Welcome to In Conversation, our interview column where we chat to our favourite artists who are producing incredible music. We now have our final 2000trees interview. Joe spoke with Justine Jones of Employed to Serve about performing their new songs live, the Church Road presence at 2000trees, and their visit to the Warhammer museum in Nottingham.
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Joe: I’ve not seen you guys at a festival since All Points East 2019.
Justine: Oh, hell yeah. That was fun.
Joe: The infamous All Points East, where they just did one metal year and then stopped. One and done, it didn’t quite translate.
Justine: It didn’t, but the thing is, though, I feel like it was really fun. There were more than enough people. I was proud of metal. I felt like they showed up.
Joe: How has your new stuff been received? How are you finding the new stuff going down live?
Justine: Yeah, really well. I quite enjoy playing new stuff. You never know how. Obviously, it’s new. As it says on the tin, you don’t know how people are going to react to it. So it’s really fun playing the new album, and your favourites might not be other people’s favourites. They might really pop off to something that you hadn’t thought of, and that’s quite a rewarding thing. As a band, you sort of sit on material for a while because it goes through demo stages. It takes a couple of years, realistically, by the time it’s the finished thing that you release into the world. So by then, it’s old hat and you have your sort of firm favourites, but they can change as you play them live. There are certain songs that I’m like, ‘I fucking love playing this live‘, but it isn’t necessarily my favourite to listen to, if that makes sense.
Joe: I feel like you’ve now got a really good mix of bangers you can just play live. You’ve got stuff from Eternal Forward Motion, then Conquering, and then the new stuff, and it all just feels really fresh. You’ve said the new tracks are written for these larger stages?
Justine: Yeah, 100%. I love my mathcore and the more sort of Converge-style metalcore. That’s where it started. What kind of reignited my love for metal. And that will always have a place, but it’s just one of those things; when we started playing in slightly bigger venues, it was really hard to get that same reaction from playing it live. And I feel like playing live is very much a two-way street; it’s our enjoyment and theirs. And also, we just sort of ended up going back to our old loves: Slipknot and Korn, and bands like that have always been a part of our stuff. I feel like the bands that got you into the genre, they almost sort of take a backseat whilst you discover new things, and then you almost come home to them.
And I feel like that’s what’s kind of happened to us. We had the newer bands that we just sort of fucking loved and got really stoked on, and then we just sort of went back to our listening roots. More thrash metal, realistically, and a bit of nu-metal, and it’s been really fun for us. Realistically, we’re five albums in now, and we didn’t want to rewrite the same album over and over again. That’s not fun for anyone. It’s just been a real progression and journey.
Joe: I think that’s what I really enjoy about your stuff. I love the new album. I feel like I can go through your discography, and it all feels nice and fresh. I really enjoy that. The way you guys have evolved has just felt really cool.
Justine: Yeah, I think the real big thing for us is to stay… not ‘current’ because we want to stay in vogue or anything like that, but just to still be excited. I think that’s when bands lose their mojo is when they kind of lose interest in why they started in the first place. For me, running the record label and doing press and things like that, it constantly forces you to listen to what’s new and current, even if you don’t feel like it, because you’d otherwise go to your comfort list. And it’s super exciting. It’s like never been better.
Joe: What I find interesting about you guys as well is, so I know last night you played Liverpool, and you do these really small venues. I remember seeing you guys at the Underworld show the week before lockdown……
Justine: Oh yeah, I got COVID from that show.
Joe: I remember going to that, and we were all there thinking, ‘I’m not sure we should be here.’
Justine: I thought it was a load of rubbish. People were like, ‘Yeah, I’m really sorry, I’m going to cancel your shows‘, and I was like, ‘What, for a cold?‘. I thought it was nonsense, and then two days later, I was like, ‘Oh…‘. When we were out and about during that tour, I was getting meal deals or whatever from Sainsbury’s, and the shelves were empty. I didn’t look at the news at that point, I still try not to, I just thought it was nonsense. It was quite funny, in hindsight, looking back at that time.
Joe: Yeah, I remember that show went off. I might have imagined it, but I feel like everyone was going a bit harder, with the stage diving and everything. I remember that show getting a bit mental because it was like it was everyone’s last chance for it. That was when you were in your windbreaker, wasn’t it?
Justine: Honestly. We felt like we looked cool, but we did not feel cool.
Joe: So my point with that is, you did Liverpool last night with Rozemary and someone else I can’t remember…
Justine: Cage Fight, yeah. And we also did Nottingham the night before with Red Method, Cage Fight, and Vower.
Joe: Have you always had a sense of needing to do these local shows? To support local venues and bring on local bands?
Justine: It doesn’t even go as deep as that. It’s literally, if you book us, we’ll come. I like going to different cities I wouldn’t necessarily think of visiting, and I like that about being in a band. It’s like speed tourism, and you get to see all these lovely places. You get to have a snippet of each scene. I think that’s a really exciting thing. That’s where we grow. We’re still very much growing as a band. Although we do, very luckily, get the festival slots and tours that we do, we’re still a small band in the grand scheme of things, relatively speaking. So you live in the club shows and, yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever leave that.
Joe: The nice thing about seeing you at a festival like this is the Church Road Records presence. There are a lot of Church Road bands on this line-up. We saw Hidden Mothers this morning, who were really good. We also saw Grief Ritual on Thursday. From a label point of view now, how important do you think 2000trees is for supporting and showcasing those Church Road bands?
Justine: It’s not about always wanting to play the bigger festival, because I think there is absolutely just as much value in playing smaller, homegrown festivals like this. I have a huge love for 2000trees, and there are probably loads of festivals I’m forgetting to mention right now, but it is so important. With the bigger festivals, as much as I adore them, you get a less, I’m going to say in a very fond way, ‘nerdy‘ crowd. I love it when people rock up here and they have a fucking schedule. I love the fact that they’re like, ‘I don’t know this band, let’s nerd out about this. Let’s go check out this band‘. It’s super important because there’s no way these bands will ever get big without festivals like this giving them a chance. I don’t even want to sound patronising; I don’t feel this is a small festival. This is big in my mind.
Joe: I feel a lot with the Church Road bands, the ethos you have seems to be that you always sign bands who are really hardworking and put out great stuff. They’ve got that drive, like they’re going to put a shift in? Even Still In Love, who you signed recently, they’ve been doing a bunch of shows recently with Terminal Sleep. Is that something you also keep in mind when you’re deciding who to work with?
Justine: I always book bands that are just as hungry as I am, just as stoked and just as excited. I’ve always wanted to stay true to my 13, 14-year-old self that discovered this music and found my place in it. And I need that to be reflected in the people that I work with. And that doesn’t necessarily mean live shows, because I understand the economy is really hard right now. It’s the spirit of it. As lame as it sounds, it’s the spirit and the excitement and just the buzz of it. It kind of always reminds me of my young self, where I was like, ‘This is my thing‘. And that’s what I look for in bands. I look for bands that are excited about new music, excited about supporting their mates’ bands. Even if, for example, you start a band at the same time and that band skyrockets, I don’t like things like jealousy. I like bands being like, ‘My boys, my girls are getting big and that’s lit‘. I like the sort of community aspect of metal. That’s what I look for. I want our bands to all be in the pub with each other, to lift each other up, because it takes more than one band to support a scene.
Joe: My final one, and this is from Joe, our other Joe, who’s our photographer. The man loves Warhammer. His question was: How was the Warhammer museum? Did it do anything for you guys?
Justine: Oh, it was really awesome. So, a little backstory: Casey, our drummer, has read all the books. And I’ve read the first one, Horus Rising from the Horus Heresy series, it’s really good, and I like reading. Our guitarist, David, got into it in a big way because he’s read all the books and got really into the painting. It was really cool, I lived vicariously through them. As much as I like to joke around that it’s nerd stuff, we’re all nerds here. I really enjoyed seeing how stoked he was, and Nathan as well. Most of our band are into Warhammer, apart from me and Sammy, who are just more into metal. It was really special. It was just really cool. It was almost like going to a music festival or a venue where everyone was excited and there for one purpose. It was people who didn’t necessarily fit in with the mainstream and found something they really resonated with and get jazzed about. I really enjoyed living vicariously through those people who were like, ‘This is fucking my church, my temple‘.
Thanks to Justine for sitting down with us to have a chat at 2000trees. You can check out our coverage of their 2000trees festival set here.