There is a moment, watching a band hit a festival main stage, when you can tell whether they are fighting for the crowd or simply soaking it up. When Black Veil Brides played their seventh Download Festival, it was clearly the latter. The field was packed back over the hill, the circle pits were churning, and somewhere in the middle of it were crowd surfers dressed as a banana, a cow and Cookie Monster. The fire was lit, the wind was up, and none of it threw them. We grabbed Jake Pitts (lead guitar) and Jinxx (rhythm guitar and violin) as they came off, still buzzing.
They reckon it was the best crowd they have had at the festival so far. For a band who grew up dreaming about exactly this, the main stage at Download is full circle. For Jinxx it reaches back to the Monsters of Rock bills of the eighties. For Jake it was staring at magazine photos of Slipknot at Download as a kid, thinking maybe, one day. Seven appearances in, it still feels faintly surreal.
What stood out was how calm they were. Usually, Jake says, the main stage brings nerves. Getting older has come with a strange anxiety, sometimes close to a panic attack mid-set. This time, none of it. “It just felt like being at home,” he says, and that word, home, kept surfacing. Download as one big family. From where we were watching, it showed. A perfect set on a perfect day, and at Download it was not even raining.
Then there is Vindicate, the new album, and the reason a lot of people who once wrote this band off are suddenly listening. The press have been calling it cinematic, and the band do not argue, with Jinxx weaving strings and orchestration through it. But the real headline is that it is heavy. The heaviest thing they have ever released, and the most serious. Black Veil Brides have always been theatrical. With the war paint and makeup set aside these days, the drama has moved into the music instead.
Jake produced Vindicate himself, and he went in determined to disrupt his own habits. “I really tried to flip everything I’d typically do upside down,” he tells us, “the riff writing, the melody writing, everything. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and create something I wouldn’t normally do.” Years alongside other producers fed into it. “My mindset’s changed,” he says. “We’ve worked with so many great producers over the years, so I’ve picked up things here and there from everybody. It’s a learning experience, and things I can take and put into my own style.”
The biggest change is in how the songs start. “In the past, Jinxx and I would have entire songs written musically, going back and forth,” Jake explains. “I’ll have a riff and he’ll know where to take it next.” Now he often works the other way round. “Lately I’ve stepped more into a producer-songwriter role. I’ll start a song with a vocal melody and build around it. A lot of the new stuff started with a chorus melody. Get the chorus first, and then you can build everything else around it.” The old way has not gone entirely, though. “There’s no right or wrong way to write a song,” he says. “There’s a million different ways you can do it.”
The title track proves the point. ‘Vindicate’ began with an accordion sample Jake stumbled across. “I heard it and thought, this is the dumbest thing,” he says. “But I instantly heard where to take it, in a metal song with crazy blast beats. It’s funny where you find inspiration.” The whole song arrived at once. “I recorded it, and it took maybe an hour to have the thing musically done.” Its working title, fittingly, was “Clown,” because it sounded like circus music. Ask him to picture the song as a room and you get the full image: a mess, like a tornado hit it, a circusy space full of creepy clowns that smells of stale cigarettes. Chaos by design.
That instinct for catching ideas wherever they land runs through everything. “An idea pops into my head when I’m driving, or getting out of the shower, or brushing my teeth,” Jake says. “By the time I get into my studio and open Pro Tools, that idea is long gone. So the voice note app on your phone is your best friend.” However daft it feels. “As stupid as it sounds, I’m literally humming an acoustic guitar melody, then the vocal melody, and my brain just takes me on this journey. By the end I’ve got a whole song in a voice note.” As Jinxx describes it, the phone is bottomless, voice memo after voice memo of half-formed songs. One recent acoustic idea has already grown into a ballad for the next record, which they have been chipping at on tour.
For a band judged for years on the eyeliner rather than the songs, Vindicate feels like the turn. They are drawing in new listeners and new fans, people who had filed them under the makeup era and never looked back. Heavier, more serious, far harder to ignore. The title was well chosen.
As for what comes next, there is plenty of it. More touring behind Vindicate, a headline US run in the autumn, further dates early next year still under wraps, and the next album already taking shape in the gaps. Straight after Download came a quick run of UK shows, taking in Brighton, Liverpool and London. We were there for the London night, and our review of it is up on the site, read it here.
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