Sirens formed just last year in Birmingham. They’ve created quite the buzz across social media and on the UK live circuit and have graced the stage with the likes of Bam Margera.
The band self-produced and releases their debut EP in 2012 as a free download via dropbox. Their new track Bad Blood is also available for free download via dropbox.
Introduce yourself to our readers, who are you and where are you from?
We are Sirens. Broken down, Sirens consists of six lads based in the Birmingham / Staffordshire area.
What are you about?
Sirens are six genuine, hardworking, passionate and down to earth guys who are maximising on every opportunity to make and play the music we love. The Sirens sound is heavy, loud, dramatic, powerful, ambient and emotional. We take our raw energy and filter it into our sound. We take pride in delivering a solid and well rehearsed live experience and love spending time with the people that support us and what we’re doing. It’s so overly clichéd for a band to say in an interview, but the people that come to shows, hang out with us afterwards, buy our merch, tweet or upload pics, really do make this the best job in the world. To re-answer question 1; Sirens are 6 friends, the people that support us and our crew that help make live shows a success
Where/who do you take your influences from?
Some common bands we all love are; Memphis May Fire, The Devil Wears Prada, Bring Me the Horizon, While She Sleeps, Norma Jean, Like Moths to Flames and many more. However, with six different minds we each have individual influences not necessarily linked to ‘metal’ that we each bring to the table. A few of us are nerdy guys who play lots of video games. It only takes a gripping storyline, subject matter or character to influence us putting pen to paper or writing a tune. Otherwise, a lot of our songs are referenced to real life subject matters that are important to one of us personally or as a whole.
Tell us about your song writing and recording process.
We are lucky enough to have our own lockup (or Sirens HQ), which is the base of operations. This is our home to rehearse and record new songs. For the songwriting process, we typically take an idea to Pro Tools, dissect the idea as a group and build it into a song after bouncing off each other’s ideas. When we are finally happy with the outcome, we record and produce the records ourselves at Sirens HQ.
Why did you release your first EP for free? And now also your current single?
This is a fairly common thing for bands to do these days. I think it’s more important to get heard in the early days and use your first recordings as a means to ‘put the feelers out’ and gauge what reaction you get from the public. Once you know you’re on the right track and staying true to the music you want to make, you can invest more heavily and release music through more channels. For us, our latest single Bad Blood is our anthem track for our first wave of songs. This is the track we want people to scream back to us at shows and go wild to in the pit. We are currently in the process of recording a number of new tracks, which we hope will form a full-length album for us.
What do you think about the current music business?
We’re all lucky enough to know some very talented stars from the music industry and a personal level. We’ve heard so much, been given great advice and heard a lot of horror stories. For now, we’re concentrating on making music, playing shows and meeting the people that support us before tackling the politics of the music industry.
What’s up next for Sirens?
So far, 2013 has been absolutely amazing and a lot has happened! We pushed our free EP and played some great local shows before having a lineup change. Welsh boy, Rob, from the Valleys joined us on guitar and we have since been lucky enough to open a sell out show for MTV’s Jackass Star, Bam Margera and his band ‘Fuckface Unstoppable’ in Birmingham’s o2 Academy. After being proclaimed by critics as band of the night and receiving fantastic crowd reception, we recently landed a slot opening for While She Sleeps and Dead Harts in Wolverhampton Slade Rooms. The response so far has been unreal. Opening for While She Sleeps was a massive milestone for us being one of our influencers and at the show the crowd were pitting and pulled out a wall of death during Bad Blood. We also sold ALL our merch…. Like we said, unbelievable. As mentioned, we’re working on a feature length album and have already named ‘Creature’ as the first single for that record which we’re currently playing at shows. Right now we’re ordering a brand new merch line and set to open for HEIGHTS early October with a few more tricks up our sleeves! 2014, bring it.
Image courtesy of Carl Battams