News
Guilt Trip announce UK and Europe tour
Guilt Trip will head out on their biggest-ever UK and European headline run this autumn with some seriously heavy supports...
Navigation menu for Kerrang!
The Cover Story
Guilt Trip: “The sense of pride I get from the scene is that we’re still labelled a hardcore band – that’s important to me”
After handing out a bruising at Slam Dunk weekend, Guilt Trip are poised to deliver their knockout blow with new album Armour Of Angels next week. Having come up through the increasingly more fertile northern hardcore scene, frontman Jay Valentine reflects on how they have defied the naysayers, discovered their own voice, and done things their own way...
- Words:
- Photography:
Jay Valentine’s mum is his hero. Guilt Trip’s frontman is not ashamed to admit that. Nor does he think it undermines his hardcore credentials. In fact, her example has inspired Jay to ensure that his band – completed by guitarists Jak Maden and Sam Baker, bassist Lily Kilcoyne, and drummer Tom Aimson – try to stand on their own without interference.
Her determined work ethic, Jay explains, is indicative of the attitude engendered by the north. While Guilt Trip are known as a Manchester band and it’s ostensibly their base of operations, Oldham, situated eight miles to the north-east of Manchester, is where Jay was born and has spent most of his life. That's also true of his friend and bandmate Jak.
“People just get up and get on with it,” explains Jay of the inherent ethos. “It’s not somewhere that people are blessed with privileges. There’s a lot of grafting, a lot of grinding. I think when your parents are from here, they’ve lived through it and experienced it, so they pass it on to you. Even back when I was at school, there’s no way I’d have been allowed to be off sick. I’d have to have been hospitalised to get a day off school. That’s the mindset we’ve taken into the band, it’s the same principles. There might be something you don’t feel like doing, but that’s not an option… you’ve got to push through and get on with it, otherwise you’re going to regret it at some point in your life.”
It was Jay’s older brother who set him on his musical path. A teenage “mosher” who’d hang around with the skaters in the park, his brother’s CD collection was prime for plundering by Jay, who despite only being six years old, would regularly help himself to records by Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Rage Against The Machine. While his brother’s predilection for heavy music was fleeting, Jay was in it for the long haul. His tastes continued to broaden, eventually leading him to the roots of the bands he liked, to some of the key practitioners of hardcore – Madball, Sick Of It All, Biohazard and Agnostic Front.
“Those were the shows I started going to growing up,” says Jay. “And that made me realise I wanted to be in a hardcore band. We’d watched these huge bands, like Slipknot, playing to however many thousands of people each night, and it felt unrealistic as a goal. But when you get into hardcore, it’s not just the sound and the ethos you’re getting into, but the energy and the rawness, as well as the fact you could be watching a band that’s well respected and they’re playing to 200 people. All of a sudden, that felt more feasible to us.”
Guilt Trip are one of many hardcore bands from the north of England breaking big right now, led by Sheffield’s Malevolence, and including representatives from Leeds in the form of Pest Control and Higher Power. Plus, Outbreak Festival was born in this part of the country, in 2011, by two 14-year-old kids, no less, before it grew into a multi-site iteration last year.
Why does Jay imagine the north has been such a hotbed for hardcore?
Back in 2023, when K! asked him something in the same vein about the vibrancy of the scene, Jay suggested he and his bandmates “[aren’t] remotely bothered about what other bands are doing,” but surely there’s a sense of communal pride when their kin achieve success, that it’s a victory for all?
“I think I stand by it,” Jay says of his rather insular previous statement. “Even as we were coming up, we were writing music different from what was popular at the time in that scene. The sense of pride I get from the scene is that we’re still labelled a hardcore band, as that’s important to me. But a lot of the people we have known over the years, I don’t think they’d want to claim us… they’d only want to claim us when it suits them, and that’s people in other bands as well, we’re doing our own thing. If you’re not going to give us respect, then we don’t care what you’re doing with your band.”
“If you’re not going to give us respect, then we don’t care what you’re doing with your band”
Jay is currently preparing for the imminent North and South editions of Slam Dunk, just one of many festival shows this summer including Graspop and Warped Tour, coming ahead of a UK-wide jaunt later in the year. It's not a typical day job, but thankfully his parents remain unfailingly supportive, even if it’s taken them a while to understand their son’s choice of career.
“My dad saw us in 2023,” reveals Jay. “As soon as he was there and he saw it, how the music makes fans respond, then his vibe switched from not getting it to understanding what it was.”
His mum, however, is yet to catch a Guilt Trip show – but we’ll get to that later…
Remarkably, Jay and guitarist Jak Maden have been friends for 27 years. As a result, they’ve been with one another throughout this journey, from listening to nu-metal giants, to discovering hardcore, to forming Guilt Trip. While Jay didn’t go to music college like his friend, when it came time for Jak to start a band for the performance part of his qualification, he called upon Jay to join.
“From there it grew and grew,” says Jay. “We obviously started off differently, then we changed – got a more serious name, more serious members, then became what we are today over the course of 10 years.”
Those 10 years saw the band face their fair share of naysayers, though. Keyboard warriors in a hurry to shit on Guilt Trip’s early efforts. Gatekeepers who didn’t think the band had done their time in the trenches as a fan before making music of their own. Most wouldn’t say that to Jay and his bandmates face-to-face. Others, hilariously, ended up becoming close friends of the band, won over by their dogged determination and increasingly excellent output.
Still, Guilt Trip felt like a hobby, even after the release of their debut album, 2019’s River Of Lies. In 2022, re-emerging from COVID-19 and its many lockdowns, the band weren’t sure whether they should carry on. Conversations about breaking up had taken place several times, as things felt too up and down to be sustainable. A European tour was in the diary, so they decided to go ahead with it, making them one of the first British bands to hit the continent, post-pandemic. It’s a decision that proved critical to Guilt Trip’s story, as the resulting shows were rapturously received and changed the band’s mindset with regards to their future.
“We thought, ‘If it can be like this every time we tour, then why not take it more seriously?’ So that’s what we did, putting more effort, time and patience into what we were doing. We’d always tried, but we hadn’t been in the right headspace for it to be a career. Once that penny dropped and we put everything into it, we soon saw that growth in real time.”
In 2023, Guilt Trip released Severance via MLVLTD, the label belonging to their pals in Steel City trailblazers Malevolence, which proved an almighty step up through a more cohesive and accomplished distillation of their metal-infused hardcore – and people were talking notice. Among them were Roadrunner Records, the legendary Dutch-American label synonymous with some of the most successful names in modern metal and rock. In September of last year it was announced that the band had signed to the label. For a band raised on a diet of Slipknot and their ilk, it was hard to believe.
“It felt like a dream… a massive full circle moment for us,” says Jay, grinning from ear to ear at the mere mention of Roadrunner, though maintaining a degree of modesty. “Even if we didn’t sign to them, it was still amazing to get the attention from a label that has been the birthplace for a lot of our favourite bands over the years. It still doesn’t feel real.”
It should, as their single Burn, released last September, was the band’s first release via the label. And in a matter of days, Armour Of Angels will be unleashed upon the world. It’s an album the five members of Guilt Trip are enormously proud of and were heavily involved in every stage of. Ask, for instance, what collaborator and former Periphery guitarist Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood brought to proceedings and Jay’s appraisal seems to be based on a more modern interpretation of a producer’s role with regards their involvement in the songwriting process.
“He didn’t produce the music at all really,” suggests Jay. “We did everything when it came to recording. He gave us pointers, of course… ‘Maybe change the note pattern on this particular riff,’ but there wasn’t much he changed other than that. He recorded it all for us and mastered it, but as far as the actual songwriting itself, he didn’t have us change anything.
“I think that’s testament to the effort we put in, to be honest. [Nolly] is the sort of person who’d give you pointers to make your music better. But there was not much he could really say about it, as we’d done ourselves justice by writing the record the way we did. We made his job easier, I suppose, but it was sick to work with someone like him.”
There’s question we’ve been meaning to ask Jay, about religion, though we’ve been looking for a suitable juncture to broach it, so that it comes across as respectful, rather than some kind of ambush. Thankfully, discussing the album’s cameo appearance from Sonny Sandoval, lead singer of P.O.D., takes things in the right direction.
“We played a show at a festival in the Netherlands,” recalls Jay of how they crossed paths with the nu-metal veterans. “One of our friends, a photographer and videographer, put together this little clip for it that we posted on Instagram, in which I was wearing a P.O.D. shirt, and Sonny commented ‘Sick shirt’ on the video. Later, one of their guitar techs started following Guilt Trip, so we messaged him and asked if he thought Sonny would be willing to do a guest spot with us. And thankfully Sonny said he’s a fan of our band, so he said yes.”
The resulting track, Resurrected, includes lyrics that walk a thin line between pious iconography and all-out fire and brimstone violence (‘Vengeance is mine and it’s the final call / Send them all to the grave when the bodies fall / Deliver all but the blasphemous, welcome to the massacre / It’s the resurrector come to save us all’).
“He nailed it,” Jay says of Sonny’s contributions to the track. “It’s one of my favourite tracks on the album and I think people are going to like that one.”
They’re likely to ask some questions too, given the presence of the singer from one of the world’s most prominent Christian bands on a song called Resurrected, on an album called Armour Of Angels. These are among many overt allusions to Christianity. During Guilt Trip’s appearance at last year’s Furnace Fest in Alabama, Jay wore a red trucker cap emblazoned with the words ‘God Over Everything’, while in recent promo photographs, Jak is holding a crucifix necklace towards the camera.
So, is this a case of Jay being inspired by the themes of Christianity? Because let’s be honest, with its references to good and evil, temptation and sacrifice, it is unquestionably heavy stuff. Or, is it more purposeful than that, a case of faith being channelled into music?
“I think it’s a bit of both,” suggests Jay, totally comfortable with the line of inquiry. “I’m religious, but none of the rest of the band are, so I wouldn’t say we’re a religious band by any means. I grew up as a Christian, going to a Church of England school, so it’s been a massive part of my life. I’m grateful that the guys [in the band] let me express myself in that way, because I feel like I would struggle to articulate what I’m trying to say without leaning into the religious side of things, because that’s how I’ve always dealt with my problems. It’s long been a crutch that’s helped me through when I’ve struggled, so it makes sense for me to write in that way.”
Though Jay says his bandmates have no issue with the religious aspect of his writing, there were some conversations along the way.
“I started the band with Jak and he’s never had a problem with it, but we’ve had the conversation with other people,” reveals Jay. “There was a point when someone else wanted to write the lyrics because they didn’t like what I was saying, but it’s my thing and I’m not preaching. They trust me not to say anything ridiculous, which I wouldn’t. I’m not telling people to turn to religion… if you condemn it, if you believe in it… it doesn’t matter to me. It’s helped me through life, and it’s helped my mum. It’s not like I’m a devout Christian or anything. I just believe there’s a place for everyone, and we should be accepting of everyone. I believe in God and I’m not going to let anyone change that for me.”
“Religion has been a crutch that’s helped me through when I’ve struggled”
If Jay has been tight-lipped about this aspect of Guilt Trip up to now, it’s not because he’s worried people will assume his music will try to preach to them or indoctrinate them, or that some consider organised religion anathema to hardcore music. Instead, he doesn’t want to prejudice any listener’s interpretation of the lyrics. Despite five of Armour Of Angels’ 11 tracks including the word ‘God’, there are all manner of other ways to read its tales of anger, disappointment, betrayal, vengeance and hatred – lyrical hallmarks of all manner of hardcore bands – it’s just that Jay’s more comfortable articulating himself through the prism of his beliefs.
And being in a band doesn’t leave Jay morally compromised. None of the members of Guilt Trip are interested in the destructive distractions synonymous with the rock’n’roll lifestyle. Travelling to other countries with mates is unquestionably a fun time, but this lot aren’t doing the lads holiday thing; they’re there to play music, to put their best foot forward, and make people stand up and listen.
“That’s the focus and it’s always been for every one of us in the band,” affirms Jay. “We’re focused on the task at hand, which is to perform to the best of our abilities, and send people home buzzing about what they’ve just seen and heard.”
Fans on these shores and further afield will get that chance come October, when Guilt Trip head out on a UK and European tour. And while all of its 18 shows will prove equally important to the band’s continued ascent, one date in particular, at Manchester’s New Century Hall on October 18, has an additional significance. It’ll be when Jay’s mum sees her son’s band live for the first time.
“I wouldn’t say I’m nervous about it,” suggests Jay with a smile. “I’m excited for her to finally see us, and I think it’ll change her perception of what it is, like it did with my dad.”
Before that, however, we’ve got the release of Armour Of Angels to look forward to, thereby giving us all a few months before we convene in the pit, to familiarise ourselves with Guilt Trip’s finest effort to date. And that’s exactly the verdict Jay is hoping for.
“As long as people enjoyed it more than Severance,” says Jay, becoming more modest after initially suggesting he’d want people to compare it favourably to Slipknot’s Iowa. “Making a record better than Severance was the goal going into Armour Of Angels, so I hope people agree we’ve achieved that.”
We think Jay can rest assured that goal has been achieved.
Armour Of Angels is released June 5 via Roadrunner.
Read this next:
- Drain: “It doesn’t matter if you just got into punk music or you’ve been into it your whole life – this band is for everyone”
- “People are seeking a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, a feeling of authenticity and real emotion”: Inside the resurgence of hardcore
- Guilt Trip: “We’re trying to see how far we can push the sound we have”
Check out more:
Related Content
