Brighton duo, fakeyourdeath, released their debut EP, null/void, on April 23, delivering five explosive tracks to the music industry. Along with their new EP, the band unveiled a full live session in celebration. On April 25, fakeyourdeath took on Blondies in London, supported by Nailbreaker, where they played a release show for null/void. The duo are only just starting out, but it won’t be long until they’re known all over the globe.
On null/void…
“It feels really good to have it out because we recorded it and wrote it, what feels like, quite a long time ago now. It sort of came together during lockdown and those are our first five songs, so to have it out as a whole piece, it feels like it’s our first statement. So yeah, I’m happy to have it out and keen to keep moving basically.”
On the success of the EP…
“It’s definitely a bit of relief. We started this project not even knowing if it would ever leave the bedroom. It’s just like a recording experiment almost, so to have recorded it and then put out the tracks we did, and then take it live, and now to have the EP out and people say, ‘Yeah, it’s alright,’ it’s like a bit of a relief.”
On mixing the EPs dark themes with creativity…
“It’s quite a juxtaposition. From where I come from, I’m right in the musical side of things and I’m actually having a lot of fun doing it, and I’m not saying Candy’s bringing it down, but you know. We’re thinking about what we’re trying to say with this and we’re not that chirpy kind of band, so what we’re trying to say is deliberately uncomfortable and yeah, it does give everything a different feel when you start talking about that kind of stuff.”
On experimenting with different sounds…
“Yeah, there’s definitely more paths we want to head down, and it’s nice to hear that it’s sounding authentic, because it is us. I feel like we’re trying to do something heavy that’s not a traditional setup with guitars and stuff, and we love that. Being in bands like that for years, I love that kind of stuff but this take on it is like, ‘How can we be heavy but use electronic instruments and embrace our favourite sides of both of those things?’ It’s not really a new concept… you get bands like Bring Me The Horizon doing that all the time, combining those electronic elements, but I think it is a little bit different. So yeah, I’m glad people think so too.”
On bands that have been an influence to fakeyourdeath…
“There’s a band called Youth Code, and a band called Health – they’re quite heavy on the electronic side of things – Crystal Castles, a band called Cold Cave; they’re all kind of in that similar world of synthesisers and drum machines, but have that kind of aggressive element as well.”
On their show at London’s Blondies…
“It’s a crazy venue. They film these Kerrang! live sessions there – you can view them on YouTube – like the K-Pit things. It looks small on there but when you get there you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually small like, how did you fit Mastodon in here for Kerrang!?’ It’s so small! It’s perfect for us. It looks kind of busy with just a few people in there. We can get right up close and personal with everyone and just sort-of do our thing, so yeah, it was a good show.”
On live music…
“It’s a part that we’ve worked really hard on. Because there’s just two of us, we’ve had to work quite hard, I think, to fill a stage and to give people something to look at. We’re exploring lots of light shows. The way that we play is sort-of a continuous piece of music from start to finish, without any breaks, so the live element of it is just as important as the recorded element of it. It’s just a bit harder on a bigger scale. I’m sure we could do more and hopefully, one time we’ll get a chance to, and to have more of a production element, but it’s definitely something we’re considering, like how we’d make it more interesting than just playing our songs on stage.”
On their ideal places to play live…
“It would be nice to play something like Download Festival, quite an obvious one, but that’d be amazing, and any chance to go abroad, we’d snap that up. It’s definitely something we want to do. We get the most out playing live, I think. We just love meeting and playing with bands that we like… it’s definitely something that we are focusing on.”
On the barriers of being a duo…
“We’ve both come from backgrounds of being in bands with three, four or five other members, and that equally has its challenges. There’s so many people trying to get their opinions in on writing a song and it can be hard. In a way, stripping it back to just having two of us makes decisions a lot easier. You can get to it quicker and just bounce ideas off each other quicker, but also it’s hard because it’s like, ‘Is this good?’, ‘I don’t fucking know.’ There’s only one person to ask and you do feel in a bit of a bubble. It does have its challenges, but I also think that, for this, it works quite well.”
On fakeyourdeath’s highlights…
“Probably last summer, getting to play ArcTanGent Festival with some of our favourite bands… that’s definitely one of the highlights so far. Then, getting to play with Empire State Bastard before that was really cool – to be part of one of their first shows. Those two stand out. Literally just being able to get out there and start this band is a highlight because I just wasn’t sure what it was going to be.”
On their music videos…
“Candy might have a different opinion on this to me but I’m here now! I don’t really enjoy music videos and it’d be interesting to get other people’s opinions of this. I don’t know what their value is these days because it’s not like when I was growing up, where that would be the only way you might see what a band looks like, or you might see their video on TV, and realise that that’s what they look like. Now, with social media and everything else and people’s attention, mine included, to sit there and watch a music video for three and a half minutes or whatever, I find that I feel like people don’t really do that. It’s more about the 15 second clip you put on an Instagram story. Part of me thinks the amount of effort that goes into doing the video versus what you get out of it, it’s really tough, especially for small bands because they just don’t get the views that you think they would after the amount of time you put into things. It’s hard to get people to watch them. But saying that, if we’re going to do one, then we’re not going to cut the corners on the creative process and we want to try and make it something like what we, hopefully, have done with the three videos we have, that coincide with the music. Otherwise, it’s just a bit of a waste, so it’s a bit of a back and forth. If we’re going to do them, then we might as well make them good.”
On what’s coming next from fakeyourdeath…
“Hopefully just more new music and more shows. I don’t want to leave it too long till we put out the next thing so we’ll be coming back with a new thing soon. We’ll just keep looking out for new gigs to play. Basically, we can develop what we’ve started.”
Final notes…
“To go with the EP, there’s a live session that we did, which was filming us playing the EP in full, which is something we’re pretty proud of because it shows what we do live as well, so that’s worth checking out.”
Watch the null/void live session here:
