I had just met Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones of Employed To Serve at Woking train station when Sammy was approached by a middle-aged woman in a leopard-print coat.
“Where’s the station?” she asked in an American accent, a huge black eye visible under her dark sunglasses. It was a dreary Wednesday morning, pouring with rain.
“It’s here,” replied a somewhat bewildered Urwin, gesturing to the entrance and ticket hall right behind us.
A disjointed exchange followed, where the woman didn’t seem to be able to believe what was in front of her eyes. Throughout, Urwin was impeccably polite, as if he worked at the station.
This interaction took place a few metres from an incongruous sculpture outside the station, of opera singer Bryn Terfel in character as Siegfried from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Twenty-odd miles outside of London, Woking is a typical and yet atypical commuter town, as midweek “characters” float around its streets, and on this occasion, engage with its most popular ascendant metal band.
It’s been a successful, but also frustrating, few years for Employed To Serve. After we’ve decamped to a booth for coffee in a local pub, Jones smiles wryly as she describes how COVID upended the touring cycle for both 2019’s Eternal Forward Motion and 2021’s Conquering. In the latter’s case, delaying an eventually triumphant arena tour supporting Gojira.
Nonetheless, Conquering was a huge milestone for the band. They reformulated their lineup for its recording, adding David Porter alongside Urwin on guitar, Nathan Pryor on bass and Casey McHale on drums. It expanded their musical palette, allowing their songs to open out and also drill down into a more titanic, yet overtly melodic, sound.
I remember the shock of hearing Stooges legend Iggy Pop playing its single, “Mark of the Grave”, on his BBC radio show one Sunday afternoon. The song was a waymarker for the band, with Urwin’s clean verse vocal vying with Jones’s antagonistic screams.
“We wanted to do that track,” says Jones. “But we were a little bit nervous because it was quite like, you know… it was a bit ‘butt rock’.”
Sensing the band’s tentativeness on this subject, I declare our booth a safe space to discuss contentious acts like Creed and Nickelback. Most of Employed To Serve’s musical leaps forward have risked backlash. It was the same for standout song “I Spend My Days (Wishing Them Away)” from 2017’s breakthrough album The Warmth of a Dying Sun. They have a strong gut instinct for what they need to grow.
“I don't think we want to go back and suggest we write another chaotic record where nothing repeats twice,” says Urwin. “For us, the excitement is trying to write a hook that hopefully sticks in people's brains.”
With “Atonement”, the lead single from new album Fallen Star, they deliver on this in spades. Its piston-pumping main riff is almost desperately heavy, whereas its chorus soars into the realms of pure pop. They sent the track with guide vocals and lyrics to Lorna Shore’s Will Ramos, expecting him to come back with what Jones describes as his trademark “goblin vocals”.
He duly provided some, but then also unexpectedly took on the chorus with a rich, gritty baritone. Reading the comments under its music video, Ramos brought his considerable audience to Employed To Serve, but they in turn showed a possible new direction for Ramos if he ever wanted to pursue more melodic avenues.
“That might not have been a thing if he’d stuck to the basics of the brief,” says Urwin. “We were in awe of it, but also thankful that he took it upon himself to add that extra little flavor.”
Producer Lewis Johns told the band that delving into Ramos’s vocal files was like working with ten different people, such was the range of layering and expression within them. Ramos is at the vanguard of metal’s new breed of social media-driven superstars. There’s also a wider trend of more pop-oriented acts like Sleep Token becoming festival headliners.
“The headliners are finally getting refreshed,” smiles Jones. It’s the first time she can remember this happening during the ten-year existence of Employed To Serve. She says she can hear the hooks of pop acts like The Weeknd in this newer crop of bands.
“It's something we think is really cool to see, particularly taking Bad Omens and Spiritbox as well, incorporating these more overtly poppy kind of elements, because it should be a case of doing something new,” says Urwin. “How can you put your new spin on heavy metal? For us, even though I guess you could argue we have pop elements in terms of hooks, we don't go as wholeheartedly into the pop feeling. It’s not because we’re coming at it from an elitist angle. It's because the music we love isn't coming from that world. We're obviously pulling from a lot of stuff, like early Machine Head and Fear Factory. We know there's a younger generation coming up that's still into all of that kind of thing.”
“I want to be Rob Halford with his leather and his motorbike entrances,” sums up Jones.
From the first Employed To Serve album, 2015’s Greyer Than You Remember, onwards, Jones and Urwin have shared vocal duties. But on Fallen Star, Urwin’s ingestion of classic rock staples by Judas Priest and Dio has collided with inspiration from Rivers of Nihil and Trivium.
Like many modern metal releases, you can play spot-the-influence on the album. Whether it’s the Deftones Diamond Eyes-era hardness to the guitar on “Breaks Me Down”, or the HIM-meets-Unto Others gothic shades of “Last Laugh” (with some epic guitar bends reminiscent of “Throes of Rejection” by Pantera for good measure). Not to mention the “Angel of Death” scream from Urwin that heralds opener “Treachery”. Employed To Serve absorb, reformulate and spit these out on an album where aggression and accessibility are locked in a grueling arm wrestle.
The song with the clearest inspiration from the band’s tour with Gojira is “Brother, Stand Beside Me”, which has a heaving, off-time intensity as well as a textured, near psychedelic finish akin to “The Shooting Star” from Gojira’s Magma album. Its lyrical reference to the “The black sheep that went astray/You’re stronger now and here to stay” speaks to the album’s reaching out towards, and picking up, those who are struggling.
The title track refers to the burden of having someone close to you who has burned out too fast. The image of the fallen star invokes Icarus, who flew too close to the sun before plummeting to earth, and also Lucifer, who paid the ultimate price for his transgressions when he was cast out of heaven.
“All the things we talk about, I mean particularly family issues, or someone with addiction problems and depression, it's something that touches everyone in one way or another,” says Urwin. “It’s leaving that scope for someone to put that track on and they can manifest their situation into the lyrics of the song.”
“Obviously you don't want to put too many personal things into your music, because you have to perform every night,” adds Jones. “It's not exactly fun reliving trauma every single night when you're performing. So it's being inspired by that situation in your life, whilst also making it so that you can perform it without feeling like you're disrespecting people's privacy or ruining it for yourself, essentially.”
The album’s cover art and title connect back to The Warmth of a Dying Sun. The words to “Now Thy Kingdom Come” make that connection overt: “Our world undone/Eclipse the dying sun”. At the time of recording that album eight years ago, music was the be-all-and-end-all. Like many people who emerge into their thirties, Fallen Star sees the band reconciling themselves to a healthier relationship with their work and their craft: “The band doesn’t make us whole,” says Urwin.
“When you are in a band, you don't have any separation from it,” says Jones. “You just feel like: Oh, my happiness is reliant on how many tickets we sell, how many records we sell, things like that. Whereas, it's that age-old thing with not putting your happiness on something that's changeable or depends on someone else's opinion.”
For Urwin and Jones, Fallen Star isn’t a straightforward PMA album. There’s lots of ugliness on display but also the means to move forward. The peril of grappling with toxic emotions is that, in Urwin’s words, “you’re ultimately just attacking yourself”.
Sometimes that involves punching your way through it, as described in the punishing “Whose Side Are You On?” featuring Jesse Leach from Killswitch Engage. The song involves a huge breakdown ushered in by Leach’s mosh call: “When push comes to shove/You’ll be the first one off the edge”. When I first saw Employed To Serve live it was supporting Code Orange, and the way the song breaks down the breakdown retains a ferocity the Pittsburgh hardcore heroes have largely left behind.
Fallen Star is also a perfect vehicle for Jesse Leach, with its vulnerability, description of mental crises, and the formula to work through them. His tumultuous history with his own band made him the perfect candidate for the guest spot.
“His music is very much in line with ours as well,” says Urwin. “He very much touches upon similar stuff that we do. Talking about the shit going on in the world, but also not creating a feedback loop of negativity at the same time.”
Empowered by the lineup change going into Conquering, and able to plough into a more extreme metal direction, that album was intense with no let up. Reflecting on it, the band felt they could reintroduce more light and shade, more “mountain tops and valleys” as Urwin puts it, which is now reflected in Fallen Star. Urwin and Porter have been listening together to Scandinavian bands with a progressive streak, incorporating keyboards and other dimensions to their sound.
“Me and David in particular really bond over Soilwork, In Flames and Amorphis,” says Urwin. “He was a real champion for – obviously he didn't play on Eternal Forward Motion and The Warmth of a Dying Sun – but he was going back to the whole light and shade thing. He was saying, don't forget about these elements. And he contributed parts to ‘Brother…’, and [final track] ‘From This Day Forward’, that I think really add to the dynamics of the record, which is super awesome.”
The other massive contributor to the album is producer Lewis Johns, the “sixth member” of Employed To Serve. He's responsible for the strings on the album alongside Urwin, who points to penultimate track “The Renegades” as an example of how Johns elevates the band's sound.
Johns came to the band’s attention through his production work on British band Palm Reader. His massive drum sound (“the bottom end is just Lewis Johns, isn’t it?” says Jones) has suffused the British underground: from Svalbard to Pupil Slicer to Ithaca to Lowen. The latter’s Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran was one of Knotfest’s best albums of last year, supercharged with Johns’ powerful production. It upended a lot of what you’d expect from the often murky and muddy-sounding hinterland of the doom genre.
Employed To Serve recorded their album before Lowen’s at Johns’s The Ranch studio last Autumn. Lowen’s label was particularly effective at getting their record out before Employed To Serve. Which brings us to that label: Urwin and Jones’s own Church Road Records.
“It was important for us to do something we really enjoyed doing, but also being able to take it on the road with us,” says Jones. “That's how this label started. It affords us to do the band, essentially.”
They’ve recently launched a PR service with the venture called Since Always Press. It’s clear Employed To Serve enjoy bringing the label’s bands under their wing, with an upcoming Spring tour supported by Burner and Celestial Sanctuary on the books.
“I find it really rewarding releasing smaller bands and mentoring them,” says Jones. “Essentially giving them advice and things. And I feel it keeps me from being jaded with my own band, because I get their excitement when they get their first interview or review.”
As for Woking, the pair grew up catching what they could in local venues. Jones saw Open Skies (a precursor to Palm Reader), Deaf Havana and You Me At Six at shows put on at the local church. Urwin had to venture further afield, on Myspace and into London, to find other death metal fiends to jam with. Woking is where the aliens land in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and became a transport hub when the railway was built from London to the port city of Southampton, where Johns is based.
“It’s like any sort of small town in America,” says Urwin. “It’s not a bad place to live. But I guess, growing up, it has got that small town kind of mentality.”
“There’s a lot of boredom around here,” adds Jones. “I feel like it breeds creativity – drinking in parks!”
When Employed To Serve released The Warmth of a Dying Sun they really didn't know where the road was going. On the two albums that followed, they suffered numerous setbacks. Now, with Fallen Star, they've made the crucial realization that their band can't be everything, and that they must accept what they can't control. It's not about how you fall; it’s how you land.
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Fallen Star, the fifth full length studio album from Employed To Serve arrives April 25th via Spinefarm. Order the album - HERE
The metalcore progressives will also hit the road next month for a focused run of headlining dates throughout the UK. The Fallen Star Headlining Tour kicks off Wolverhampton on April 21st and wraps on the 25th with a performance at O2 Academy Islington in London.
Joining Employed to Serve on the band's home turf, Celestial Sanctuary and Burner have been tapped as opening support for the length of the run. See dates below.
