Architects interview: 'Grief isn't this journey from f***ed to better'

One of the UK's biggest metal bands talk to Roisin O'Connor about losing their brother, best friend and guitarist Tom Searle, the grieving process, and how Tom is ‘all over’ their new album ‘Holy Hell’

Architects’ eighth album ‘Holy Hell’ is about pain, and the way we deal with it (Photos Ed Mason)

Grief is a strange thing. There’s no rushing it – that’s something British metal band Architects have learned the hard way.

It is just over two years since the death of their guitarist and co-founder Tom Searle from skin cancer, aged 28. He and his twin brother, drummer Dan, were the only original members of the band, which formed in Brighton in 2004 and have since become one of the UK’s biggest and best metal acts, rising to global success over the course of seven critically acclaimed albums. Tom’s death was a shattering blow.

“You wonder if there’s gonna be some kind of revelation, like... what am I supposed to do with all this?” vocalist Sam Carter says.

He and Dan Searle are sitting together in one of their local cafes in the seaside town of Hove, where the band formed and is still based. Autumnal sunlight is shining through the window. Both musicians are alert and appear in good spirits – asides from the understandably emotional moments when they talk about Tom – perhaps just a little tired (Searle has a newborn baby girl at home), as they drink coffee and talk about the band’s new music.

Architects are releasing their eighth album, Holy Hell. It’s a record about pain, and the way we deal with it, which isn’t always smooth-sailing: “Now the oceans have drained out/ Can I come up for air?” Carter sings on the single “Hereafter”. “’Cause I’ve been learning to live without/ And I’m fighting with broken bones.”

“After the first tour we did without Tom, we came home and wrote a couple of songs, and that was when we knew we could continue,” Searle says. “There was no rushing it.”

They started recording around this time last year. Dan remembers the specific date, 24 October, because it was the day after his 30th birthday – “which was boring, because I’m a pro,” he jokes when asked about recording with a hangover.

Themes of heaven and hell, angels and demons run like a strong current through the record. Religion is one of the “big questions”, he notes, even if none of them practise, and it was a theme they wanted to continue from Tom’s earlier lyrics, as part of the album’s aesthetic.

“The album is about matters of life and death,” Searle says. “I feel that kind of language is really relevant to the subject. Terms like heaven and hell, devil and god, they’re amazing metaphors.”

He worries a little about fans taking some of the lyrics too literally, but was also keen to be as honest as possible about the grief he was going through: “Some of the songs, where I was trying to talk about the really brutal stages of grief, especially ‘Hereafter’ and ‘The Seventh Circle’,” he says, “things were so bleak, and they were about times when I thought life was pointless. I didn’t want to pretend like those moments didn’t happen. I did want the album to have a start and the end, but the journey was always a mess. When you go through something like this, you think you’ve turned a corner and then…” he shrugs, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“I was round Dan’s house the other day,” Carter says, “and I forgot I had a counselling session. I didn’t wanna go, but I went, then got home and thought ‘I’m a f***ing mess’. It’s easy to feel you’re OK when you’re hanging out with your best friend and his new baby, you know?”

“It’s easy to bury your problems,” Searle agrees. “Initially, my grand plan was that it’d be this journey from f***ed to better. But that’s not how it works.”

Where Searle lost his twin, Carter lost his best friend. Listening to him sing on Holy Hell can be a difficult experience – such is the intensity of his performance.

“I’d gone through, not the same thing as Dan, but very similar, and the album sums up my journey, and it does for Josh and Adam and Ali,” he says. (Josh Middleton and Adam Christianson are the band’s guitarists, Alex Dean plays bass.) “My role is to make the songs come to life. You have these really vulnerable lyrics, so you have to give every line as much as you possibly can.”

“You did a good job,” Searle says, and the pair grin at one another.

“Tom’s all over this album,” Searle adds. “It started when he wrote the main riff to ‘Doomsday’. That was an important song for us. I wondered how we’d do a full album, at the time. But the song was born out of an obsession with writing the right thing, to start the new era of the band.”

The second single from the album, “Royal Beggars”, is one of the most raw, emotional songs on the album. It’s about dealing with issues and facing up to them rather than pretending they don’t exist. For Searle, that was struggling to cope, and realising “all the things we do to medicate”.

“Coupled with this strong feeling, when I was in the depths of grief, that we can all do better than this,” he adds. “It’s very easy to sleepwalk your way through life. We need to believe in ourselves a little bit more.”

For the video, the band wanted to do something “different to anything else we’d done, a little more set in reality,” Searle says, “and also something that had some humour in it.”

“It’s a little bit ridiculous,” he chuckles, as Carter adds: “Videos aren’t why anyone forms a band. We’ve dragged our feet to dozens of music video shoots. But with this one, it felt like... let’s put a bit more into it.”

“The performances add a slightly ludicrous edge to the narrative,” Searle continues, “so I think it was easier to do. Everyone felt a little bit silly. If it was a more vulnerable role... The song’s a bit different, obviously.”

‘It’s very easy to sleepwalk your way through life’ (Ed Mason)

In January, Architects embark on one of their biggest tours to date, which includes a show at the SSE Arena in Wembley, London.

“It’s a piss-take we’re this big, because we’re so heavy,” Carter says. “It’s amazing what bands like Bring Me the Horizon have done for the genre, they were kind of a gateway band.”

“We’re very fortunate,” Searle agrees. “We didn’t start a metal band to be this successful. When we started it was like, Slipknot were just breaking, and there were so few British heavy metal bands.”

They don’t begrudge bigger bands their success, either, and if anything, they find the music industry’s culture of “ambition isn’t cool” rather irritating. “Wanting to make money in this industry is the ultimate sin,” Carter says. “You’re not supposed to want to be successful.”

Arguably one of the biggest moments of the band’s career so far – at least one to garner more mainstream attention – was last year when Carter made a furious, blistering condemnation of a man who groped a female fan during their show at Lowlands festival in the Netherlands.

“I saw a girl, a woman, crowdsurfing over here, and I’m not going to f***ing point the piece of s*** out who did it, but I saw you f***ing grab at her boob, it is f***ing disgusting and there is no place for that s***,” Carter was filmed saying. He is clearly spittingly angry.

“It is not your f***ing body, it is not your f***ing body and you do not f***ing grab at someone. Not at my f***ing show. So if you feel like doing that again, walk out there and f*** off and don’t come back.”

His speech drew widespread praise from the music community, and sparked a large debate about how men should be just as vigilant as women at calling out sexual harassment at gigs.

“It was the first time I’d seen anything like it,” Carter says now. “I didn’t know how big it had got until people started sending me messages, saying how many had been affected by it.

“I don’t think I’m special for doing it,” he adds. “What I think is special is other people sharing their stories, being brave enough to come forward after years and speak out. Architects are in our own little bubble. We’re not rock stars (“apart from Adam,” Searle jokes) and we’re so closed off from the world of after-parties, getting f***ed up… So when you start seeing all of this stuff come it was like f*** yeah, get rid of those f***ing pricks, call the f***ers out.”

Understandably, there was a lot of pressure with this new record. But Architects fans have been patient, clearly realising what the band were going through, and knowing what a powerful moment it would be when the time came for them to release the first song.

Both Searle and Carter feel ready to release the rest of the band’s new music so they can “stop obsessing over it”. “It’s almost like the song is never finished until it’s released,” Carter says.

We’re about to call time on the interview – Searle has to get back home. We joke about his baby daughter doing screamo duets with Carter on future records.

“In four years, maybe, she can be on album 10,” Searle says. “I’ve gotta start teaching her. My wife sang on the album while she was pregnant with the baby,” he reveals with a smile. There’s something beautiful in that, to have the voices of past, present and future on the same record. “All in the family, man.”

‘Holy Hell’ is out on 9 November