Consistently one of British metalcore’s finest bands, Bury Tomorrow aren’t in any danger of losing that title with their killer eighth album Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience. And as frontman Dani Winter-Bates asserts, it’s connection, belief and absolute faith that keeps them pushing through…
Dani Winter-Bates leans forward to get a clearer view of the notebook Kerrang! is holding up. We’re pointing his eyeline in the direction of a couple of pages of scrawled notes, transcribed lyrics and the sort of doodles you see on the back of a school pencil case. Two words sit, scratched and underlined, at the top of the first page.
“Relentlessly bleak.”
Dani laughs – a warm, easy-going, boyish chuckle – at the description. “What a review!” he notes. “What’s that out of five Ks?” Another laugh.
A more erudite dissection you will no doubt find, but as a conversation-starter, it’s a simple summation of the surface-layer of Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience – Bury Tomorrow’s eighth full-length record, in what is approaching their third decade in business.
Even Dani himself seems bewildered at the passing of that time. “It’s complete madness to think about,” says the man who, next year, will have known life outside the band for the same amount of time as he has within the eye of its storm. “The past few years, in particular, have been a real blur – touring the world, breaking new ground, playing some of our biggest shows ever.” He describes Bury Tomorrow’s last album – 2023’s The Seventh Sun, their first released with guitarist Ed Hartwell and vocalist/keyboardist Tom Prendergast – as “rejuvenating”; a fresh beginning in the wake of a period that was creatively and personally challenging, played out under the cloud of the pandemic.
If The Seventh Sun saw Bury Tomorrow splitting their gaze between plotting the future and respecting the past, Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience has its eyes firmly facing forwards. Add to those scribbled notepad words the likes of “violent” and “expansive”; “challenging”, too; “arty”, even, as Dani offers, though such a descriptor should be cause for intrigue, not alarm. The album’s prevailing heaviness – and make no mistake, this is a heavy record – exists in a multitude of forms, from the brute bludgeoning of recent single Waiting, to the malignant creep of Yōkai, and the unsettling deconstruction of Found No Throne. And tying the whole at-times uniquely disparate journey together, of course, are the words of Dani Winter-Bates.
For while Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience is a reminder that Bury Tomorrow remain a band with new things to say and new ways to say them, and it serves as one that proves its frontman’s message remains as vital as ever...
“The past few years have been a real blur – touring the world, breaking new ground, playing some of our biggest shows ever”
The easiest place to start with any story is at the beginning – except for the fact that, were you to ask Dani when Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience came into view, you’ll be met with some head-scratching, diary-checking and baffled non-commitment.
The album, you come to learn from all of this mental scrambling, didn’t so much happen by design and intent as evolution and inspiration. Practically speaking, the success of The Seventh Sun afforded more time on the road than Bury Tomorrow had long known; on exhausting journeys and in boring backstages, writing naturally fills the time. Every night, performing The Seventh Sun gave real-time feedback as to Bury Tomorrow 2.0’s fledgling steps into new creative spheres, which fuelled new ideas. Crucially, the album’s overwhelmingly positive response gave Bury Tomorrow a renewed sense of trust: in themselves, and their ability to continue to transcend the metalcore genre confines that had long proven comfortable but entrapping. “I think the only headspace we truly found ourselves in was a desire to continue to improve,” the frontman offers.
Such a headspace found an outlet in hitherto unconventional logistics. Rather than restrict Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience’s gestation to long-defined periods of writing, pre-production and recording, instead a half-dozen studio sessions across something in the region of a nine-month span were booked for snatched moments of downtime between touring commitments. In the interim, demos could be ripped apart, turned upside down and inside out, and stitched back together. It afforded Bury Tomorrow space and time to think. What would happen if they tried a song in the style of Dani’s beloved La Dispute? Should they have a go at writing a pop song? How about deathcore? The track Silence Isn’t Helping Us began life as something akin to a dance anthem.
“The art came in making sure all of that doesn’t end up sounding batshit crazy,” Dani jokes. “But you end up getting better songs for it, of that I’m sure. Because you’re not worried. You’re not finding the whole experience to be fucking awful. You’re not thinking about getting in, doing your part, and peacing out. You want to be there and enjoy the process. I think you miss that as you get older as a band. You miss that feeling of just writing and having a good time doing it.”
It’s a situation Dani and Bury Tomorrow knew all too well – the singer has been candid with Kerrang! in the past about the “unrest, the turmoil, [that] is long entrenched in our band’s history” – and, though now in the rear-view mirror, those experiences evidently still linger. Self-sabotage is a theme that gnaws through Will I Haunt You, With That Same Patience. “That was definitely a reality we were living through [for a time],” Dani says. “In an unhappy environment, creativity is the first thing to go. I don’t think we’d ever say we consciously sabotaged ourselves in the past, but yeah, I would say that it’s something we’ve known.”
As well as feeling revitalised by the personnel changes in their own ranks in 2021, Bury Tomorrow found similar refreshment behind the production desk this time around. Having helmed every Bury Tomorrow release since 2018’s The Black Flame, Dan Weller’s initial unavailability meant they turned to Carl Brown (Bullet For My Valentine, While She Sleeps, Sleep Token). It led, too, to working with a producer who was less “a part of the band, in songwriting and collaborative terms” as Dan had been, stepping off more to challenge Bury Tomorrow to take the creative reins fully.
“Carl was our number one choice when we knew Dan wasn’t going to be available,” Dani explains. “Dan has done such an enormous amount for our band, and been there for us through all of the shit, but we were probably due trying to switch things up and the timing offered us the opportunity to do that. We called Carl and his immediate response was, ‘I’ve been wanting this call from you for such a long time.’ The man is a genius. He creates a sense of space in music that I think heightens everything.”
Certainly, Carl’s fingerprints are evident over what Dani deems the most “expansive” Bury Tomorrow album yet. More subtle evolution than drastic revolution, Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience takes the band’s constituent signature parts and skilfully re-evaluates the impact and immediacy of their usage. Surprising deviations and intentionally jarring handbrake-turns are never far away. Take Villain Arc, for example, which dissolves into sparse emptiness at points of expected eruption, or the skittish Let Go, which dials up the potency of Dani’s coarsest vocals by only letting them off a tight leash for surgically precise moments.
“There’s always going to be space in Bury Tomorrow for riffs and breakdowns, and they are across the album – but they’re more fleeting and more impactful for it,” Dani says. “I think we’ve been more aware of the role the music has in conveying the emotion of the album, and not just leaving that to the lyrics. I think there’s so much more intricacy and nuance to this body of work. It has an atmosphere.”
It’s a rewriting of Bury Tomorrow’s boundaries that reflects the current state of the metalcore scene from which the band emerged, we put it to Dani. As with the output of many of their contemporaries, Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience isn’t so much not a metalcore record as one that simply questions what metalcore needs to be.
“It’s a great thing, because it just creates so many more lanes to explore,” he nods of the current scene’s individualism. “There was a spate of bands when we started out that were all completely interchangeable with each other,” he laughs, knowingly. “But now you have bands like Sleep Token, Bring Me, Spiritbox, Bad Omens, Loathe, who would traditionally all fall under a pretty similar genre banner, but they’re all creating something original in their own image. It’s helping bring new fans in, it’s helping keep this scene alive and healthy, and I think everyone is pushing each other to be at their best creatively. It puts a certain pressure on you, absolutely, especially when it comes to those ‘shock’ moments that everyone is searching for. But I think it’s a great thing for music.”
“Bands are helping keep this scene alive and healthy, and I think everyone is pushing each other to be at their best creatively”
There’s a famous saying that “to live without hope is to cease to live”. It’s a sentiment Dani Winter-Bates would undoubtedly subscribe to.
Hope is a theme, after all, that is stitched throughout Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience – the search for it, the longing for it, the absence of it, the power of it, the necessity of it. Whether turning its spotlight onto the divisions of the wider world (‘There’s no antidote / Violence is their only hope’ – Wasteland), or looking inwards to the disconnect of self (‘Emotionally devoid, incapable of hope’ – What If I Burn), it’s four small but impactful letters etched into seven of Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience’s 11 tracks.
The idea of Dani as an inherently hopeful person feels at odds with much of his recent lyrical output, since 2020’s Cannibal album saw him move away from the “demi-concepts” of records such as Union Of Crowns (2012) and Black Flame (2018), and instead commit to mining his own personal traumas as a foundation for starkly naked lyricism. Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience pulls no punches in that regard. There are stifling, suffocating ruminations on mental health, anxiety and dissociation with the world. Many of the album’s greatest horrors are those that come from within. ‘I’m being buried alive by the weight of my mind,’ he reveals on opener To Dream, To Forget. On the ferocious Yōkai, meanwhile, Dani sings: ‘If you wrap the fucking noose around my neck / I’ll jump and pray I hear the snap ringing in the back of my head.’ There’s a numbness and despondency to its worldview. You’d have serious concerns about a loved one expressing to you the sentiments contained in these songs.
“I go there a lot,” Dani says of the pitch-black headspace that enshrouds the album. His writing style was initially somewhere close to the school of automatism, a “dictation of thought” where pen meets paper free from conscious direction, refined and polished later in the studio. “I want to call it for what it is, which is that the world is on fire, and it takes us going to the darkest places for us to find other people and connect with them, and in many ways that’s what the whole record is about. There’s a juxtaposition, even in the title [with that in mind, Dani is semi-jokingly insistent that the people refer to the album by its full name]. It’s a constant ache, and this constant togetherness in experiencing that ache.
“Since Cannibal I really learned to give myself permission to go to those places and those topics. Because it is still the place where I can put those thoughts, put them to bed and be free of them. Writing is still my greatest catharsis. And so the record explores things like grief, and it goes into loss, and ill health, and the diminishment of aspiration. But that’s where I take myself, and I’m glad that I do, because it’s created a more intense environment for our band to connect with people on a whole different level – a place where they can safely face their own struggles and be relinquished of the burden of them.”
Yet through it all, those four little letters glisten gently beneath the muddy water on the album’s surface.
Is hope the only thing we have?
“When you say only, I think that gives it a negative overtone,” Dani begins. “I think we can reframe that in the sense that hope is the only thing we have because it’s the only thing that connects us all when no-one knows what the future will bring. But life is about holding on to those tiny moments of hope every single day, isn’t it? Hope is the only reason we have to continue. So yeah, I definitely still have hope. I have to.”
The frontman finds his own hope close to home. His tenure working for the National Health Service has been as long as that in Bury Tomorrow. Hope comes from the compassion and fortitude on show daily from his colleagues who are overworked, underpaid, and scapegoated and vilified for the honour by a succession of bad actors running the country. His current role as the Head of Inclusion and Sustainability sees him “witness people go up against some of the very worst behaviours and still stand up and stand with each other”, people who “amid all the chaos, and the working conditions, and the tiredness, caring for other people, and finding the joy in providing that care. It’s remarkable to me.” He preaches a simple mantra: “When you look around, I think you can find something to be hopeful for every day.”
“I’m not a religious person, but whatever you believe in, or whatever you don’t believe in, it’s always going to be the same at the end. Death is the only certainty. So what we can all hope for is: how can we make every moment as positive as it possibly can be? I’ve got one chance at life. That’s it. And I want to make sure that I’m continuing to kind of drive forward positivity and connection and good as best as I possibly can. Because if I’m wrong, and there is something at the end, and there is someone weighing my scales, at least I can say I’ve done the best I can in my life in and out of the band to make the world a slightly better place.
“That’s win-win, isn’t it?”
Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience is released on May 16 via Music For Nations / Sony Music
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