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Bad Omens: “Every artist has such a different process and journey. There’s no template – there’s no roadmap to this sh*t”
Bad Omens’ Noah Sebastian is in a contemplative mood. Meeting the frontman for an exclusive dissection of their hard-fought ascension to the top of the alternative mountain, the often enigmatic band leader dives into his creative process, the importance of finding balance, and takes us tantalisingly closer to album number four (sort of)…
- Words:
- James Hickie
- Photos:
- Bryan Kirks
“How am I currently?” Noah Sebastian asks, repeating Kerrang!’s question. “Comically bad…”
Bad Omens’ frontman and his bandmates – guitarist Joakim ‘Jolly’ Karlsson, bassist Nicholas Ruffilo and drummer Nick Folio – are currently experiencing the repercussions of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Exceeding the 40-day mark at the time of this interview, the stoppage is the result of Congress being unable to agree a new funding deal, leaving government workers without pay and millions of Americans left without essential services, including health programs, social security benefits and air travel.
It’s the latter that’s causing headaches in the Bad Omens camp right now. While air traffic controllers and TSA employers are continuing to do their jobs by virtue of being designated ‘essential workers’, they’re doing so without payment, with increased pressure meaning more sick leave, leading to flight delays and cancellations. As a result, the Virginia metallers have spent the past 48 hours endeavouring to fly out of the States to London – though they haven’t so much as set foot on an aeroplane during this time.
Unsurprisingly, waiting around isn’t what Noah wants to be doing right now. As a self-confessed “workaholic and perfectionist” he considers it to be dead time. Ordinarily in a situation like this, when there are no musical responsibilities to take care of and a need for some decompression, Noah would be firing up Fortnite with Davis Rider, the band’s frequent collaborator. While some rock stars splurge their money making extravagant purchases, like houses or cars or watches, Noah likes to spend his earnings on V-Bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency, allowing him to jazz up his character’s attire, with the frontman currently setting his sights on some Scooby-Doo themed Air Force 1s.
It’s Noah’s desire to augment, to be brighter and better, that has seen Bad Omens – in the wake of Sleep Token and Bring Me The Horizon’s pioneering successes – become the frontrunners of the crop of metalcore and metalcore-adjacent bands to break big in recent years, which is even more of a compliment considering that list includes the likes of Spiritbox, Dayseeker, I Prevail and Ice Nine Kills. So in the absence of any other distractions right now, save for boring, airport-based procrastination, Noah welcomes the opportunity to reflect upon a seismic 12 months for his band, and how it’s teeing things up for an era-defining 2026.
The last time Bad Omens visited these shores in January 2024, it was as the main support to the aforementioned Bring Me The Horizon on a bill also featuring Cassyette and Static Dress. Anyone who was there can attest to the fact that engagements in similarly-sized rooms under their own banner beckoned – their production ever-so-slightly squeezed for space by the vastness of the headliners’ set-up, though their power and stagecraft was undiminished.
It has, however, been a relatively quiet year for Bad Omens on the live front, having made some sporadic – but never less than stunning – performances.
“It feels like a blip,” Noah reveals of his 2025. “Like life was on fast-forward.”
For that reason, his band’s appearance at Louder Than Life is chief among his highlights.
“It was one of the few times I felt truly present amidst the pace of everything we always seem to have going on,” says Noah of appearing at Louisville, Kentucky’s annual rock and metal pilgrimage, and what it taught him. “I’ve since been trying a new approach to how I mentally and physically take on performing.”
These lessons will serve Noah and his bandmates well once they get to London, where they’ll begin extensive rehearsals for what will be their biggest UK and European headline tour to date.
With expectation mounting, ‘balance’ has been the singer’s operative word of late, in order to maintain his wellbeing, as a healthy mind leads to a healthy body (of work).
“I’m discovering the importance of that balance and how it actually helps – especially creatively,” he explains. “Making more time for the little things I enjoy at least helps recharge the mental energy required to do all that we do.”
This year has also served as a period of transition for Bad Omens, with the release in quick succession of new music in August, September, October and November – Specter, Impose, Dying To Love and Left For Good, respectively. Four songs markedly different from one another, they were all born from a headspace Noah describes as “reflective”, “sincere” and “genuine”, thereby setting in motion the next six to 12 months for the band.
“I’m champing at the bit,” he says of his readiness for more. “I’m just hoping to find the time to make more progress on whatever becomes the next chapter for this band, and what it looks like as a full body of work.”
Yes, you read that right – Noah still isn’t sure quite what form the follow-up to 2022’s THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND will take (they released another album, of course, in last year’s Concrete Jungle [The OST], but that was a soundtrack to their Bad Omens: Concrete Jungle Vol. 1 graphic novel).
In an interview this past summer, the frontman hinted at the possibilities of the record’s burgeoning scale. It might be one very long album, or possibly more than one. Has he at least gotten clarification on that yet?
“To be honest, I’m only a little bit closer,” he admits now. “There’s a lot of large moving parts and ideas being worked through, but there are still plenty of other things that have to get done for the record in the meantime.”
Speaking to Kerrang! this past July, Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden was asked about the conversations he’s had with other artists that have influenced him creatively. Noah Sebastian’s name soon came up.
“[He’s] got a vision and he’s gonna make it his,” Joel said admiringly of Bad Omens’ frontman. “He’s going to make the record, however long it takes. And it’s not dramatic – it’s, ‘This is what I’m doing.’ He’s working his ass off to create and bring a vision to life.”
“I’ll work as long as the task requires to get the result I’m after, no matter what it costs,” is how Noah describes his unhurried approach; and when he says cost, he doesn’t just mean financially – there’s the personal toll that fastidiousness can take. “That’s something that’s been catching up to me, and I’m actively working on it so I can avoid the fatigue and loss of joy I’ve started to feel in the things I used to love.”
It’s quite the admission from a man on the cusp of even greater accomplishments, and one that suggests, career-wise, he’s more comfortable with the journey than the destination he’s arriving at.
“It’s crazy to look back and think about how much of our young lives we spent driving or sleeping in a van in a Walmart parking lot, or waking up to the sun in our eyes at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. And how, at the same time, we didn’t really mind it at all. It’s weird to think that I’m that same person, but at the time it just felt like what needed to be done – and totally normal, even though most people don’t really live that way by choice.”
Those who do choose this way of life – or rather this way of life chooses them – should understand that creating a legacy to be proud of can’t and shouldn’t come easily. Back in January 2023, Noah told us that hard graft and patience should remain virtues, as there shouldn’t be any shortcuts to success.
“You have to realise that if something hasn’t happened for you yet, then maybe you don’t deserve it,” he explained. “I think that’s something lost on people growing up in an age of instant gratification.”
Indeed, Noah isn’t shy of working for something to pay off in the long run. By the same token, he’s also turned his back on social media and mindless short-form content, instead getting his dopamine fix from a lifelong passion of movies. This includes being behind the camera, having shot and directed the band’s atmospheric, artful most recent videos in Slovenia, which helped him to explore and challenge his passions outside of music.
“These days, the visual and storytelling components get me way more excited than anything,” he reveals. “I love writing treatments and scripts, and being on set shooting. While I’m much less in the driver’s seat on the technical side of all that than I am with the music, I really love watching even the simplest idea come alive in a big way on screen – the marriage of all the components, equally important, coming together to create a satisfying image that evokes emotion and complements the feeling of the music in just the right way.”
Not wanting his love of the moving image to feel entirely like work, though, he will also find the time to kick back and just watch a good film. One of his recent favourites is 2023’s excellent Past Lives, directed by Celine Song. Far from the kind of entertainment you might expect to fire the creative cylinders of a man responsible for such heavy, dynamic music, it’s an intimate, romantic drama, telling the story of childhood sweethearts taken on different paths, then reunited after decades apart, causing them to reflect on what might have been if circumstances hadn’t separated them.
This tale of fate and longing had a profound effect on Noah, who returned home with the express aim of writing his own score for it.
“I just wanted to make some instrumental music that gave me the same emotional reaction the movie did,” he explains of what would ultimately become Impose, one of the four Bad Omens singles released in 2025. “What I created with the production really conjured the vocal melody and lyrics out of nowhere.”
That’s Noah’s dream scenario for creating art. While this is the man who once admitted that THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND’s title-track came from challenging himself to make a song using household items, traditionally Noah doesn’t like things to be too premeditated.
“As artsy as it sounds, I’ve found – through extensive trial and error – that all of my favourite works are ones I’ve just happened upon,” he shares. “I’ve never once sat down and said, ‘Today I’m going to write a Bad Omens song,’ and made something I liked as much as the accidents that fall into my lap.”
Impose, and its unexpected cinematic inspiration, is therefore a prime example.
“That’s a song that could say a lot even without the lyrics. It’s a good example of not really sitting down to write a song for Bad Omens, but instead just letting my feelings take over, and finding something really beautiful and honest along the way.”
While the moment of genesis is truly a miraculous thing, the weeks and months that go into wrangling one’s own creation into its final form can be more of a mixed bag.
“There are days when it’s the best place in the world,” he enthuses, initially at least, “when you feel like the first caveman to discover fire – making something magical with your own hands that didn’t exist before this moment, seemingly out of thin air.”
On the other hand…
“Then there are days where it feels like watching grass grow,” he laments, “when you spend 10 hours just fumbling around in the dark, and at the end of those 10 hours you still haven’t found what it is you’re looking for – and all you can do is hope that maybe you will tomorrow. Then you mourn the loss of your entire day. Most days are the latter.”
Noah did, however, have a great time in the studio at the end of October, when he joined Bilmuri (real name Johnny Franck), A Day To Remember’s Jeremy McKinnon, Wage War’s Cody Quistad, and producer/engineer Will Carlson for a creative session immortalised in a picture shared on social media. While it was for work on Bilmuri’s forthcoming album, it’s not clear in what capacity Noah was there, and he keeps it that way today.
“It was super-fun,” he recalls. “And it was the craziest coincidence that we all found ourselves in the same place at the same time, with just enough availability to spend the day together creatively. That’s insanely rare, given how busy we all are. But it was a great time, and I really love all those guys.”
Noah’s similarly tight-lipped about the possibility of these, or other, pals collaborating on the next Bad Omens record, though what he does say provides rather mixed messages. “As far as collaborators on the new music, we’ve still kept it predominantly in the family. That said, we’ve also done a few songs and sessions with some new people we hadn’t worked with before – who I really love and am excited about.”
When he’s asked about success Noah replies, with a tint of humour, that it’s “such a deep question”. It’s a word that’s bandied around so much, and something that, whatever your definition, Bad Omens have attained on various levels. But has it sated Noah? To know that, we need to understand what success actually looks like to him.
“I’m still not entirely sure,” he offers. “I know it sounds nihilistic, but I just know none of it really matters when the show is over. I can vividly recall having the same level of happiness – if not more – before the band ‘blew up’.”
With so many peers, presumably this is something they’re able to discuss, as who else could truly understand a situation like this? Oli Sykes, for instance, who Noah duetted with on Antivist during their tour together last year, has a similarly hands-on approach to every element of Bring Me The Horizon’s enterprise – from music to multimedia to merchandise.
Has Noah learned anything from Oli or other artists operating in similarly rarified air? Just as there are no shortcuts, according to Noah, there are no blueprints for this either.
“Honestly, every artist has such a different process and journey, and I think that’s what makes them all special and unique in their own way. There’s no template – there’s no roadmap to this shit. If there was, everyone would be doing it at this level. I’ve tried seeking advice from other artists in a similar position, and while it has been nice, it’s never served me better than my own intuition. You really have to find your own way and just surround yourself with good, trustworthy, hardworking people you actually enjoy being around.”
One lesson Noah never forgets, though, and describes as “a tale as old as time” is the misapprehension that being the biggest or the best or the most successful will paper over the cracks in a person – that pain may inform one’s art, but the success it might garner doesn’t truly reciprocate.
“Selling out arenas and headlining festivals won’t fix it,” Noah says firmly. “No accolade or level of prestige will fix it – and that’s why, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.”
Unsurprisingly, then, given Noah’s combination of realism, pragmatism and a desire to do things well instead of quickly, he’s not someone who obsesses about the future.
So, while next year marks a decade since the release of Bad Omens’ 2016 self-titled debut album, a landmark that might give other musicians cause to consider their hopes and dreams for the next 10 years, Noah isn’t one of them.
“I can’t think that far ahead – and honestly, I don’t like to. Nothing has ever gone exactly how it was planned. Life is too unpredictable, and that terrifies me. I just know I want to keep making cool stuff and try my best to have more fun doing it. From there, we’ll follow whatever road that way of thinking puts us on.”
It’s this philosophy, distilled into Noah’s parting words, that might be cause for some heartbreak for those expecting the next Bad Omens record to definitely make an appearance next year.
What three words have summed up your 2025?
“No new album,” says Noah.
And what three words describe what’s to come in 2026?
“Still no album.”
And with that hanging in the air, Noah heads off to find out when, if ever, he’s getting on this bloody plane.
This interview originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of Kerrang!.
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