Possibility, perspective and turning pain into positivity: Inside the return of Shields

Shields never thought they would pull their project out of the past. After all, when they shut the door on the band after seven years in 2018, the break-up looked pretty permanent. Following the suicide of their guitarist George Christie in January of that year, grief had permeated so deeply it had become untenable. Six months later, they were done.

The surviving four members pursued other projects, but several years later ended up in the same orbit again at Torquay’s Burn It Down Festival. The organisers offered them the chance to play a one-off reunion show at the following year’s event. They got onstage and things felt right again. The message was clear: this was not going to be temporary. Eventually, it snowballed into the writing of their second album, Death & Connection.

Tragedy may have hastened Shields’ end, but it never felt like that shadow was hanging over them. “It had nothing to do with us getting back together again,” explains vocalist/guitarist Joe Edwards. “We had had time away and space away from the events that broke us up in the first place. There were hard points writing the album, simply because we were processing this stuff – we’d processed it as individuals, but we never really processed it creatively together. Writing Death & Connection meant that we could do that.”

When Joe creates music, he’s emptying out the emotions piling up in his subconscious. They guide him to write what he needs, even if he’s not set out an intention to beforehand. Combined with fellow vocalist Sam Kubrick-Finney’s own overlapping experiences, this was how Death & Connection became a meditation on different facets of grief, ranging from those who are no longer here to the loss of relationships.

Against a canvas of spacious atmospherics, ice-cold, slicing riffs and eerie electronic elements, Shields transpose these feelings into their most visceral form. The dovetailing, melodic Red & Green explores the loss of Joe’s brother and how his memory manifested as colours talking to him in his dreams.

Opener This Is Not A Dream takes the form of a spoken word intro recounting a “harrowing event that I suffered at the hands of my ex,” which he stayed up until 5am making, “because I knew that if I didn’t create this right then, then it would be gone.” Meanwhile, closer Miss Me is a heartbreakingly detailed recollection of George’s funeral, written the day afterwards with the only artistic purpose being to process the sad day that had passed: ‘We laid George down there at the front / Waiting for the fire / I touched the coffin one last time / Saying my goodbyes.’

If anything, grief and loss are humanity’s great equaliser, and Shields know it. “I think it would be hard for most people not to be able to find at least one song or sound they can relate to, whether it’s about the loss of a relationship or the death of a loved one, or missing someone, or struggling with one’s own connection with themselves,” considers Sam. “We couldn’t have actually written an album about a more universally relatable topic, I think, which I don’t think was a lazy decision of ours. It was an authentic one.”

Joe and Sam are the only members who have been in Shields since the beginning, joined by more recent additions Krish Pujara on bass and Ali Wain on drums. Krish had been a fan prior to being asked to audition and was brought in at the tail end of the album’s creation. “Joining the band where you haven’t written the materials means you’re trying to bring energy, trying to bring positivity into that brotherhood and trying to have fun with it,” he remarks.

Ali, meanwhile, focused on what he could add live. “I came in wanting to bring something that hopefully no-one else could,” he enthuses. “I would rather be a drummer that’s maybe a bit less tight, but is showing onstage that we’re giving some kind of emotional performance. We’re playing music and we’re playing songs; we’re not playing notes and parts.”

Even without changes in personnel, Shields were never going to return as the same band they were before. Time has passed, their tastes have changed – as they demonstrated when they reimagined their 2013 song I Just Feel Hate last year – and they’ve been hardened by experience.

“I think I’ve gone from being a very naive and childlike young man into, at times, a slightly more bitter, jaded one, and then into a much more positive, far more present individual,” Sam reflects, “with even more perspective than I would have thought I had.” It means that the significance of the band is different now – he understands it doesn’t have to be the life raft it was when he was younger.

“Shields is a is a vehicle of joy and opportunity for me, and that’s what I want it to be for everyone in this band,” he concludes. “[I’m happy] as long as this band is a thing in my life, I get to enjoy it and I get to do it with Krish, Ali and Joe, and hopefully I only ever get to do it with them. Auditioning band members is not something I ever want to have to think about again!”

Shields’ new album Death & Connection is due out on January 30 via Long Branch Records

Read this next:

• “I don’t want to carry this horrible shit in my in my head anymore”: Inside Caskets’ stunningly honest new album
• Bad Omens: “Every artist has such a different process and journey. There’s no template – there’s no roadmap to this shit”
• “This has been pretty overwhelming”: Inside the rise and rise of VOWER