Moodring: “I was told, ‘Look out the window and be glad you can see the sun.’ I’ll never be able to get my head there”

Hunter Young is fed up of getting tour offers. It’s an unusual position for a musician to ever be in, but the reason for it is he cannot take them, and those making the offers have often not realised why. After being diagnosed with severe chronic fatigue syndrome – a disabling illness characterised by extreme fatigue, sometimes pain, and worsened by exertion – in 2023, hitting the road was permanently struck off the agenda on doctors’ advice.

As such, Moodring does not tour at all. His other project PSYCHO-FRAME, in which he plays guitar, perform without him.

“Every time PSYCHO-FRAME leaves, I feel this giant pit in my stomach,” he sighs as Kerrang! joins Hunter in his studio. “Every time a Moodring listener says, ‘Hey I can’t wait to see you in XYZ city,’ it feels like pouring salt in the wound.”

Most days, he doesn’t even leave the house.

“I lay in bed and I charge up this metaphorical battery and rest until I can go expend all that energy to get another project done,” he explains. “That could take weeks, or it could be a month or two. It’s really, really boring. I don’t wish having that much time by yourself on anyone.”

Hunter’s condition has irrevocably warped his relationship to creativity. He has to be careful about his energy expenditure – whatever he invests into music, he has to get something out of it, instead of, say, strumming a guitar just because he has the impulse. As he let the devastation of his medical prognosis sink in, it became his outlet, a place to unload his emotions for the sake of other people as much as himself.

“I thought that this album was the best way to do that, versus bleeding on the people around me all the time and constantly talking about dark stuff,” he admits. “I don’t think that’s fair to them to have to hear me say what I want to say constantly.”

While his body is still, Hunter’s mind is in motion. His physical and mental health swing in tandem, and it’s when he’s most unwell that his mind goes to the darkest places. It’s why Moodring’s new album is titled death fetish (a name so antagonistic to algorithms that it’s been shadow-banned online), a turbulent body of work detailing the violent, pitch-black fantasies of a mind that’s wandered too far.

There’s very little, if any, glimpses of light across it. After all, that’s not what Hunter made the album for.

“Making the record helped me not execute, if you will,” he says dryly. “They had me going to chronic illness therapists and they would say things to me like, ‘Look out the window and be glad you can see the sun.’ I’ll never be able to get my head there. I am much more grateful for the small things as generic and as cliché as that is, but I can’t eat the way people eat. I can’t just go experience life.

“It does make me unfortunately suicidal, and the album’s called death fetish because I won’t act out on it. It’s a fantasy.”

death fetish is released on March 27 via SharpTone.

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