‘T
hey say your second album is supposed to be the difficult one, but it just so happened that our second one…” offers up Creeper’s Will Gould boldly, with a ripple of laughter, “was absolutely cursed!”
For a band who have consistently shrouded themselves in mystery and theatre - from the Southampton-wide treasure hunt they sent fans on around their debut, to their full-on disappearing act following 2018’s London KOKO headline show - you’d be forgiven for thinking that a narrative one-liner like that would be fairly commonplace. As it turns out, though, the curse of forthcoming second LP ‘Sex, Death & The Infinite Void’ actually sounds pretty bloody real. “We’ve been saying for a long time - long before all of this got really out of hand!!” Will laughs, dropping the bait, “that a lot of things happened with this Creeper record that were really nightmarish. We spoke about it being a cursed record. My original statement about the album was talking about the curse of this second record, and then I rewrote the press release because I felt I was making it into more of a thing. But then the curse rounded up into a global pandemic… “It feels like we’re almost making [Guns N’ Roses’ infamous super-delayed album] ‘Chinese Democracy’ here! There’s been this arduous process where this record’s been coming for such a long period of time,” he continues. “We had the year off - our optional year off! - and then immediately as we came back, My Chemical Romance came back the same day as us, after nine years or something! And then 2020, like a manic spider, just started weaving this web to try and stop us from ever releasing anything, or going on tour, ever again!” His laughter comes punctuated with a still-present sense of disbelief: the kind we’re all still getting used to. And while the band did take a year off the road in 2019, only to finish the album, prep for its release and then be told it was going to be delayed due to the COVID-19 crisis, it’s not just the pandemic that
“Everything that this record touches just turns to shit!” Will Gould
wreaked havoc with Creeper’s second effort. “Over the course of this record, my best friend got hospitalised; my mum’s partner passed away; the producer of the record went through a divorce; the head of the record label’s brother passed away,” he lists. “It was awful; everyone was just going through a tragedy at every point. When the record went to press in America at a record plant, our record was the last to go through that press because it burned to the ground. The whole thing burned to the ground!” Once more, with gusto. “In reality,” he adds, emphasising each word, “It. Burned. To. The. Ground. Isn’t that insane? Isn’t that mad?! Everything that this record touches just turns to shit!”
H
owever, hexed though their album may be, ‘Sex, Death & the Infinite Void’ still makes for as ambitious a next step as its flamboyant title might suggest. Set against the narrative backdrop of Calvary Falls - a small fictional town buried deep in the United States - it’s a predictably bombastic affair. Based upon the story of Roe, a man who’s fallen to earth much like a modern day Ziggy Stardust, and Annabelle, a woman betrothed to another, it revels in the sin of their illicit love and the ways in which they realise their world has changed forever. And while a touch of conceptualism isn’t exactly new territory for the band, their second album also saw the reality of their own personal lives taking more of a spotlight than they’d anticipated. “Every time we write stuff for Creeper records,” Will explains, “we try and think of the most outlandish, largerthan-life things. It’s supposed to be a more fantastical version of reality; that’s what we’re trying to build. [But even] the most mad story I could come up with falls to the wayside when you learn the reality of how we actually made the record. Even now, the time we live [in] right now, in these extraordinary times, I feel like the reality is a lot more interesting than the fiction. The last [album] was all about the story, and this one has been completely dominated by what’s been going on in our own personal lives, and the larger real world as well.”
Curse CalvaryFalls Of
Creeper
The
pulled their disappearing act back in November 2018, no one could’ve foreseen the When obstacles that’d be thrown their way whilst making Album Two. But if ever a band was destined to face some demons and come out fighting, it’d be this one… Words: Sarah Jamieson. Photos: Richard Kelly.
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