Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Joe sat down with Wilkie of Malevolence to discuss their upcoming record, DIY mentality and the recent Architects tour.
Joe: It’s been five years since Self Supremacy released, how has your writing process changed since then?
Wilkie: It’s changed loads, between Self-Supremacy and Malicious Intent, we did an EP called the other side. Back in the Self Supremacy era, those songs were generally written several years before, even in like 2015 or 2014. We would write together in a practice room, in a real traditional way of bands writing music. It might not have been all of us, at least three or four of us. Josh (Lead guitarist), he’s the dude for the riffs, neither Konan nor I write the riffs in Malev. We’d be in a room together like “yeah I have this idea”, put some drums to it and then show me how to play it. We’d jam along and then be like “what if we put this next”, and that’s how we wrote songs back then.
Now we do it much more digitally, Josh writes music at home and in studio. Sits riffing out making loads of riffs and programme drums for them, then makes melodies. Make rough kind of songs and put them up into a Dropbox. For our latest album there were 20 songs in the Dropbox of rough ideas he had. He will ask for our opinions of them and tell him what sections, breakdowns etc we like. Then from there they will get pieced together into what they are now. So yeah, the song writing process has changed, it’s more modern and less traditional. It’s way more efficient than it was previously.
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Joe: Do you have any reflections on Self-Supremacy?
Wilkie: I listen back to it now, first of all there’s a bit of filler on there, there’s a few songs on there that shouldn’t have made the cut. It’s quite a long album, there could have been a couple less songs and further refined some of the songs. With Malicious Intent we have a more traditional song structure where there’s verse/chorus/verse/chorus/breakdown/bridge. On Self Supremacy the structure is like A/B/D/C/D/E/F….and constantly changing and moving. Which is cool but it’s not always necessary, leading to the songs being 5 and a half minutes with a million different parts. Which doesn’t always make for the best or catchiest songs, we’ve matured a lot in that sense. There’s still songs on there that we will be playing forever and are our biggest songs, the title track is one of our best songs to this day.
Joe: Does Malicious Intent Feel like a new journey for Malev?
Wilkie: It seems that way, in a number of different ways. Musically I believe we’ve progressed, there’s more singing and the songs are slightly more singing. We play different shows now, the vibe is very different to what it was back in the Self Supremacy era of Malev. The shows then were more hardcore with a harder vibe, and now we play more metal shows which are a bit bigger. It feels like the start of a new journey musically and the way we’re perceived by people. I do feel like we’re a different band.
Joe: What’s it been like performing at larger venues like Ally Pally versus smaller venues such as New Cross Inn?
Wilkie: It’s a completely different experience, in every possible way. Doing these really big ones is new for me, outside of a festival. Doing these arenas is very different, the show is very different. On recent Architect tours, that was the first tour we did performing with in ear monitors. I’m not moving around as much on stage as I know there’s more scrutiny on our performance, their sound systems are fucking massive. I’m just thinking, “right there’s someone at the back of this room who can hear everything”. Every single individual element of what’s happening so I need to make sure I’m playing tight as fuck. Now obviously, that is similar when we play a 200 cap venue. When we play in those small rooms, it’s chaotic. There’s so much energy from the crowd with people climbing on the stage and diving off it. We probably move around more, a little bit less scrutiny on your playing as people aren’t scrutinising your playing as much because of the carnage. I’m not saying we give more to the bigger shows but it makes you perform in a different way.
I don’t want to say we give it 100% at Ally Pally and only 60% at a smaller venue, you just end up being conscious of different things. When you’re on a big stage and there’s a barrier between you and the crowd, it makes you feel like you’re performing and there’s loads and loads of people watching on Youtube. For example in the “Broken Glass” video, at that show there’s 70 of my friends on stage with me. People jumping off the stage and screaming the lyrics, which gives us so much energy and it makes us go a bit more mad with moving around. The big ones I feel like my actual playing is being scrutinised more so I try and play tight.
Joe: Did you get any learnings from doing the Architects tour?
Wilkie: I learnt a lot on that tour, even on just a day of show on how it operates on arena tours. With your schedule and code of conduct on that level, for example on that arena tour they build the stage each day and there’s hundreds and hundreds of people working on it. They’re in the venue at 7am building the stage from scratch, before this tour I always thought there were stages in arenas. I always assumed you go to a venue and there’s a stage with speakers that you can play on. They have to build the whole stage, the whole PA and all of the monitors. Everything you see is carried around with Architects as part of their production. That whole experience was brand new for me, which is mental given how long we’ve been doing this. It’s taught us what we need to bring with us to deliver a good show at that level; a lightning guy, a front of house sound guy, crew member on stage in-case anything goes wrong. Whereas we might not have that at smaller shows.
Joe: How did the features of Matt Heafy and Matt Honeycutt come to be on Malicious Intent?
Wilkie: Matt Honeycutt, we first toured with Kublai Khan back in 2014 or 2015. They came to Europe for the first time and we were on a package with them. We got on with them really well and we thought they were sick. In 2016, they took us out to the USA and we did our first USA tour supporting Kublai Khan. That’s the story of how we know Matt, I suppose we go pretty far back now, 6-7 years. We know them pretty personally now and we love Kublai Khan, so we just wanted him on a song and we hit him up.
Matt Heafy from Trivium, that was a mad one. None of us know him, none of us have ever met him. We were all really into Trivium when we were around 13, Trivium for us was a gateway band. When I speak to people, especially British people, Ascendancy that got them into it as a teenager. It was a real getaway album for me to get into metal in 2005/2006 and then going to see them when I was 13 or 14. That’s how I know who he is, hugely influential. One day he posted us on his Instagram with a caption like “this band Malevolence are fucking amazing, been listening to them every day on tour”. In the group chat it went off “fucking no way Matt Heafy likes Malev” etc, then he kept posting us on his story. I think somebody from the label or something sent him the record or maybe a couple of songs. He messaged saying “I’ve heard the record, it’s fucking amazing, can I do a solo or sing on it?”. We were like “holy shit”, he wanted to be on our record, we didn’t even have to ask him because he asked us. We told him that he can do whatever he wants and that he can sing, scream and do a guitar solo. We sent him a song that was nearly finished but we changed it up and made a bit of space for his solo and he sung on the chorus. It’s sick so I’m really happy with it.
Joe: With these features on the record and coming off the back of a tour with Architects, do you feel there’s more momentum behind Malevolence than ever?
Wilkie: We’ve got more momentum now than we’ve ever had, everything points in that direction. Our shows are bigger and better than they ever have been, all our numbers online are way bigger than they were before. It’s mental, it’s pretty sick.
I’m 28, I’ve been doing this my whole life. I’m really fucking glad that a lot more people are starting to turn their heads. It’s not been an overnight thing for us, there’s a lot of bands that come through and “boom”, everyone likes their record. We’ve been touring and doing this shit our whole adult lives, so I’m grateful that people are starting to pay attention.
Joe: Do you think that aligns with a lot of UK bands gaining traction?
Wilkie: In the world of metalcore, you can’t deny that the UK is not a significant country internationally. The UK are in the conversation, Architects are probably the most influential metalcore band of the last decade. How many bands out there sound like them, there’s so many bands that sound like them. Even While She Sleeps, same with them, loads of bands ripping them off. Bring Me The Horizon, even though they’re not a metalcore band anymore, they came from that world. Now they’re like popstars, so you can’t say that the UK is not a major player in the international scene. It has grown a lot, it’s funny now for Malevolence to be part of that conversation. Not saying we’re near Architects or Bring Me The Horizon levels, for a long time we weren’t so I never really thought about the scene growing.
Joe: Was the plan always to go down the DIY route with the warehouse and self-releasing?
Wilkie: It was never the plan, what happened was that we released our previous EP we did that fully DIY. We were packing merch and vinyl with our own hands, in our drummer’s living room. When The Other Side was released, his living room was just boxes and boxes. It was just a workspace, we were going round his house each day to pack all this. It got to the point where we couldn’t do it out his house anymore. It wasn’t fair to have that in his living room, he couldn’t watch TV. At first we rented a little space in Sheffield, one that was shared with other business. We did that for a few months and it didn’t work out. We saw an empty warehouse advertised, completely empty, it was basically an abandoned building. With that we were able to get it a little cheaper on rent, against a place that was furnished. We completely did out the whole thing, our studio that we record vocals in had urinals in there before. We pulled them out ourselves, plastered the walls, fitted toilets and now we have a studio room, a kitchen, a practice room and a main warehouse space where we run the label space from. We’re really lucky to have it.
Joe: While She Sleeps have a similar setup in Sheffield too.
Wilkie: Yeah, now their place is fucking serious. That was a little inspiration for us, they have a studio, offices and storage in there. They’re not doing a merchandise operation there but record there and do videos for the Sleeps Society etc. It’s fucking amazing and makes ours looks like shit. There’s a culture of that up in Sheffield and you can get city space for very affordable prices compared to other parts of the UK. The amount of space we have we’d never be able to get in somewhere like Bristol or London. As a result, a lot of bands do tend to have a lot of space. Bring Me The Horizon have a warehouse 300 metres from us with their HQ and Drop Dead HQ, with a vegan restaurant there too. Then about 200 metres away is While She Sleeps’ place, so there’s all three of us in a kilometre. It’s sick, it’s a nice little community.
Joe: Does the DIY mentality make the success now more rewarding?
Wilkie: 100%, I’m very proud of what we did. Doing it DIY, was never the plan, we did it that way because we didn’t have a choice. A lot of bands at a lower level don’t make any money because they’re paying to have everything done for them. The reason we did stuff DIY comes from being a frugal Yorkshireman. I’m 21, the band isn’t making much money so why pay someone to do it for you when you could do it yourself? For example, the warehouse renovations we did ourselves. Luckily enough our guitar player is a skilled tradesman so he lead the operation, I can’t do anything of that shit, I carried stuff around and painted the walls. The Other Side, we released ourselves, we got offers from labels but none of them were good enough. Why would I let someone else take a cut when I think I could do a better job. There were aspects which weren’t DIY, for example we hired people where we couldn’t do things such as digital distribution. We had an agency handle that which gets you on Spotify etc. That being said, The Other Side came out, we had no label, no manager, it was literally just us. We played Bloodstock, Slam Dunk and Download all with no label or management. I get to these shows and half the bands we play with who have just started up have management and a cool label, and they’re like “bang, first gig Download, first gig Bloodstock”. I’m proud of the fact I got here from not being part of the metal industry and doing it ourselves with no industry favours. We did it because we make good music and people like it.
Joe: Are there any plans in place for Malev this year?
Wilkie: We’re busy as fuck. Album comes out then we’re doing a pop-up shop in Sheffield and hang out. Next day we’re flying to Malta, we’re flying there early with our girlfriends and have a party and hang out in Malta. Fly home from that, that week we’re doing Mystic Festival in Poland. Then we’ve got Download and doing a few festivals in Europe, which is followed by about 20 shows in America with The Acacia Strain. This is all in the next two months, every weekend we’ve got shows. Once we’re home from America, we’re headlining Bloodstock second stage and playing Knotfest in Germany. I’ll be honest, we’re not headlining the UK this year. We’re going to do it next year, we’re touring with Trivium in January as well which is around 40 days. There’s five shows in the UK and then around 25 in Europe.
Many thanks to Wilkie for sitting down for a chat with us, and you can listen to Malicious Intent here.