“…And Justice For All is a blueprint!” exclaims Josh Middleton. With their new album Dormant Heart out on January 12^th via Nuclear Blast, in the second of our two features, the Sylosis guitarist/vocalist and mainman spoke to Ghost Cult to argue the case for progressive thrash, and why he’s turned to the Dark Side…

In terms of standing out on their own, while everyone else is obsessed with making each album “more extreme”, “more brutal” or “more ‘us’”, Sylosis have taken the unusual step of looking to make a stand alone album that says something in and of itself, but is not necessarily representative of the band as a whole or their direction of travel. The Sylosis sound and the trademark technicality in the playing is there, as is the progressive thrash that the band are renowned for, but added to that is a pervading sense of despondency and despair, an influence, in part that comes from not finding much to inspire in the current music scene.

“(The darker sound) came naturally. We naturally gravitate to darker music and dark imagery, anyway, but as I say, there are not many modern bands that do it for me, really, so if I do listen to more modern bands, it does tend to be the dark, doom bands and some of that bleeds across into our music. But, as much as we have gone for a really dark, gloomy album it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is a direction we’re going to keep going down in the future, but we wanted this album to be its own thing.

“We’ve established ourselves as a band now; people know what we do, and at the heart of what we do is Thrash.  But we wanted to try something different, and that starts with the opening track, doing the exact opposite of what we normally do – which is normally a long, progressive thrash song. So we did a short, doomy one, more of an intro track, that was really about setting the tone for the album. But that said, although it’s a darker album, there’s still tonnes of thrash on it, but we wanted to make it more varied that we’ve done in the past.”

For a band with a reputation for being technically able craftsmen of their weapons of choice, the guitar, this meant looking at, maybe not innovative, but alternate ways of expanding their proficiency and their arsenal.

“In terms of the guitars we wanted to up our game on this one. We’re always going to be known for doing the technical guitar stuff, and on one of the tracks, ‘Harm’, there’s a lot of sweep-picking and we had both guitars harmonising while sweep-picking and we’re definitely trying to expand and capitalise on our technical side, but overall there is more variety and while we’re definitely not going to start getting slower, we wanted this album to be dark and to be about the atmosphere.”

The lyrical concepts of a frustration with the pervasiveness in society of human apathy add to the frustration and despair that is ubiquitous throughout the album. “The music always comes first and then we take the lyrics and match them to the music, though even if the music was different in this case, lyrically it would probably have come out quite similarly as it’s just where my head was at when we were writing the album, though with the music being a lot darker and more sinister it helped the concepts to fit.”

“It’s been a long time coming, this one”, enthuses Middleton. “We started writing a couple of years ago and we began recording it back in March (2014), so by the time it comes out it’ll have been ten months from the start to it being released, so it’s been a long wait. We didn’t tell anyone we were going in the studio to begin with just in case we ran into any delays, which we did, so we had to keep it secret for quite a long time, but now it’s coming out.

“I’m really excited. We’re really proud of it.”

Words by STEVE TOVEY