but this is a spiritual venture that we must keep alive, moving, and constantly in flux. We do this by scaring ourselves with things we are not supposed to do. Every. Single. Day.
