Doesn’t it feel ages since While She Sleeps have done anything? It hasn’t been, but maybe that’s a consequence of not being metal’s most in-demand new name anymore. Like their occasional brothers-in-arms Bury Tomorrow, While She Sleeps have largely plateaued now, years removed from an incandescent breakthrough that positioned them among the heirs apparent of British metal. Suffice to say, that never totally happened.
Not for a lack of trying, though, as While She Sleeps have frequently performed well on their releases. They’re up to their sixth album, after all, buoyed by a steadfast community that’s always been placed front and centre. But there’s also the niggling feeling that maybe that can’t hold on its own. Even when their best work has been in straight-up metal fed through impassioned lenses of hardcore and punk—2017’s You Are We remains top of the pile, with 2015’s Brainwashed just below—there’s evidently more on the line. It’s why the last couple of albums have toyed with electronics, and honestly done quite well considering how bad the precedent for that can be. But that’s also where it’s felt like the steam has been running out the most, as interest can waver and While She Sleeps’ footing gets less sure.
It’s a no-win situation, let’s just clarify. The door to the top is bolted shut now, regardless of what While She Sleeps do. They could go as far back to their roots as humanly possible, recreate The North Stands For Nothing or This Is The Six in every aspect, and that wouldn’t be the answer. It really isn’t fair for a band who’ve fallen victim to time rather than any ineptitude on their part, but it’s also understandable. Maybe there isn’t the ironclad crossover nexus that others have grafted on; maybe it’s in how a lot of their work can run together in sound or tempo or melodic phraseology. Whatever it is, you might as well plaster Self Hell with the mission statement of lobbing it in the shredder, as this is, by far, the most left-field and unconventionally directioned While She Sleeps album yet. Or in other words…wow, someone wants to be Bring Me The Horizon.
Perhaps that fruit is even too low-hanging to pluck, because what else are you supposed to say about this? As a metal band from Sheffield with clear-cut dreams of parlaying ambition into world domination, the exact blueprint for While She Sleeps has already been written and handed to them on a silver platter. Hell, they’ve worked with Oli Sykes in the past; the inroad is primed and ready, too! But with every listen to Self Hell—and every new detail that adds its own sketchmark to a parallel that wants to be one-for-one—it’s evident how While She Sleeps can struggle to squeeze in. Again, it’s too obvious. If the covert smuggling of electronic edges over the last couple of albums were picking at the Gordian knot, all restraint has been dispensed to hack it apart and make a spectacle of it. On paper, it’s exactly what you’d expect—an abnormally huge alt-metal concoction of outside influences and genre agnosticism, down to the cache of names to promote how much broader a net has been cast. Malevolence’s Alex Taylor is the gimme of a scene friend; meanwhile, ambient electronic producer Aether and Fin Power of rising indie-punks STONE are almost presented like this level’s equivalent of Poppy or Babymetal.
Just two tracks in on Leave Me Alone is the most blatant—perhaps even damning—example of While She Sleeps’ reach. Gone is the speed and ferocity of hardcore, or the technicality of metal, replaced by a borderline identical facsimile of recent Bring Me The Horizon work that makes no compromise for While She Sleeps’ own brand of heaviness. In the hulking wall of sound on the chorus, or the dead-eyed drawl of “Leave me the fuck alone” with the Sheffieldian bend turned way up, there’s really no getting around it. The concession is that it’s the worst offender, by far. Fingerprints and traced notes are all over the place, but the floor is high enough to where While She Sleeps can just aboutget away with this on their own merits.
For one, if the issue of their work sometimes being indistinct from each other is on the table, this is certainly a vested rectifying of that. You aren’t mistaking the title track or Down for anything that came previously, such is the twisting and warping of the usual While She Sleeps formula. On the same plane, it’s good to see a band going in this directing and not simply trying to copy Bad Omens. That would’ve been completely below While She Sleeps’ pay grade; as it stands now, the disjointedness and unevenness of Self Hell is preferable to another 40-odd-minute brain-drain, simply for showing more intent. Chiefly, the sharpened, spiralling leadwork key to While She Sleeps’ profile hasn’t gone away, which automatically lifts the album up by a couple of rungs. To The Flowers’ final runalone makes up for a slightly diminished quantity, a product of Sean Long’s self-proclaimed ‘double-whammy’ that makes the crispness and detail stand out all the more. Even just down to the fundamentals, though, While She Sleeps show off a better aptitude for this stuff. Adam Savage’s drumming gets a good couple of moments to shine on Rainbows and the title track, while the production actually lands upon moments of spaciousness and atmosphere, to where Enemy Mentality puts to bed any notion that rigidity or blockiness is just a fact of the style. Turns out it doesn’t have to be, and can actually be pulled off rather deftly—who’d’ve thought?!
It’s also good that While She Sleeps haven’t nailed themselves to the exact same sources that have been ground to dust from overuse elsewhere. Hip-hop and electronica are a given, but apparently Britpop has played a factor in this one, to a degree that’s, shockingly, quite out in the open. Not to the degree of Oasis covers, mind; more so, there are vocal cadences on the title track and Dopesick that wind and weave in the same way, the former being arguably the stickiest hook this album has. Loz Taylor has a lot fewer vocal stunners on this one—likely a result of the increased capacity of clean singing, now at its highest level—so it’s good to the retooled efforts of While She Sleeps coming up good in spots. It’s frankly a rarity in these situations; even without sticking the landing, at least Self Hell isn’t languishing among the same repeated mistakes. There doesn’t need to be two interludes (especially when No Feeling Is Final can barely scrape together a noteworthy feature about itself), but that fact in itself is something different.
Granted, Self Hell doesn’t quite reap the same benefits when viewed from different angles. It’s the danger of taking a step as wide as this one is, and coming out with a body of work that’s just about being held together by loose string. The lyrics, as standard for this band as they are in chronicling personal and systemic struggles, don’t hold up to as much scrutiny inside this framework. Likewise, you can be left searching for moments of genuine, unrepentant metallic punch, and outside of Wildfire and Down, it’s a little bare. These feel like the obvious casualties of such a critical creative movement, where the influx of the new will naturally displace what could otherwise stand up well enough. Self Hell does feel kind of awkward as a body of work, lopsided and unstable, if not entirely collapsing. Even if the good isn’t negated, it’s odd and misshapen where it stands, and maybe not even able to reveal itself in full capacity. It’s been well opined how much harder To The Flowers hits when accompanied by its video; in the context of the album, it’s not exactly like-for-like.
So where exactly does all of that leave While She Sleeps, then? Well, it’s the most a new album from them has given to talk about in years, albeit in the mixed terms they’ve ever had. It’s a quirk of an album like Self Hell that’s so piecemeal in this specific a way—there are pieces in place; pieces out of place; pieces missing altogether; pieces here that probably shouldn’t be. Honestly, for the biggest shift they’ve ever made, it’s admirable they’ve been that thorough with it. Not every dream of being Bring Me The Horizon yields fully-fledged metamorphoses with each go; there’s work that goes into that, most times. Self Hell displays the brunt of that, wearing its messiness as prominently as the moments of shine contained within. For a band like While She Sleeps and the undisturbed path they’ve been on lately, at least it’s something.
For fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, Architects, The Ghost Inside
‘Self Hell’ by While She Sleeps is released on 29th March on Sleeps Brothers / Spinefarm Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
