Having come out the other side of an incredibly difficult few years, Fit For A King’s Ryan Kirby threw his all into the band’s eighth album Lonely God. On the eve of its release, the frontman talks fortitude, family, faith and taking things further than ever before…
To understand the significance of Fit For A King’s forthcoming eighth album Lonely God, you have to know what came before. That means delving into a deeply personal episode in the life of frontman Ryan Kirby and his family. It’s a story that’s impossible to recount, however, without revisiting the pandemic.
Three months before the arrival of COVID, Ryan and his wife adopted her niece and nephew, whose upbringing up to that point had been characterised by abuse and the instability of being bounced around the care system. Sadly, soon after the adoption, Ryan’s wife suffered a stroke that almost took her life.
Suddenly things were very precarious – a family trying to help two children navigate their trauma and feel comfortable in a new dynamic were impacted by serious illness and financial uncertainty (Fit For A King were forced off the road five shows into their tour in support of their fifth album, 2018’s Dark Skies, resulting in Ryan losing 90 per cent of his income).
The record the band made during this period, 2022’s The Hell We Create, wrestled with themes informed by those experiences – of generational trauma, of close scrapes with death and what they teach us about how unprepared we are for it, as a victim or bystander. Its musical clout, however, wasn’t necessarily on a par with its thematic weight. K!’s review at the time noted that while it was ‘sturdy enough to weather the story of its creation’, ultimately ‘surprises are few, but it hits hard in all the right places’. It’s an appraisal Ryan seems to agree with.
“Even though the lyrics were extremely sincere and there was overwhelming emotion on the last record, the emotion also fed into anxiety and stress over the band,” he suggests by way of debrief, with a calm and control in his voice you imagine is an asset in challenging times.
“Obviously we were touring, and were asking ourselves, ‘Is it ever going to be the same again? Is touring gonna come back?’” he continues. “We thought that because we couldn’t tour, we wouldn’t be able to win people over with our live show, so we had to write an almost perfect record that people liked or I thought we might be done. I think by doing that, we wrote a very safe record that teetered on being pretty boring at times, instrumentally, because we were trying so hard not to push boundaries and upset anyone because we’d already lost so much.”
Thankfully, things are different these days. First and foremost, while Ryan’s wife’s health “isn’t amazing”, she’s also not at risk of dying. “She’s not constantly in and out of the doctor’s office,” he explains. “She’s just in and out every three to five months now, which is great compared to where we were.” Life at home is more stable, too, though not without its difficulties – not least with regards to what Ryan should and shouldn’t say about his children who have already been through enough. “There are certain things about being a parent, especially with kids who are adopted… there are always challenges and struggles with that.”
Meanwhile, when it came to making Fit For A King’s eighth LP, Ryan had one key piece of criteria: “Can we please put out an album that’s just an album?”
It was an understandable plea. While touring for Dark Skies had been curtailed by the arrival of the pandemic, its follow-up, 2020’s The Path, was released in the midst of it. The Hell We Create subsequently emerged while restrictions were still in place, at a time when many gig-goers were nervous about returning to venues, thereby robbing Ryan of the catharsis of sharing such painful, personal songs in a live setting.
Having felt like they’d only been operating with half their intended function, making music but not performing it, Fit For A King grew weary. “We thought, ‘What’s the point of even trying to write? The world has so much other stuff going on, plus there is no guarantee of playing any new material, domestically or internationally.’ We felt defeated in the studio.”
Once life returned to some semblance of normality, for Ryan and for the world, Fit For A King began to view what happened as “a great reset” and the chance to recalibrate how they worked.
The members of the band – completed by Daniel Gailey (guitar), Ryan ‘Tuck’ O’Leary (bass) and Trey Celaya (drums) – are spread between Texas, New York and Los Angeles, meaning that when they’re not touring, they don’t see each other very much. “It’s a good thing we tour a lot, then,” laughs Ryan.
In the past, Fit For A King would conjure up an entire record in the studio, booking six weeks and writing like crazy. This time around, however, they decided to supplement the process with additional sessions, which yielded the standalone single Keeping Secrets, released last year ahead of the Metalcore Dropouts Tour alongside The Devil Wears Prada, and billed by Ryan as “[showcasing] some new elements for the band”.
The song served several other important purposes. On a personal front, it was inspired by Ryan’s adopted daughter, who wondered if someone can truly love you if you don’t open up and let them know you completely. And artistically, Keeping Secrets proved that FFAK were capable of writing without the presence of a producer, building their confidence. Meanwhile, the response to the track, with its hectic rush of styles, taught them something about their fans.
“We realised that what our fans want is for us to try things, even if they don’t necessarily like it,” reveals Ryan. “There’s a sense that if you don’t try new things then people are going to forget about you. Something that’s worse than people hating on a record you’ve made is people not caring you put a record out in the first place.”
Aside from boasting the most restaurants per square mile than anywhere else in America, Arlington in Texas is the home of Pantera. Not that Ryan listened to them growing up, as it wasn’t conducive to the conservative, Christian household he was raised in. Ozzy Osbourne didn’t trouble the speakers at home, either, though Ryan notes the impact of his recent loss.
Metallica, Korn, Slipknot – Ryan knew their bigger hits, but didn’t have the childhood nostalgia attached to them like many of his peers. When he reached eighth grade at the beginning of his teens, however, Linkin Park entered his life via their single, Faint.
“I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” he recalls. “That was my entry into hearing screaming for the first time. I also admired how Linkin Park were somehow able to unite everybody from every fandom.” Plus, given the nu-metal titans’ wholesome image and generally inoffensive lyrics, Ryan’s parents were on board. It was the gateway he needed, and one he enthusiastically walked through, before the Madden NFL videogame series introduced him to the likes of Bullet For My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold, Atreyu and Underoath. “I thought, ‘Whoa, there are bands that scream more than they sing?!’”
While music plays a huge role in Ryan’s life now, his faith, though not as ardent as his parents’, is vital. “I just acknowledge I’m not a preacher, that I’m a musician and I write music. If it happens to be incorporated into my music, cool, but I’m not going to force it.”
Ryan has other outlets for his thoughts around his faith, anyway, having penned the book The Embrace: Learning To Cling To God And Love Others. According to the precis for the tome, which was written before the health and adoption issues, it features ‘never-before-heard stories inside the music industry and how [Ryan] learned to embrace God and those around him’.
“It talks about different struggles in my life and different areas of my life I’ve learned to get through,” is Ryan’s summary. “I wanted people to feel less alone with their struggles, especially during the pandemic era when people had so much time to sit and reflect.”
Which brings us to Lonely God. It’s essentially a record built around the story of someone who’s made a lot of mistakes and wants to divorce himself from his past, though it develops in all sorts of frightening and fantastical directions. Hammering opening track Begin The Sacrifice captures this man screaming into the abyss, desperate for something to believe in and the right direction to go in. This is a timeless quandary – of the lost and disenfranchised searching for a course correction or something to give their lives purpose.
“There are a million things in this world pulling at us,” explains Ryan of how modernity, technology, the media, and political and religious zealotry make that confusion more perilous. “Whether it’s religion, whether it’s politics, whatever… it’s telling us it’s the right thing to follow.”
The album’s final track, the epic Witness The End, features a guest appearance from Chris Motionless. FFAK and the Motionless In White singer became good friends following tours together in America and Europe. As Witness The End developed as a song, Ryan began to think of Chris’ more feral offerings on record, like 2010’s Creatures, as his ideal addition.
“He sounds absolutely incredible and reminded the world that he can get pretty metal,” Ryan enthuses of the man he describes as “one of the most influential vocalists in the scene”.
Ryan won’t be drawn on exactly where the conclusion of Lonely God leaves the listener. He’ll only say that it’s not a story that ends happily, much like the Netflix series Midnight Mass, in which a mysterious priest reinvigorates the faith of an island community before the horrors of his true purpose are revealed; Lonely God was heavily inspired by it.
And despite the album’s relevance to today’s climate, Ryan is keen to avoid being drawn into politics too much, having been subjected to flack in the past. He is, however, frustrated by the lack of progress on certain issues because those issues are necessary to keep people divided. “If they fix a particular problem, they can’t campaign on it ever again. But my life is a lot better since I have learned to admit when I don’t know enough about something to have an opinion.”
Lonely God is an album for listeners to find their own interpretations of and associations with. We all look for answers, sometimes in the right place, and sometimes in the wrong. The main takeaway Ryan wants people to have, though, having been through so much in the past few years, is that it stirs something in the listener. “Having a particular sound is one thing, but having people feel the emotions as well as hear them is what it’s all about.”
Lonely God is due out on August 1 via Solid State
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