“I don’t want to carry this horrible sh*t in my in my head anymore”: Inside Caskets’ stunningly honest new album

On the morning of November 7, Matt Flood was woken up by his fiancée blasting his own band’s new album at him. “Turn it off!” he shouted back. “Give me 10 more minutes in bed!” Sure, nobody likes being loudly woken up before they’re ready to throw back the covers, but Matt at least got a humorous start to a day he had been petrified about for months.

“I was really anxious for people to hear it,” he admits of the record, The Only Heaven You’ll Know. He’s dialling in with K! a week after the album’s release on a sunny morning in Florida a couple of days ahead of Caskets’ show at the Orlando comeback edition of Warped Tour. “I think it’s our best work so far. But for me personally, a lot of pain [went into it].”

Nowadays, Matt is in the best headspace of his life. Years of growth, reflection and better fortune separate him from the young man he used to be, who lacked both direction and a stable home, and who was addicted to drugs.

After joining Caskets as his last roll of the dice in the music world, he’s found greater success than he ever imagined. He’s found the woman he wants to marry. As he readied himself for the next stage of his life, there was one more significant source of trauma buried in the back of his mind that he needed to excavate, one he had never really spoken much about even to his bandmates: his “car crash” relationship with faith.

“I don’t want to keep carrying all this fucking horrible shit in my in my head anymore,” he says. “It was pretty scary to bring it all back to the to the forefront of my mind and then bring it to the boys in the band, and then sing [about it] in the studio. That’s really been one of the main reasons why I was anxious releasing this album, because I was worried about what people would think.

“[Since then] it’s become easier for me to talk about it, because I’ve had some really good conversations about it. People want to listen to music that’s relatable, and they can take something away from it, something to help them or help someone that they know. I think that’s one of the main drives [for me] to start talking and writing about this now.”

When he was young, before he had any deep understanding of religion, Matt was a Jehovah’s Witness. He grew up thinking of the Bible as a tool that could help guide him whenever he ran into difficulty. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was encountering struggles as profound as becoming homeless, as he did when he was just 15 years old. Did a benevolent, all-powerful God sign off on this? And what good was a book of holy teachings when he didn’t know where he was going to sleep?

“I was looking at it as a tool to find some peace within myself and try and see where I belonged in this world, where I fit in, and try and see if it could guide me to a more stable, safer environment,” Matt explains. “But instead of doing that, I just ended up having this war in my head, ‘Well, if it is real, why did this happen to me in the first place?’ It took me a long time to believe that the Bible wasn’t something I should use as a tool for my own self-gratification – it’s up to me to do that for myself.”

It was a lonely struggle. Religious trauma is discussed openly perhaps more so now than ever, and for artists like Witch Fever, Waterparks and to an extent, PRESIDENT, alternative music has become a vessel for the emotions of what is often a rather complex experience. Still, it’s not always been that way.

“I was doing drugs, and I smoked a lot of weed, and the people that I hung around with, you couldn’t sit down and have a conversation like that with them,” admits Matt. “I didn’t realise it then, but I did just need someone to talk to, even to find some clarity in what it was that was fucking my own head up.”

Matt knew he was going to deal with it the only way he had ever known – through writing.

“My therapy is writing songs. I don’t speak to a therapist. I can’t do that. I’m not knocking therapists or anything like that, but I don’t want to sit down and tell some stranger all of my deepest, darkest fears.”

Vowing to be bluntly, unfalteringly honest, the words he put to paper were alarming even to his bandmates.

“We’d go through the lyrics, and they’d be like, ‘This is a little bit too on point.’ Some lines were too graphic, too intense. They’d bring me back down to earth a little bit. But it was a weight off my shoulder, once I’d gone to the boys and spoke about the meanings of a lot of these songs, knowing that I had their support and that they were fine with me singing about this type of stuff.”

The next challenge is to bring The Only Heaven You’ll Know on the road, as Caskets are doing in December. How difficult it might be to deliver those songs live is currently an unknown.

“The emotion takes me a lot of the time when I’m onstage,” says Matt. “I kind of just get lost in the moment. A lot of those emotions will come up when I’m onstage, but I kind of push it outwards into the crowd. I am pretty scared to do a few of these songs, but I have a duty to sing it the best I can perform.

“It doesn’t really matter what I’m going through in that moment, or how hard it is for me – it’s all for the people that have come to watch us play.”

The Only Heaven You’ll Know is out now via SharpTone. Caskets tour the UK from December 12.

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