Interview With Grief Ritual
At Badgerfest 2021
Interviewed By Sheri Bicheno
I hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing Grief Ritual perform before… and I’m always a complete pushover for new music. So, after I had done a little digging and discovered that these Gloucestershire lads combine some of my favourite flavours of metal, I gave them a listen, and immediately had my face blown off… So, naturally, when I saw that Badgerfest had them on the line up, I set myself up for a live experience of said face blasting… I was not disappointed.
I went, I got, I loved!! I cannot recommend these guys enough.
Playing the likes of Bloodstock’s Hobgoblin Stage, 2000 Trees Festival, and numerous gigs up and down the UK (with Raging Speedhorn, Heart of A Coward, and Black Tongue), Grief Ritual have astounding feedback, and I’m a bit hyped to have discovered this little alchemic balanced gem of Blackened, Extreme, and Metalcore.
I caught up with them at Badgerfest for a quick chat…
Sheri: Killer set! That was wicked!! Beforehand I wasn’t too familiar with who you are so it’s really nice to come across something new and really get into it!
Silas: That’s great to hear, thank you so much!
Sheri: Where are you guys based at the moment?
Silas: In Gloucestershire, but Chris is from Birmingham…
Chris: Yes… We’ve met before!
Sheri: Yes we have! I was like, “I know this face” haha.
Chris: It’s normally bad news when I hear that haha.
Sheri: Haha well if it is, I can’t remember!
*Fits of giggles from all*
Silas: If we can have that on record, that would be great! Haha.
Sheri: I’m quite interested in your style… I don’t like putting everyone in a box. When you come to writing, what comes from you guys? What do you envision when you sit down and collectively song-write?
Silas: It’s like an ongoing thing for us, because we’ve kinda got our foot in each genre. We’ve got a very like… black metal influence. And on the other side we’ve got into the hardcore scene, as well and then everything in between – so it’s like we wanna sort of tick off both sides of that, and of course not ostracize anyone so…
Chris: We’re all pure metalheads at heart really, so we’ll been in bands in the punk scene, the hardcore scene, and the metal scene, and thrash… we’ve all had our hand in stuff… so it’s culminated into this really, hasn’t it?
Sheri: So when you do your song writing, do you have a particular person that it falls to?
Chris: So I joined these guys fairly recently. Which has helped in a way because we had a sound already and we just thought how can we adapt that and work on that.
Silas: It’s relatively collaborative, but these two are the people you really need to talk to about that haha (*points at Chris and James*).
James: It’s normally like we’ll jam an idea out and go “that works and that doesn’t” based on if it’s too similar to before, or too far out to where we want to go, so we can find that middle ground really.
Silas: What’s been really good this time is that, with our previous guitarist, it was all written in the room. There was nothing brought to us before, it was all just in the jam – the good thing about Chris is that he writes a lot of it on his laptop beforehand, and then when we get in the live room, we sort of have a rough idea of what we’re gonna do. So we chop and change it, change the tempos and have a bit of a feel of new stuff around, and then start again because it’s all rubbish hahaha!
James: Honestly though talking about that, Chris has really brought the most out of all of us I think, as musicians, as songwriters, all that sort of stuff. I mean, he’s brought a hell of a lot to the table and it’s really influenced a lot of the new stuff that we will be bringing out early next year.
Sheri: That’s my next question hahaha. You’re a step ahead of me, mate haha. I have seen that you are in the studio so you’re writing at the moment…
Silas: We have just finished recording actually, with Joe Clayton in Manchester. See the trouble we have on the motorway on the way, we probably should have got a hotel and stayed the weekend but there you go haha. But we’ve recorded two (we think) fantastic singles with Joe, and we’re looking to drop them early next year, and everything we’ve got behind them, and run with those.
Sheri: We will be looking out for that! What are you guys up to after Badgerfest and next year after the release?
James: So we’ve got a weekender, and a few gigs lined up before the end of the year… but I think it’s mainly gonna be based on the single being released next year now, and sort of re-branding and going from that point onwards.
Silas: We’ve got some festivals lined up next year that we can talk about soon. About 5 or 6 gigs before the end of the year – this was our first show back after about 18 months really! So, I mean actually to come and have the reception that we had and playing in front of 100 people or so, the amount of people that are here and having such a professional setup – it’s been amazing. It was like a trial by fire haha – walking to the stage and thinking “fucking hell, I haven’t done this in like a year and a half!” And it was such a pro set up.
Chris: It was like a 20 minute window between getting here and then playing hahaha. And then after 20 minutes that’s when we had the first time to just step back and be like “Oh yeah! We CAN do that.”
Sheri: It went well! Thank you so much for your time guys. We will catch up with you again!
Grief Ritual: Thank you! We look forward to it!
Grief Ritual are:
Silas Miller – Bass
Jamie Waggett – Vocals
Chris Ward – Guitar
James Broady – Drums
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Disclaimer: This interview is solely the property of Sheri Bicheno and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities