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Royal Blood are teasing some heavy new music
It's been a minute since we last heard from Royal Blood but all that's about to change, with new music seemingly imminent...
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“I’m f*cking ready to go again”: Inside Royal Blood's momentous comeback
After two years away from the spotlight, rock power duo Royal Blood are back with the awesome single Ten Over Ten and brand-new album Dead Company. In a world-exclusive interview, Ben Thatcher and Mike Kerr take us inside their "primal" new record and reveal why they're reconnecting with their harder, heavier beginnings...
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Of late, the most notable thing about Royal Blood has been their absence. Almost exactly two years ago, on August 18, 2024, they left the stage at Belgium’s Pukkelpop festival, at the end of a summer of massive festival shows, following a 10-year birthday trek for their debut album that saw them hit the intimate-for-them 5,000-capacity Brixton O2 Academy. And then promptly disappeared.
Until recently, the last post on the band’s Instagram was a happy birthday message for bassist and singer Mike Kerr from over a year ago. After a decade in the game, the pair had realised that they needed a minute to “go back to our lives a little bit,” by Mike’s reckoning. “Recharge and reset.”
“It's always been the cycle of touring, writing an album, recording the album, back on tour, and just that machine going,” says Ben Thatcher. “The first time we ever had to stop was COVID, and we were still in the middle of a record during that time. But this was the first time where we could stop and be Mike and Ben living in Brighton again.”
Visitors to Brighton & Hove Albion games over the past couple of seasons may have spotted the drummer in the home end of Amex Stadium. More adventurous and athletic types exploring around the city might have spotted Mike out running and going on “really long bike rides”, training for triathlons. He was getting ready for a marathon as well, “but I got a stress fracture.”
Those looking for Royal Blood, though – not just its two constituent men, but one of the country’s biggest rock bands – would have come up short. After never sitting down for a minute, they made what Mike calls, “a conscious decision” to take the rest of the year off.
“That’s something we struggle with because we're always eager to keep making music and keep going,” he says Mike. “But it was a concerted effort to purposefully resist doing that and really take the rest of the year, and spend time with our families, which was great. I think, actually, stopping is, paradoxically, going to be the most productive thing for us.
“By January last year, though,” he grins, “We were like two raging bulls, ready to go.”
Today, we join the pair in the control room of Fulham’s swanky Metropolitan Studios, where their new single, Ten Over Ten, was mastered. Past visitors to this lovely facility include Queen, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Elton John and Foo Fighters. Recently, The Rolling Stones set up camp here. In one corner, a load of rugs lean idly rolled up against a wall, waiting for Mick Jagger to come and pick them up.
This is a long way from where Royal Blood’s new album, Dead Company was hammered out. For one, it was back in Brighton. For two, it was much less glamorous, what Mike calls, “basically a glorified shed at the end of someone's garden.” Here, the two of them got back into “that experience of engaging with another musician, not a computer, and staring each other out, feeling it out until you get to the end of your song.”
“We just came in with this totally refreshed energy to make music again,” he says. “There's a track on the record called Swallow The Bomb, which is the first thing we wrote, and you can hear that on there. It’s really fast and really heavy, and that set the tone. You can hear we’re just in the zone and where we're really excited about playing fast and heavy, and that's something we haven't done for quite a long time. It felt really fresh to play heavy, and really fun.
Ten Over Ten, and the rest of the album, has that same feeling. It’s Royal Blood going back to something more simple, but more deadly. After the smooth, danceable grooves of 2021’s Typhoons, and the arena-sized excess heard on Back To The Water Below in 2023. Mike says it’s a mix of their early “naivety”, coupled with a decade of learning in the studio and touring with Foo Fighters and Queens Of The Stone Age.
“We started off jamming,” says Ben of the roots of Royal Blood. “It was jamming to get enough material to go and play live. And with the next records, you have to progress, and you learn how to yeah do things differently.
“But this one, we're back in a room together, writing, writing music together, and feeling the sound waves hit you, and that's when you get excited again.”
“The whole thing feels kind of DIY, and it feels very homemade in how we made it,” says Mike. “We just loved how our demos were happening, so we went, ‘Let’s just do it, do it here then.’ Demos have kind of a cursed magic to them because you don’t care, but that’s where you get a lot of that raw energy from.”
All this reflects the pair wanting to go “all in” on everything. It’s what Ten Over Ten is about. “My headspace was: if you're gonna do something, do it hard, no plan B, give it everything that you've got,” Mike explains.
Daily, he and Ben would head to their space, and go hard at it for three or four hours with that attitude. Having usually done several hours of running in the morning, Mike would arrive “pumped up” and full of vigour. “That attitude, I found really inspiring. Just going in knowing we were going to be hitting it hard and making noise and really playing physically, that set a really good tone.”
Ben nods. “This one felt very primal again.”
It had been a hell of a decade for Royal Blood when they decided to have a sit down. Their 2014 self-titled debut had been an instant smash, sailing to Number One as the fastest-selling British rock debut in years. Quickly, the pair found friends and supporters in rock’s highest regions. At one of their first gigs in the U.S., supporting Pixies, they got a knock at their dressing room door. Next thing Ben knew, “Lars Ulrich was taking us out in his car over the Golden Gate Bridge to Mrs Doubtfire’s house.”
Around the same time, Tom Morello took to Twitter to declare, “I've seen the future of riff rock and its name is Royal Blood”. As the album turned one year old, they trounced competition from One Direction and Coldplay to take home a BRIT Award for Best British Band, they were presented with the gong by one of their other minor admirers, Jimmy Page.
Though they didn’t repeat the trick when they were nominated again in 2018, all three of their subsequent albums would go straight in at Number One. They’d had decent plans when they started, but quickly Mike and Ben found themselves way off whatever map they’d drawn for themselves.
“We've accomplished so much as a band that we never thought would happen,” says Mike. “It could have ended so, so much earlier, but we're still relevant. We're still enjoying playing music. People still enjoy coming to our shows, and it's just an amazing opportunity to still be able to do that.”
“I still think it’s mad some of the people that have really supported us, like Jimmy Page,” says Ben, with a proud but disbelieving what-are-you-like? grin. “Guns N' Roses invited us to play with them as Slane Castle. Foo Fighters, Queens Of The Stone Age… We were listening to them growing up. We were in wedding bands playing these people's songs, and suddenly we were hanging out with them!”
“Lars Ulrich took us out in his car to Mrs Doubtfire’s house”
While we’re talking cover bands, Royal Blood have one of their own, Royal Monster. Even more surreal, says Ben, they’re bagging places he and Mike counted as milestones in their own journey. “Playing at Concord in Brighton is a really big deal. How insane is it that there’s a poster there for a tribute band of my band?!
“At one point, we were in South America somewhere, and I noticed they were playing Shepherd’s Bush Empire the same night. They were literally playing to more people than we were!”
This was, obviously, not the case when Royal Blood played the opposite side of London at Greenwich’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena, as part of a run celebrating a decade of their debut. Mike’s memory of the day includes getting COVID (“I went to the dressing room after the show, and I couldn't talk. I felt terrible. I had to get escorted from the venue and locked away on my own!”) but it was still a triumph.
“As a band, you dream of playing those massive venues. You see so many bands doing it, and you're like, ‘One day…’ and it happened for us!” marvels Ben. “It's an amazing achievement to be able to say that.”
Playing their first album in full, and having to dust off some numbers they hadn’t aired in years, the tour also gave the two a chance to digest what had happened to them.
“There was something very reflective about doing that anniversary tour,” says Mike. “We were playing songs I hadn't played in a long time, but it was a good opportunity for us and the fans to connect on that.
“We're always a little bit cautious about things that feel nostalgic, but it was actually a lot of fun doing those shows and remembering that era and how far we've come. Also the fact that we still get to do it. I think there was this feeling when that first record came out that the chances of this being a 10-minute thing were very high. So we were lapping it up for all it was worth! Historically these things don't last. The intention of the band was never for it to be for anyone outside of our friends. It’s almost amusing how things went. By the end of that tour, it was like, ‘Okay, this has been an epic decade.’”
Ask them what they’ve noticed change about one another, and both men are uncharacteristically stumped for an answer. Mike quit drinking and other sins years ago, in 2019, but other than that and the usual natural things that come with moving from your 20s to your 30s, after some thought he concludes, “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“There’s been no real character change, really. That's probably why we still get on. If you radically change personality, there's always that risk that the alignment's gonna go. But that hasn’t happened.”
“We seen each other grow up really, and that's an amazing experience,” adds Ben. “But fundamentally we’re still the same.”
“If there has been a change,” ponders Mike, “Then it's that thing of just getting older and becoming more comfortable in who you actually are, being more yourself, being more comfortable in your own skin. Just knowing who you are and learning about yourself.”
“I think our age that we're at as well, not that we're getting really old, but I think we're learning to look after ourselves a little bit more,” reckons Ben. “At the beginning it was all go, it was green lights. It was BRIT Awards, MTV, everyone going on about how ‘Royal Blood’s the new rock band’, and all of this lot, and there was a lot of partying going on. A lot of fun was happening and stuff, and you can lose yourself in that at times.
“I think just growing up and learning about ourselves and who we are and what our interests are outside of the band, that’s where you level out a bit. Then can you have more clarity on what you want to do, the shows you want to play, the albums you want to make and stuff.”
Part of what makes Dead Company the album that it is is a sense of returning home. Royal Blood have already bulked up in many ways, stepping into other realms where a more subtle touch is required, itself requiring an expert’s skill. What they’ve done this time is apply that muscle, that knowledge, to the more fist-first, impulsive thunder of their earliest works.
“When we first started doing this, you know, we were really inexperienced, and we were learning in real time,” remembers Mike. “Having had the opportunity to do this for over a decade, we've managed to learn a lot. I think what was really exciting about this new record was just feeling like going back to playing heavy music and feeling like really equipped in how to do it.”
And so, Mike and Ben would head to the shed, usually keeping something roughly equalling business hours, and hit things, loud. Rather than working in “quite a quiet space,” with Mike occasionally working out bits on a piano, Ben says there was “a wall of sound where you can’t hear over each other.” And where usually it would take a couple of goes for the weaker ideas to sluice through before the good stuff made its presence felt, Swallow The Bomb was an instant bullseye.
“Ben started playing the beat, and we got really excited,” says Mike. “Both of us realised that we just don’t go very fast, normally. We suddenly saw this whole untapped area of our band. That’s exciting, because it's our fifth record, and there is a genuine concern when you go in that maybe you’ve already explored everything.”
It was a similar thing when Ben showed Mike some beats he’d come up with, leading to what became Ten Over Ten.
“I just thought that would be so cool to get into a song because it was so heavy,” enthuses Mike. “It almost reminded me of Motörhead or something. That got me thinking in a very fresh way. Once we started playing it in our rehearsal space, it just felt very obvious. ‘This is something I want to play live, and feels good under my under my hands.’”
This impulsiveness and no-parachute feeling also informed Mike’s lyrics.
“That song is about that idea that the only way out is through. I find that really empowering. But the music informed the lyrics on the whole album. I didn't want any pre-organised ideas of what I wanted to say. I was just very instinctual. On that song, the music felt very powerful and very empowering. Which I think what music's particularly good at doing.”
“We wanted this record to be relentless”
Music also helped Mike and Ben realise when they were done. The aptly-named The Closer features the closest thing Ben has ever done to a blastbeat (“I thought, ‘This sounds mental, it doesn’t make sense,’ but then I started to enjoy the feeling of being on edge, which was fun”). When it all came together, they realised they didn’t need anything more.
“There was a feeling of, ‘I’ve got nothing else. I can't go any harder than that,’” says Mike. “The record started with something really fast and hard, and ended that way. We did it and got a feeling in the room of, ‘That's enough of that.’
“One thing we did decide about halfway through was like the record shouldn't let off. We wanted it to be relentless.”
Which is what you want from a band absent from a stage. Charged up. Louder than before. Using the experience of age to reconnect with the impetuous vigour of their younger selves. Royal Blood aren’t just back from a break, they’re back to their primal form.
“It’s good to be back,” nods Mike as we head to the exit, past Mick Jagger’s rugs.
“I’m fucking ready to go again.”
Dead Company is released November 13 via Warner Music. New single Ten Over Ten will debut on BBC Radio 1 tonight at 6:30pm UK time.
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