“I don’t want to mess up this perfect opportunity. I really want to help people”: Inside Vended’s debut album

After a long wait, Iowa metal squadron Vended will finally release their self-titled debut album this week. If you’ve caught them live at any point, such as their scorching turn at Bloodstock 2022, you’ll already know it’s going to sound like a band being backed full of dynamite and sent into a furnace.

We caught up with singer Griffin Taylor to get the lowdown on one of the most hotly-anticipated metal albums of the year...

“This is a cool intro, but it’s on my boys. I was asleep while it was all happening. I was probably in the back room, passed out on the couch going, ‘Oh god, it’s three in the afternoon. I want to go back to bed!’”

“This was the last song that I wrote. We were out in Bakersfield, just recording, recording, recording, and I was writing, writing, writing. I was kind of out of ideas at by that point: ‘What is this last song going to be?’ And then I thought, ‘Let’s just write a fucking anthem song, a song for the crowd and what we want our crowd to be.’ I love it when fans get painted up in either our make-up or their own, and when they dress up and all that shit. I wanted an anthem for them, about them.

“It’s really aggressive and hard. We sometimes have issues practicing and performing that song, because when we were recording it, the other guys were on four cans of Monster a day. So it’s fast as fuck on the recording, but I remember the first time getting ready to play it live being like, ‘Fuck, how are we gonna do this?!’”

“The Far Side was a bit tricky for me to write because I had an idea in mind, but I didn’t know how to say it. It’s about really shitty days being your best days, but there’s a specific way I’m trying to say it. It’s not like you got fired or you stubbed your toe or some shit like that. It’s more that feeling where it’s a shitty day outside, but that’s the best type of melancholy for you. In the bridge it goes, ‘When it finally rains I get a sense of something more / I wish I could say I feel better.’ You get that on those days where it’s stormy outside, and you start figuring yourself out and start fixing certain problems in your head – problems that don’t matter, but they matter to you. Legitimately, it’s just a description of a shitty day outside and you’re figuring yourself out.”

“This is a love note to our fans. It’s genuinely about me being very anxious and very afraid of fucking up a huge opportunity that I’ve been given – whether that be in the future or in the past. It’s me saying: ‘Am I the only one who has the guts to say that I’m wrong about something?’ A lot of people in the industry will do something bad and then just fight, fight, fight, and not take responsibility.

“A lot of this is coming from my anxiety, being afraid of a ghost, being afraid of the future and if something happens. Over the years as I’ve matured and had adult talks about what life is like, and how you go through things, I’ve learned a lot of ways of dealing with that. You find out that not everybody has their shit figured out. When you’re a kid, you see a bunch of adults and you think they know what they’re doing, but a lot of the time people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and they just do things in the moment, or as a reflex.

“So, thinking of that, this is about me not wanting to fucking mess up this perfect opportunity to help people. I really want to help people. I really want to make people feel better about their day. I don’t want to lose that gift, because it’s the only thing that I have going for me.”

“This wasn’t on me, it was everyone else. They wanted to do something that wasn’t our sound, but gave us an opportunity to experiment. It’s all my boys, and I love it. It really puts you in a mood, gets you fucking snapping away, wiggling your finger. It just shows how fucking talented my boys are.”

“I get asked about Nihilism, and the question is: ‘Am I a nihilist?’ No, I am not a nihilist. That’s not what the song is about. It isn’t about me being a nihilist and thinking that nothing matters. It’s legitimately a metaphor that comes from my anxiety and my social issues and overall depression.

“I was sitting in my room, it was storming outside, and there was a part of me that really wanted to go out and hang out with my friends, and then there was a part of me that just wanted to fucking wallow and lay in my bed and not do anything. The back of my head was going, ‘Even if you went out and hung out with your friends, it wouldn’t matter.’ The song is very much me expressing my self-isolation and my social anxiety and my self-deprecation. There’s a part of me that feels like my friends don’t want to see me, and there’s a part of me that feels like a lot of my friends are using me, and that’s just fucking anxiety psyching me out and making me feel worse.

“As time has passed, I’ve been getting out a lot more. Outside of Vended, I’m working, I’m making money, and I’m doing a lot of things that have gotten me out of my headspace and gotten me out of the house. That’s made me feel so much fucking better about myself. I’ve been talking about it in therapy, and there’s still a lot more that I need to talk about in therapy, but it’s all just a fucking road that you’ve got to walk on. That’s life. You’ve just got to keep moving, and know that a lot of it is you psyching yourself out. There’s probably plenty of factors that are going into that, like you didn’t eat properly, too much caffeine, you’re sleeping in a lot... which fucking sums up my life.”

“Pitiful is a story about when I really recognised that I was having a panic attack. We were on the road in Europe, and it was legitimately because I had way too much fucking coffee. Now, in Germany, their coffee is strong, man. And I didn’t know. I was just drinking it because it tasted good. It was early in the morning, it was nice scenery, there was a lot of good smells around me, and I was drinking coffee at the fucking hotel that we were staying in.

“So, I’m thousands of miles away from home, doing a lot of things that I’d dreamt about doing since I was a kid, and it all got to me for some reason. We were driving, I was freaking the fuck out, and I had to ask to pull over. I had to ground myself on one of those road poles. It was really fucking scary. My bandmates were like, ‘You had a panic attack.’ That’s what that feels like? It was over something that didn’t really matter. It drove me to start going into therapy and going to psychiatry once I got back home. I fucking spewed out all the shit that’s been bothering me and that I wanted to work on, and ever since then I’ve being going to a therapist and I’ve been feeling so much better about myself. I’ve been working on issues and past traumatic events that I’ve gone through. That’s pretty much where Pitiful came from: being pitifully in a panic attack, and it driving me to get help.”

“We were staying in an Airbnb in Bakersfield when we were recording. We were being boys, but I was still in a real depression, and I realised that me being in a funk was affecting the people around me. Serenity is about what it was like for me, being in such a depressive state, isolating myself and really feeling bad for myself, but trying to motivate myself and telling myself what I am and what I’m not. It’s me saying I’m going to feel better about myself. Eventually I’m going to be better to be with, and feel better and not be so combative out of the blue when someone shouts my name. When that happens I flinch, because I’m like, ‘Fuck, fuck. Someone acknowledges my existence!’ It’s my favourite song, and a lot of what I put into it therapeutically helped me.”

“That one is a tricky bugger. I wanted to write the song about the internet or social media, and how everything is in your face 24/7. It was driving me insane, constantly, constantly, constantly seeing shit, but I couldn’t fucking pull myself away from the screen. And then, after the song was written and recorded, I realised that I wanted the song to be about interviews. Some people do interviews with me and my band and expect us to be a certain way, and if we contradict what their mindset is, because they think that we’re big people, they think that we’re little kids just being little shits. It's also a criticism on how journalism is done nowadays, where everyone is just getting views and that’s all they care about – not the right information. That’s journalism in general, outside the music industry as well as in it. Obviously, this is not a critique of this interview. We love Kerrang!.”

“That’s about growing up. It’s about realising some of the adults that you looked up to, a lot of the times those people don’t have your best interest at heart. When you’re growing up, you think the world is sunshine and rainbows for some people. And then as you get older, you realise that it’s a fucking circus, dude. It’s a shithole. Everyone is up each other’s ass. Everyone’s got an agenda. Everyone’s got something that they want to fucking say to you. And a lot of times you’re just like: ‘Fuck off.’

“The song is about the death of innocence. It’s about realising you’re not special, and no-one else is, and everyone’s just trying to grasp at straws to justify their existence. And that goes for me as well. There are 1,000 people better than I am, but I’m trying my best, and I’m still trying to give myself a reason to wake up in the morning.”

“That one was really confusing to do. We wanted an interlude, and had a bunch of ideas, and it sounded great, but we were just going, ‘Are we doing this right?’ I wasn’t getting any feedback from Chris [Collier, producer] about what I was doing with my vocals. The only time I heard from him was when I started doing, ‘Daylight come and me want to go home,’ and I just heard him go, ‘Griffin! Stop it!’ It’s weird, but it was fun.”

“It’s got the ‘Fuck you’ shout in it, which we do as our ending at shows now. I don’t really know what the song’s about. I think Downfall was, as I was thinking of it, a feeling of falling down to Hell. I just went, ‘Fuck it,’ and l kept writing. It’s so good, and it really gets you fucking amped. It’s such a short song, too, but it still packs it all in. It’s a cool way to end the album. It’s so heavy, it says, ‘Fuck you,’ and it’s a good pre-ending for everything you’ve been listening to.”

“It’s an outro, but it finishes the sentence: Ones Downfall As We Know It. I didn’t know what I really wanted to do, but the others were like, ‘How about you write some lyrics on this interlude?’ So I did four sentences: ‘Welcome to the world as we know it / Everyone seems caught in their moment / Welcome to the world as I know it / I couldn’t make my own, so I wrote it.’ That’s really just me trying to justify why I’m writing, why I wrote this album, why we made this album. It was us trying to start our world and start our community, and give people a safe place to be in. And not only a safe place for the fans, but a safe place for us, too. It’s a safe place for us to be ourselves, to do what we can, and to make sure that we keep the music alive.”

Vended is released on September 20

Read this next:

• Vended: “It’s about world domination and being the biggest band in the fucking world”
• 14 rock and metal songs that are legitimately terrifying
• Vended’s Griffin Taylor: The 10 songs that changed my life