“I made a promise to tell the truth, and the first person you’re telling the truth to is yourself”: How Sick Joy hit bottom, cleaned up and faced reality

“This is my whole life,” admits Mykl Barton, barely one minute into his conversation with Kerrang!. “I don't have anything else outside of this.”

Dressed in the elegant combination of white shirt and blazer that’s plastered across his press images and the terrifying video for Sick Joy's Anything Goes, the grey area between Mykl and his alt.rock band feels paper thin.

If anything, they are conjoined entities. Having downsized from three members to one since their 2022 debut WE’RE ALL GONNA F***ING DIE, Mykl feels “uncomfortable” calling Sick Joy a solo project. Nevertheless, the roots run deep enough for it to effectively define how he views his personality.

“The idea [that] you get to be who you actually are when you're onstage or writing – it's this bit that's not real,” he explains, referring to everyday life. “When I'm out buying a coffee or whatever, that is the thing that's been covered with social pressure, expectation or the code of the world. So, when you actually get up and play the music, it’s like, ‘This is who I actually am.’ I stop doing this and shut him out? Fuck knows what – or where – I'll be.”

The good news for Mykl – and their fans – is that Sick Joy aren’t going anywhere. This Friday they will unleash their second LP More Forever and continue their tradition of playing London to celebrate, after opening Pearl Jam’s BST Hyde Park extravaganza when their debut landed. Equal parts gnarly and moody, More Forever channels the alt.rock spirit of QOTSA and Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, fronted by Mykl’s stark songwriting.

While the frontman split his time between his Brighton base and Geordie roots, carving out the necessary time and funds to release the record independently, bassist Danny Pitson and drummer Sam Rattray departed. Leaving Mykl with the task to “put the wheels on bus while you’re driving the fucking thing”, the logistical hurdles between Sick Joy and More Forever added to the challenges that Mykl was experiencing in his personal life.

“I'd gotten sober for a period of time. I don't want to make it a ‘thing’, but it was an interesting point in my life, and I've struggled with it back and forward,” he says. “My health wasn't very good for a period of time, and identity has become a focal point that runs through the record, delving into consciousness and fucking meaning – if any. I read a lot of different books by a lot of different folks, trying to keep it together, and I feel like I did. The album feels like the culmination of it. It's good to make something good out of something shit.”

Written and recorded between the South Coast, the North East and rural Spain, the songs on More Forever are not defined by fragments of these three locations, but the imaginary space between the lines that birthed them.

“The songs are coming from some other place between asleep and awake,” clarifies Mykl. “You can get yourself into a place that's quite clouded [as a songwriter]. It's that little window after… it’ll come out in a melody, and you're like, ‘Fuck, I've got to grab it.’ As soon as you grab the little idea, you’ve got to keep jumping on it.”

Not only did Mykl have to grab the revelations within More Forever, he had to face up to them. Pile-driving cut All Damage express the unstoppable “fucking mess” he finds himself in, while the piano-led Nothing Good marks the resultant conversation with himself: ‘You give me nothing good.’

“More Forever was a realisation of trying to run from things that I might not have necessarily even been aware that I was running from,” Mykl explains. “There was a point where I [wanted] to disappear as hard as I possibly could, almost a signpost that I was living with the phrase ‘More Forever’ in my head. Enough is never enough, and [it’s about] being able to go, ‘You're living with this thing – you're gonna have to do something about that.’ Perception is a big part of being able to change.”

After acknowledgment, Mykl began to accept his duty to take action and grow from his circumstances. Penultimate track Somebody Else was written from a voice that seeks to shed any falsehood or pretence: ‘So bring on the funeral / I think I’ve been somebody else / I think I’ve been lying to myself.’

“As part of early sobriety, I made a promise to tell the truth, and the first person you're telling the truth to is yourself,” he continues. “It sucks that terrible things have gone on in my life, your life, everybody's lives, but it's your responsibility to do something about it. ‘Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you’ – it's a [French philosopher Jean-Paul] Sartre quote. Do I want to get eaten away and annihilate myself, or is that giving the power back to the wrong place?”

After confronting and questioning his identity on More Forever, the journey will continue for Mykl, hellbent on continuing to create under the Sick Joy moniker for the foreseeable future. That desire for longevity comes with an acceptance that the road ahead will inevitably be fraught with more obstacles and reckoning. But it doesn’t faze him. No matter what comes in the way, the purpose of his art remains purely “for [my] own expression”.

“I'm supremely grateful that you're having a conversation with us, but I understand at some stage, nobody's going to want to talk to anybody about it,” he muses. “All things end – everything dies – which is another theme of the record. It's finding the comfort with, ‘I'm going to be doing it anyway.’ As long as you're doing it for yourself and trying to keep moving towards authenticity, it's going to have some merit.”

More Forever is self-released on January 30

Read this next:

• Sick Joy’s track-by-track guide to WE’RE ALL GONNA F***ING DIE
• “I hated my life. I was blacking out to cope. Now I feel like a different person”: How James Veck-Gilodi started again and found peace
• Marmozets: “We had to fight to get back to where we are now”