As Sylosis announce their seventh studio album The New Flesh, we meet mastermind Josh Middleton for the exclusive first interview to dive into their knockout new record, but also reflect on his hard-fought journey here, and why heavy metal will always reign supreme…
In 25 years, there have only been a couple of times when Josh Middleton has wondered if this was for him anymore.
One such moment came just over a year ago. He and Sylosis had arrived in America last October to begin a tour with Fit For An Autopsy. Three weeks or so there, and they’d be back to hit the road with Malevolence on a co-headlining run, taking in the 2,300-capacity O2 Forum Kentish Town in London. A few months later, they were down to head back across the pond to join Bullet For My Valentine and Trivium on the U.S. leg of The Poisoned Ascendancy Tour. If 16-year-old Josh could see himself now, he’d presumably have wondered where did it all go so right.
This Josh, however, was close to phoning his manager and asking them to book him an early flight home before things had even got going. Having come down with something nasty on the way over, the already less-than-100-per-cent frontman found himself lying in his bunk as their bandwagon bumped along America’s less-than-100-per-cent roads, absolutely convinced that fate was coming around the next bend.
You can see his point. The last time the Reading metallers had been on U.S. soil, the RV they were touring in was involved in a crash where, all things considered, having to cancel the rest of the gigs and go home with a load of bills for the hospital and one damaged vehicle was one of the better possible outcomes. Such happy memories came flooding back this time around as Josh, sick as a dog and on the wrong side of the world from his wife and two daughters, lay in his bunk and felt the road beneath the tyres.
“I was having anxiety attacks instantly. I was convinced we were going to crash,” he says today. “I was having extreme PTSD from the crash in 2013. I was grabbing onto the walls, freaking out. I had the flu, I was missing my daughters. I just thought, ‘What if I die when I'm here, when I should just be at home for them?’”
Even when he weighed up the costs, both financial and in terms of the possibility that their management would drop them, and other bands would think they were unreliable, the frontman calmly reasoned, “Well, I think that's just gonna have to be what it is.”
These thoughts became the seed for the song Everywhere At Once, from Sylosis’ upcoming album The New Flesh. Being a more pared back, acoustic number, Josh calls it “the sore thumb” among the rest of the record’s robust metallic power and speedy thrashings that long ago earned them the nickname ‘The Shredding From Reading’. But, he says, it’s also the most honest.
“That was a really heavy period for me, one of the worst experiences my life. It wasn’t that I wanted to quit or anything, but I want to be there for my kids more than anything,” he explains. “That was the first time I was really confronted with the thought of not doing the band and thinking maybe I've just got to sack this off.”
What you will learn talking to Josh, however, is that although this perspective is an entirely understandable and admirable one, it will take more than a brush with death and realising the pressure of priorities to lead him away from this life. It may have been a lesson, and a chance for growth and to rethink certain strategies of the Sylosis machine, but The New Flesh is often a record that deals in themes of preservation, moving forward and finding your strength. Indeed, the banging title-track that serves as the album’s opening throw sets such a tone.
“That song’s a bit of a bit of an odd one,” Josh reveals. “Some of the lyrics are about that feeling of coming to terms with the state of the world and how scary that can feel at times. But it’s also about that feeling of wanting to shed your previous skin and be done with certain things from the past, or certain aspects of yourself or personality or whatever it may be.”
A new album, a “solidified line-up” – Josh, Conjurer bassist Conor Marshall on guitar, bassist Ben Thomas and Bleed From Within drummer Ali Richardson – tons of touring in the diary, including their biggest headline show to date: a year on, with skin shed and strengths gained, The New Flesh finds everything more sturdy than ever. As a man who says his family definitely come first, but also a lifer who’s only half-joking when he admits to having “no other option”, it all just underlines that Josh’s surname is as much ‘From Sylosis’ as it is ‘Middleton’.
“I think I've just always had that sort of outsider feeling from society, where I never wanted to be in the real world, have a real job,” he smiles. “I think that's what attracts a lot of us to heavy music. I’ll see people going to their nine-to-five jobs in suits and stuff and I just think, ‘That's never going to be for me.’
“I hate to say it,” he laughs when asked to take stock of the band’s current position, “but it really does feel like we're just getting started…”
As far back as Josh Middleton can remember, he always wanted to be a musician.
“Hopefully I don't sound really awful and arrogant, but I just knew that this was all I wanted to do from a very early age,” he says. “By the time I was at secondary school, when I was 12, I didn't care about anything else other than just being in a metal band and being a guitarist. Everyone at that age felt so much younger than me. The music they liked was just whatever boybands or girlbands were on the radio, and they liked football, they hadn't found ‘a thing’, but I'd already found skateboarding and heavy metal.”
Around the house as a kid, his ears had first been treated to the sounds of The Beach Boys courtesy of his father, while the first noodlings of his own came on an acoustic guitar Middleton Snr had, but never played. It was during a night out to see his older sister perform at a school concert that he was properly struck by it, when their neighbour rocked up with an electric guitar. “I just thought, ‘That’s well cool. That’s for me.’”
He was even more impressed when he began to dig deeper into rock, and a school chum gave him a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, with the note that it was his older brother’s band. Then came Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters and Radiohead, before the more aggressive sounds of Sepultura, Machine Head, Fear Factory and Korn came into the picture. As did a disappointment for when bands lightened up…
“Korn were my favourite band for a while, but then Follow The Leader came out, and I was bummed, because it wasn’t raw and heavy like [predecessor] Life Is Peachy. That was really dark, and had this nasty edge, but this was all poppy and polished. I was like, ‘This sucks!’”
“I knew that this was all I wanted to do from a very early age”
It was Slipknot’s uncompromising Iowa and Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill that made him realise it was possible for a band to get heavier as they got bigger. He also paid attention to the names the ’Knot were dropping in interviews: Morbid Angel, Death, Carcass.
After starting the band as a schoolboy, the early incarnation of Sylosis had their first show at a battle of the bands in a local leisure centre where, Josh says proudly, they won the grand prize of a day in a recording studio, having beaten his sister’s boyfriend’s band and their Red Hot Chili Peppers cover.
“We were the youngest band and just made a racket. We did four of our own songs and a Cannibal Corpse cover,” he laughs. “I remember thinking it was going to be really glamorous, but it was just in a sports hall! I think they just liked our youthful energy and the fact that we brought the most friends with us. But yeah, we won a recording session, where we made our first demo in an afternoon.”
It's worth remembering that metal of the stripe in which Sylosis deal was not exactly top of the pops at the time. Slipknot had sold a million with an album that opened with a minute of blastbeats, and In Flames, Opeth and Children Of Bodom were enjoying a rise, but their success and the coming of the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal still felt more like individual successes by more exotic, foreign bands than anything the UK scene could hitch to.
“I just assumed that I'd have to move to America, because it just wasn't cool to be from the UK,” admits Josh. “British bands like Stampin' Ground and earthtone9, as amazing as they were, just didn't break out in the same way that the U.S. bands did. It really felt when we were growing up in the UK that it was impossible just to go anywhere. Bring Me The Horizon made it a bit cooler to be British eventually, but in those early days there wasn’t really a British band doing it that successfully.”
Though he jokes that on The New Flesh they have “regressed” in terms of technicality and into a more pure type of riffing, and that he doesn’t care what people label them, back in the days of their debut, as metalcore was getting its revs up, “with bad Swedish riffs and really generic breakdowns”, Josh drew hard lines about what Sylosis weren’t as much as what they were.
“I was like, ‘Alright, we're tuning up to E-standard, no breakdowns allowed, and it's going to be …And Justice For All worship. I’d have a knee-jerk reaction to being called metalcore, and I’d be able to draw a diagram of where all the riffs came from to prove it. We never fit into the revivalist thrash scene, either, even though I loved all those bands. It was kind of cool that we were out on our own, doing our own thing, because if anyone was looking for that sort of music, it was only us doing it. But it meant the touring was harder, and it wasn’t so easy to get noticed. It wasn't trendy what we were doing.”
Sylosis did, if a bit less swiftly than some of their peers, do very well for themselves. Josh also became noticed as a formidable guitar talent. In 2012, he was asked to fill in on a tour with Architects, having the chops to keep up. In 2016, he was drafted in again to fill in for Tom Searle. Following Tom’s death in 2017, Josh became a full-time Architect, with a creative role as well as a performing one.
“The hardest thing about that was, it was Tom's world. I was stepping into someone else's band, but the guy that was writing all the music wasn't there. That would weigh on me quite heavily. It was quite tricky to navigate respectfully. I remember being on tour, and being onstage and going, ‘Fuck, Tom should be here stage left, playing guitar…’”
“I was stepping into someone else’s band, but the guy that was writing all the music wasn’t there. It was quite tricky to navigate respectfully…”
This period was also the only time since Josh was a teenager that Sylosis didn’t really exist, admitting they essentially went on hiatus but didn't formally announce it. But in 2020, they returned to the stage with a refreshed line-up (“I wanted to have more energy onstage, so I found the right guy,” he beams of perma-windmilling new addition Conor), but the gap had also given time for reflection.
“I think one thing that helped being in Architects, aside from just having time away from Sylosis to view it with a fresh perspective, was in the songwriting,” explains Josh, who departed the band in 2023. “I was writing and then taking it to Dan [Searle, drums], who would work with it and give feedback. I've never had that before. Sometimes I’d think, ‘Oh, man, I spent ages on that song,’ but it was really good for me, for my ego, learning to accept criticism and different approaches.
“I think that's why we've come back stronger and better than before, because it's more collaborative. And it’s got me back to that feeling of being at band practice, cranking the amps up, and thinking, ‘What's going to make you want to flip a table?’ At our earliest gigs, that’s what we went for. ‘What’s the most intense thing we can do?’ That magical period of when you really discover heavy music, when you're 15, 16, that’s stayed with me. There’s that energy and excitement of when you start a band, and you have your first band practice, and it just feels like, ‘Oh, this is powerful. This is fun.’”
You can hear this in The New Flesh. It’s a record that’s not just fast and heavy and technical and done very well, but one that’s got the energy of life inside it. And though the metal world is much more in tune with what Sylosis are doing than it might have been when they started – and here Josh points to the successes of Knocked Loose and previous tour-buds Malevolence as just two reasons to be cheerful – some things haven’t changed all that much.
Josh still says one of his main inspirations is Death’s 1995 album Symbolic. He says that his own band are marked out from their mates by their more “traditional” riffing, as it was back then. He might not care so much about allegations of being metalcore, but old preferences are still well ingrained. Things are a little more direct, maybe (“I haven’t got the attention span to write such complicated songs anymore”), but it still means if you want Sylosis, you get Sylosis. Which, he’s realised, is why people like them in the first place.
“We didn't miss a step coming back, which was crazy, because you would assume that might happen. So we've been really fortunate that our fans that have been with us from the start of stood by us, and now we're just gaining new fans.”
Asked what he hopes people make of The New Flesh, Josh looks back to how he felt hearing Iowa. That a band can become more of themselves, rather than return on a lower power, chasing something but losing their soul in the process.
“It’s heavy out of the gate. I love when bands do that, because as a fan, you're just like, ‘Thank you. That's exactly why I love your band!’ I know that 16-year-old Josh is happy about that, and if anyone complains that it's too heavy, it always, always makes me smile.”
Again, you’re struck by how much Josh Middleton, Josh From Sylosis, is a lifer. This, incidentally, is subtlely but fundamentally different than simply ‘doing this for a long time’. Lemmy once answered the question of Motörhead’s longevity by observing, “Well, we’ve never broken up.” But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Because Lemmy without a bass in his hand, not being on a tour bus, wouldn’t have known what to do with himself. Josh does have serious priorities away from music, but you get a similar sense from him that there is no life without all this either.
“Every now and then I'll be at a family thing, and I might be wearing a Morbid Angel T-shirt, and I’ll get family members going, ‘Are you still wearing those shirts?’” he laughs. “Yeah! This is always going to be me. If push came to shove, I’d obviously put my kids and my wife over anything. But doing this is definitely my life. There's just no other options.”
The New Flesh is released February 20 via Nuclear Blast.
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