1st 3 – Not only have your own music become heavier over the years, but it’s also become more epic and orchestral, with a bigger sound – is that fair to say?

Yes, 100%, and thank you for noticing. I work in a recording studio as well – I manage bookings and I’m an assistant engineer. I think that being in that world has put a stamp within our music, which is great, we all love recording and that element of it. It’s been amazing to add new textures rather than just have your typical guitar, bass, vocal, drums. It gives you so many more avenues to explore. Growing up, we were always listening to heavier bands, and it got to the point where we were thinking, why aren’t we recording the type of music that we’re listening to. We still love our old songs and there’s a time and a place, and it’s our past, but we’ve always listened to heavier stuff, so we thought, why don’t we just throw it in the pot. Vocally as well, adding more screaming layers has been really fun and more interesting for us and it was a natural progression for us.

1st 3 – You combine both standard rock vocals and the harder screaming vocals in the same song, but the screaming bits are more just at the end of the songs – do you think that balance might shift in the future?

To be honest, I don’t know. We’re constantly writing. There is some stuff we’ve got which is a lot heavier, there’s some that is stripped down acoustics. Personally, I think that it’s about whatever adds to the song. I listen to a lot of heavy, heavy stuff as well, that’s fine but for us, I don’t think that screaming all through a track would be that beneficial, unless it’s something that we’re really into. It’s all about what the song needs – if it needs a big chorus with choirs and stuff, then cool, let’s go for it. If it needs a balls to the wall breakdown with some mad pig squeals going on then we’ll give it a go, it’s all about the song. But what we’re feeling is that we try to write music that we enjoy and really want to hear so we’ll see where it takes us.

1st 3 – It’s noticeable that although you have a heavy sound overall, you don’t just go for a heavy drum sound all the time and you’re not afraid to use sparser drums – was that a conscious choice?

Yes, I’m a big fan, and the lads are as well, of bands like Thrice and Nirvana. They’re the kings of dynamics – so verses quiet, loud chorus, loud heavy bit. It just adds a lot and that’s something that we try to champion. I love dynamics. If your verse is nice and mellow, you’ve got more room to play with your vocal melodies, you can strip back on the vocal and then come in with that hard chorus, kick up all the drums, you’ve got your strings that come in, your vocals that come in, it makes it feel bigger. I think that dynamics is key for our style of music at the minute.

1st 3 – You’ve made a number of videos now and the imagery is very dark – there’s blood and so on. How important is the visual imagery and how involved in that process is that band?

It’s all us mainly, we script pretty much everything. Some of our older videos looking back are a bit cringey but it’s fun to make and it’s a time stamp, it’s something to look back on. For the last video, Take It Back, we had a big crew which was absolutely amazing, and big shout out to everyone who worked on that with us, it was insane. We were way out of our depth, there were seven different guys doing lights and rigging and camera work and stuff. It was really fun to do but the idea of the video stemmed from a concept that we had. The song is based on a reflection, whether that’s self-reflection or reflection of other people so I wanted to use mirrors, and they were really cool to help us get that vision across. So, it’s developed to have a few more people on board but usually in the past it’s solely just us and I am a huge horror fan so when we were doing the video for Sparks in our Blood, I was just, let’s go mental and get covered in blood! Let me tell you, that stuff tastes horrible, it tastes vile, don’t put it in your mouth, it’s awful, it stains your teeth and it’s a nightmare but it’s all good fun. I think videos are fun, and we can kind of be fake actors for a day, which is always a laugh, and making music and messing around with cameras with your mates is all part of the package.

1st 3 – What does the future hold for Matter of Mind?

Hopefully some shows, I’m really, really missing playing live. Hopefully we can just on some tours, which we’re trying to book at the minute. More music writing, we’re constantly writing. We’re sitting on so much material, it’s crazy and we need to go through it and pick out the good stuff. We’re just going to keep going. We’ve got a few songs out under our belts now and I feel that the last few singles really cemented our sound – we know where we want to be, and what we want to do, and what we’re about.

I feel like we’re heading in the right direction now, which is great so just onwards for us – just keep going, keep writing, play some shows and spread the word of our band.