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Employed To Serve: “There’s nothing more powerful than heavy metal”
After years at the heavy metal coalface, grinding to make their dreams a reality, Employed To Serve stand on the precipice of a bold new era. In a world-exclusive interview, Justine Jones and Sammy Urwin take us inside new album Fallen Star, working with some famous friends and how they're taking everything to the next level...
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Tom Pullen
Employed To Serve are survivors. “From day one, the mentality was: tenacity over everything else,” says Sammy Urwin. “Whatever happens, we’ve worked out a way to just power through it and not let it drag us down, or stop us enjoying doing this.”
Perched in Hackney’s Cock Tavern – a stone’s throw from Cable Street, where in 1936 Oswald Moseley’s British Union Of Fascists were sent packing by an opposing collective of anti-fascists, trade unionists, Jewish groups and others who didn’t want the nastiness they were selling – the guitarist is getting into the band’s new song, Atonement. A scalding piece of metal, even by the Woking wrecking crew’s standards, and featuring a guest turn from Lorna Shore singer Will Ramos, it’s a furious pushback against those who would rather slash your tyres than see you manage just fine without them.
“It can be interpreted in many ways,” says Sammy, carefully. “Imagine you're trying to leave a relationship. That person is saying to you, ‘If you don't want to be with me or have me in your life, then I'd rather see you go down the flames and be destroyed. It's about severing a very toxic relationship, and people revealing their true colours. Rather than seeing you succeed, they’d rather see you go down.”
“They’d rather see you burn,” adds singer Justine Jones, sat across the table.
“This is basically a fuck you to them. To say, our revenge is still being here and still pushing forward,” nods Sammy. “Make of that what you want.”
Who or whatever its subject is (they won't tell), this first throw from Employed To Serve’s brilliant upcoming fifth album, Fallen Star, is also a marker of the band’s current sunny position. It was actually recorded at the start of last year, not long after they finished their massive arena run supporting French metal titans Gojira. More recently, in November they were invited to celebrate 2021’s 5/5-rated Conquering album with a special set at Manchester’s Damnation Festival. Three days after our pub visit, they announced a handful of shows to mark the release of the album, including their biggest headline gig to date at London’s O2 Academy Islington.
It marks a new era for Employed To Serve: bigger, bolder, harder. Justine recalls an early tour with Funeral For A Friend where “I’d never even played on a stage before, I was used to just being on the floor, I was scared of being up there,” but now they’ve developed a taste for pyro.
For the new album aesthetic, the star of the artwork represents a callback to the cover of 2017’s The Warmth Of A Dying Sun breakthrough – a record that eventually took the silverware of Kerrang!’s Album Of The Year. The look of the band, meanwhile, speaks to the confidence of the now, with the boys – Sammy, fellow guitarist David Porter, man-mountain bassist Nathan Pryor and drummer Casey McHale – decked out in familiar uniform black, while the singer sits proudly above, power-dressed in elegant, flowing dresses and eveningwear.
“I loved the idea of a sun goddess, which fits with the title,” Justinne says. “I love fantasy novels and that ethereal look, so I wanted to do that. I’ve dressed the same since I was 14, so I wanted to switch it up a bit and do something more conceptual that says something about how I feel about the band and where we are.
“It’s also about personally having confidence to dress how I want in metal. When we first started, women would get a hard time. They still do, but I feel because there's been more female band members and things like that, it's a bit more welcoming to dress differently, and you don't have to just wear big, baggy T-shirts. You can wear nice dresses and still be metal.”
“Plus,” she grins, “I’ve realised that you can just order stuff on the credit card and return it after a shoot.”
Listening to Fallen Star, this confidence is writ large. Where there is anger, there is also defiance. Where there is screaming, the catharsis is balanced by exhilaration, joy. Every acid lyric or moment of boiling aggression is something being cast out, forged into something good and useful and strong.
“Like a lot of bands, we've had our fair share of challenges in recent years, and it's just the best way of us being able to deal with it without self-destructing,” says Sammy. “The band, for us, has always got to be fun and enjoyable. If we can feed any venom and hatred into those songs, then we can have a clear head to carry on and conduct ourselves in the way we want to, and complete our mission of complete world domination.”
They’re quite the pair, Sammy and Justine. He, a guitar nerd and wide-eyed metal maniac with a particular predilection for Ronnie James Dio and an expert knowledge of brutal German goregrind. She, an almost permanently-smiling nu-metaller with a daft sense of humour who once, with stunning accuracy, described herself to K! as someone who “used to be a mosher kid, now I’m a mosher adult.” Both are among the sweetest people you will ever meet. They’re also some of the most overwhelmingly positive.
They’re also lifers. Outside the band, they run Church Road Records together. They've also just launched a new PR company called Since Always, aimed at championing underground acts. There really isn’t much they do that isn’t connected to music in some way.
Now five years married, the two met as teenagers, drawn together partly by a shared love of metal and rock. In 2011, they started Employed To Serve, back then a much gnarlier and more unwieldy beast in which “there were basically no repeated riffs.” Today, they’re the only two constants, having seen an almost Spinal Tap-like number of bandmates come and go.
When Sammy talks of tenacity, you can look at this – and having to completely rebuild things a few years ago after old members’ lives meant being in a band as ambitious as this forced a choice between one or the other – as illustration. The two of them joke that this is down to being “tyrants” (they’re not), but it’s also down to an almost single-minded love for what they do that such hassles didn’t throw the entire enterprise off the road.
Indeed, Fallen Star is the first ETS album to feature all the same players twice on the bounce – testament to a never say die attitude eventually finding what feels like something permanent and solid.
“It’s really exciting to have band members now that have been in the band for quite a while, and having that nice, solid foundation as a band, where we get where each other's coming from musically,” says Justine.
“We were really lucky during the pandemic that we had that time to get to know each other really well,” adds Sammy. “We've had a lot of people come and go through ETS over the years, usually because they get to the crossroads of life and want to do something else. In early 2020, we were just jumping in with a load of new members and getting in the van and cracking on with it. So when everything stopped, it gave us time to really get to know one another.
“I feel like at one point when we had quite a rapid change of members, it felt like we were kind of losing that identity within ourselves. Obviously me and Justine are at the forefront because we've been here all these years and stuff, but we do want it to feel like we're a solid unit. With David [Porter, guitar], Nathan [Pryor, bass] and Casey [McHale, drums], we had that time in lockdown to actually become really firm friends, first and foremost, and then come out of the pandemic and carry on.”
Not that Employed To Serve have ever sounded weak. Indeed, there are few bands who celebrate the excitement and carry-on of heavy music quite so exuberantly as they. But the identity of which Sammy speaks is one that’s come into sharper focus in recent times. Fallen Star continues this, marked by what Justine calls “going Scandi” with big, proud nods to the melodic heaviness of In Flames or Soilwork.
It’s also been shaped by where ETS have recently found themselves. The Gojira tour and the ever-larger festival stages they spent whole summers touring was a learning experience. In the first-day madness of their opening night with Joe DuPlantier and co., ETS found themselves with a whole 15 minutes in which to get their shit together and get going in front of 10,000 people. Which was a handy time to discover they were missing a bit of important kit. But they managed, and they triumphed, and they learned how to magic things from nothing and win the day.
They also found that while their setlist was as reliably banging as always, some songs truly blossomed in such a big setting. “We’ve got the ‘hey hey hey’ bits for massive stages now!” enthuses Justine.
“On Conquering, we had more extreme drumming, and solos, and a lot more clean singing. There's no better way of finding out if you can do that than playing at Ally Pally,” laughs Sammy. “Now that we've got that under our belt, it's made us more confident to explore more of that side of music. We've been more ambitious with Fallen Star. Like, ‘Okay, we're gonna open this door and see how us as musicians can push things.’”
This is how Will Ramos ended up on Atonement.
“It’s got elements of deathcore, brutal death metal, big, big, anthemic choruses, plus this huge melodious guitar solo with harmonies and stuff,” says Sammy. “We were like, ‘How can we make it even more experimental and wild?’”
“He’s a five-in-one vocalist,” says Justine. “He actually sounds like different people. His range is crazy!”
“He took it upon himself to sing that last chorus,” says Sammy of the final, unexpected clean part. “He wasn't asked to anything like that, and it made it even better, because now it's really doing what we want to do by kind of bringing all these different parts of the metal spectrum together.”
Elsewhere, there’s pop-ups from Killswitch Engage frontman Jesse Leach (on Whose Side Are You On?), and Svalbard’s Serena Cherry (Last Laugh). Again, it was about realising there was a perfect opening for them once a song revealed itself.
“With Serena, it was nice to have her on the track where she was doing the singing,” says Sammy. “That was a crucial part of the song. If it didn't have that Serena feature, I think that song would be nowhere near what it is. Otherwise it's just a powerhouse the whole way through.
“Jesse’s whole outlook on life and his lyrics, and his way of approaching the music he makes is very much in tune with how we approach making the music in ETS,” he continues. “He has a very positive outlook. He talks about a lot of very dark subject matters, while also very much focusing on how to push forwards and get through those dark times.”
One way Employed To Serve are furthering this in their new era is with their new slogan, Heavy Metal Unity. Justine literally waves the flag for it at the end of shows now. It is, they say, about celebrating heavy music, but also the purpose it serves.
“Metal’s a universal language,” says Sammy. “The world, most of the time, is very, very tricky place, with a lot of fucking bad shit going on and a lot of division. But metal gives people that bond.”
They always had this, of course. But where previously Sammy would arrive onstage with his middle fingers up to try and pump audiences up with a more tongue-in-cheek aggressive persona (to good effect, it must be said), now it’s less ambiguous. Some people would think he was actually mad at them, or annoyed about the show, rather than using it as a way of draining life’s frustrations. Or, as he puts it, “I can’t walk down the street, swearing at people and getting in their faces.”
“I feel like when ETS started, all of the aggression and stuff was being portrayed as: how can we make this as aggy and hard for the audience to get into as possible?” he says. “As we've grown as people, it's more like we want to welcome the audience and share this experience of feeling electric.”
“It was cool, but after a while I think it stopped working as well,” says Justine. “I think some people didn’t understand it. Especially in other countries. There were a few shows where people didn’t really get why we were swearing at them. They thought we were angry at them.”
The new idea is to quite literally stick a flag in their vibe. Sammy makes comparisons to classic metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden to articulate it. Being an old-school head, he also points to bands from the ‘70s and ‘80s when talking about the band’s long-standing uniform look onstage.
“It's all about projecting a larger than life persona,” he says. “It gets you into it, it makes you feel together. And it gives you that extra feeling that someone is there to do business. Look at Rob Halford – he’s not putting those clothes on to not be the Metal God.”
“Mentally that change gets you into it,” says Justine. “I always liked the fact that football teams are unified. Some bands have one member in, like, jazzy shorts, and it’s all mismatched. Heavy metal has got such a strong image, it's a shame not to explore it.”
All this only makes Employed To Serve stronger as an idea. In practice, it’s made them a wrecking ball. It’s why, every time they’ve had to swim upstream, it’s only made them more jacked. And why, for all the frustration and anger that can go into their music, and especially on Fallen Star, they’re a source of luminous joy and release. It’s the diamond that tenacity and an unwillingness to countenance giving up will eventually produce.
“We are very, very proud of what we do,” smiles Sammy. “This music is meant to make you feel larger than life. We want to get up on that stage and grab people's attention. Heavy Metal Unity: that’s how we feel about our music and how we feel as a group.”
And how’s that? Sammy grins again, and confidently answers.
“It’s heavy metal. There’s nothing more powerful.”
Right you are. Right you are.
Fallen Star is released April 25 via Spinefarm Records.
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