With their new album ‘Dead Company’ out today, vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr talks about the time that it took him and drummer Ben Thatcher to return, the layered craft behind Royal Blood’s “most simple” album yet, and the unmatched exhilaration of a live crowd.
As Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher were composing Royal Blood’s new album, ‘Dead Company,’ a thematic link between the song’s lyrics began to appear, unconsciously. Kerr calls it “the art of perseverance without any kind of disconnect”. This discipline appears from the very beginning of the album, on the self-titled track: “What’s in the way,” Kerr sings, “ the way.” As he explains, “Sometimes, perseverance can be not very helpful, where it’s like, just plow ahead and ignore what’s going on around you. [For me], it wasn’t ‘charge ahead,’ it was more of a charge inwards”.
That impetus to dive inwards, dissecting what’s beneath, had been a long time coming. When Kerr and Thatcher decided they were going to take some time off after the summer of 2024, they were on the heels of Royal Blood celebrating the tenth anniversary of their 2014 self-titled debut with a run of shows and festival sets. A return was inevitable, but not set in stone. As Kerr explains, it was a chance to garner perspective: away from the cycle of writing and crafting an album, touring said album, then returning to do it all again, the pair could momentarily get away from the chaos and return to their everyday lives in Brighton.
“I wanted to wait not only until we missed it – ‘cause that doesn’t take very long,” Kerr smiles, “but really step away. Four months isn’t really a long time, but it’s a long time to not play together – and honestly, I kind of thought it would be longer than that.”
Kerr expected their self-imposed break to last about a year but, by December of 2024, he and Thatcher retreated to their shed-turned-rehearsal space, obscured in someone’s garden. They arrived with a blank slate in front of them: no set plans, no fully-formed ideas, only simple gear and an instinct to return to their instruments. “Part of being creative is being willing to look a bit stupid for a little, because you’re sort of stabbing in the dark and digging around,” Kerr explains. “We were aware: ‘Let’s go in and literally face each other, and just keep playing until we find something.’”
That initial awkwardness faded away quickly: on their second try – after one song that went “straight in the bin” – they came up with ‘Swallow The Bomb,’ a blistering, fast-paced jam that would set the tone for the rest. Kerr wrote lyrics to each “initial sketch,” as he calls them, of the songs on ‘Dead Company’ as the music was being written, and he recalls its ten songs as being the least difficult to write, compared to their previous albums. “I think the music was so empowering and full-on that I was left feeling much taller after playing it,” he considers, “and that concept alone became a big theme for the record.”
For Kerr, ‘Swallow The Bomb’ was an immediate wake-up call. He had been fascinated with a concept, loosely derived from a quote by Mark Twain: “If you had to eat a frog every day for the rest of your life, then the best time to do that would be straight away,” he explains. “That concept of taking on the most difficult task and making that the priority, [and] not taking tomorrow as a guarantee, so… placing as much importance on the present moment as you can.”
As he and Thatcher essentially isolated themselves in their two-man studio, Kerr remembers the sessions as necessary for retaining Royal Blood’s identity. Without the elaborate technologies of a more grand studio, there was a pressure to keep things simple – and at some points, it turned into a “painful” process. “That doesn’t always mean complexity. It never ceases to surprise me how ‘simple’ it can be for things to be powerful,” Kerr laughs. “Writing in this way feels very disciplined.” Such was an approach that, as it proved, would serve exactly what they were going for: an emphasis on the “primal” basis of their sound.
“I’ve noticed that however we wrote a song isn’t really going to be how we write the next one,” Kerr notes. “The minute you latch on, thinking you have a process or a system, it seems to collapse on itself.” Instead of trying to remain two steps ahead, then, Royal Blood leaned into the unknown: “keeping things chaotic and then, trying to make sense in the chaos.”
Since their debut, Royal Blood have been known and lauded for making some of the most forceful, positively raucous noise that a bassist and a drummer can make together, and they’ve seamlessly revolutionised how far their bare bones rock ‘n’ roll could go: 2023’s ‘Back To The Water Below’ expanded into piano-driven, slowed-down melodies, while 2021’s ‘Typhoons’ placed their bass and drums onto a dancefloor.
With ‘Dead Company,’ there was an instinctive desire to get back to their instruments’ basics; Kerr describes this album as Royal Blood’s most simple – but, that is not to suggest that there is any lack of sound. “On this one, I just wanted to put all the emphasis on the parts and how they were being played, and trusting that that’s really where the character lives,” Kerr explains. One could say that it is Royal Blood’s “return to their roots,” but as the album unfolds, we hear the self-assured path that they are embarking on grow more refined.
At the album’s centre is ‘Nowhere All Along,’ a song that I admit to Kerr that I keep circling back to, while listening. Driven by a steady groove, the song hears some of Royal Blood’s most personal lyrics, among Kerr’s favourites on ‘Dead Company.’ “Even at the speed of light, I can’t outrun my shadows,” Kerr sings in the opening line, and in its chorus, “‘Cause every place that I go, there I am.” He describes the song as “a chance to come up for air,” following the reckless abandon of ‘Mother Never Told You,’ and says that it may be the simplest song that Royal Blood has ever made, on a technical level.
“But, I think sometimes that takes more confidence to do that,” Kerr notes. “I don’t think we would have made a song like that 10 years ago.”
Much of this confidence seems to come from the way that Kerr and Thatcher work together: their “trust the process” ethos, as Kerr explains, has grown stronger. With “Dead Company,’ that approach grew increasingly necessary as the songs went through respective cycles of their own, and the months spent fine-tuning each “sketch” into a fully-formed song were met with a trust in one another. It also stems from the recognition that Royal Blood’s core is inherently connected to the act of bringing their music to an audience.
“I definitely think [that] how we play live has its fingerprints on the recordings,” Kerr explains, considering that in the past, the recording of layers of a given song meant that by the time a piece was complete, they had never played the song as a band, together. “For this, I really wanted to make sure we inverted that, where the recording was the victory lap,” Kerr says. “All of the time and investment went into playing and playing, and playing the songs until they were baked into our muscles.”
Where some artists push the consideration of a live set out of their minds when they’re in the studio, and others may avoid the prospect of getting on-stage, if possible, Royal Blood seem to thrive off of the unpredictable nature of playing to an audience – all of whom are equally ecstatic to see what Kerr and Thatcher will pull off. “I think there’s just this feeling of the seatbelt being completely removed, and there’s no helmet,” Kerr laughs. “It’s the closest to danger, without being in any danger, whatsoever. From a musician’s perspective, it’s the most ‘in the moment’ that you can possibly be.”
As Royal Blood look ahead to a number of live dates across the UK and Europe, bringing ‘Dead Company’ to the masses is the exhilarating peak after months of allowing their songs – and themselves – to rejuvenate. “You’ll never have that combination of people in that room ever again, you know?” Kerr considers of a live gig. “It’s this unrepeatable moment.”
‘Dead Company’ is out now.