Canadian band Sumo Cyco release their third album, called “Initiation”, through Napalm Records on 7th May. The band is fronted by vocalist Skye ‘Sever’ Sweetnam, who formed the band in 2011 along with guitarist Matt Drake. I had the opportunity to speak to Skye via Skype on 7th April and we chatted for around forty minutes about the band, the new album, the three singles that have been released and much more. You can hear that interview on the Friday NI Rocks Show on 9th April which is available from the NI Rocks MixCloud page - https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/interview-with-skye-sweetnam-from-sumo-cyco-on-the-friday-ni-rocks-show-9th-april-2021/

The interview can be read in full below.

 


 

 

Website - https://sumo-cyco.myshopify.com/

 

Playlist for the Show

SAFIRE – Heartbreaker

DIAMANTE – Ghost Myself

BUTCHER BABIES – Last Dance

STITCHED UP HEART – My Demon

SUMO CYCO – No Surrender

Interview with SKYE SWEETNAM Part 1 (14 min)

SUMO CYCO – Bystander

Interview with SKYE SWEETNAM Part 2 (10 min)

SUMO CYCO – Vertigo

Interview with SKYE SWEETNAM Part 3 (15 min)

SUMO CYCO – Love You Wrong

FATE DESTROYED – This Crown

EVANESCENCE – Better Without You

HEART HEALER – Evil’s Around The Corner

WHITEABBEY – Shadows

SEA HAGS – Half The Way Valley

CATS IN BOOTS – Her Monkey

SMASHED GLADYS – Bump in the Night

HAMMER KING – Hammerschlag

HERMAN FRANK – Venom

IRONHEART – I Stand Alone

DIRK SCHNEIDER & THE OLD GANG – Where The Angels Fly

BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER – Valley of the Kings

BLACK SHERIFF – Supersonic

WHITESNAKE – Wine Women An’ Song


 

 

NI ROCKS – Hi Skye, thanks for talking some time to talk to Rock Radio NI. We just played the latest single from Sumo Cyco called “No Surrender”. What can you tell us about that track?

SKYE – That track, for me, really depicts being true to who you are and living in accordance to your authentic self. We get so many pressures from the outside world to mould into what society wants us to be. I feel like I almost have five different personalities that I am in different situations. It’s just about overcoming the inner demons and it has a real driving, almost paranoid feeling, and I think the verses were very inspired lyrically by almost feeling like, in some situations you’re always told to hold your tongue, or be polite or not necessarily always speak your mind. It’s almost that predator versus prey feel, where you feel like someone is over your shoulder, about to pounce on anything that you say or rip you apart. It’s kinda like that - nervous almost to be yourself. If that makes sense (laughs).


NI ROCKS – There’s a great video to go with the track as well. You generally produce all the band’s videos. What was the thought process behind the video for “No Surrender”?

SKYE – For “No Surrender” we had gained access to this really cool, big warehouse. One of my ideas was to really make it about that dark side of our personalities and that is depicted by the kinda dark room and having the band like a burst of colour within the darkness, and also by the skull character. I did  some prosthetic make-up and she is kinda like the evil voice inside my head, always lurking over a shoulder or the other shoulder. And we also pay a little ode to our four factions – we have a crazy make-believe world of Cyco City and right now on our website you can take a quiz and decide which gang you belong to in our world of Cyco City. Each of my four outfits kind of represents those four different aesthetics or styles or different sides to my personality.


NI ROCKS – The new album “Initiation” is released on 7th May through Napalm Records. Where was the album recorded and who did you work with on production, mixing etc?

SKYE – We are a home studio type of band, so Matt our guitarist is an amazing producer and mixer. We’ve over the years, just like with the video equipment, collected our own studio and Matt is a really amazing arranger. He can play every single instrument and is a super, super talented guy. We co-write all the songs together. Since I’ve been a young writer I’ve always worked with a lot of producers that work out of home studios and I really like the vibe. It’s very easy going and you’re not paying huge studio fees where you’re going oh my god we have to get this exactly right because we don’t have much time. It just lets you take some breaks, go for a walk, come back and rethink your ideas. We worked mostly like that but we also had this amazing experience in Vegas with a producer named Kane Churko – people may know him from working with In This Moment, Five Finger Death Punch and he’s done some really awesome work out there and wrote a bunch of really awesome songs. We’re attracted to his work and really wanted to work with him. We had this really great two weeks in 2019 when we went down to Vegas and just had the time of our lives - in the evening walking around Fremont Street and in daytime working on tracks with Kane. We came up with two new songs that will be on the record – one of them is called “Vertigo” which is going to be released tomorrow.


NI ROCKS – This is your first album since signing to Napalm Records last year. How did that deal come about and what has it been like working with them so far?

SKYE – It’s been great. The deal came about, in I feel, a pretty organic way. The Marketing Director Sonia (Goldberg) came to a show, in 2017 I think, in New York and saw us play and really liked it. She started talking about our band to other people in the office. Then it all came together in 2019 when we were on the road with Jinjer, another Napalm band, and the label guys came out to see our show as well in New York. So we had a bunch of people come out to see us play and they liked what they saw and the energy. It just kinda worked out that they were interested in working with us, and after talking to them and talking to people that worked with them and getting a feel for what we were in for. We realised that they were just a really good fit for a band like us that doesn’t much A&R direction as far as what we want to do – we already have a strong brand, a strong image, a strong sound – and they were literally just going to let us have their platform to release on and weren’t trying to change us in any way. Which is obviously something that some labels have -where artists have issues with their label and a struggle for creative freedom all the time; and the balance between the business and the music. With Napalm they’d already bought into Sumo Cyco brand, so they’ve been super supportive, great partners and taken a lot of weight off of my shoulders that I used to carry by doing a lot of the label stuff for the band I guess you could call it. So it has been great working with them.


NI ROCKS – When did work actually start on the new album and did the covid pandemic affect the timescale for the release date at all?

SKYE – Yeah for sure. Because we have the home studio we’re always working on tracks and coming up with riffs all the time in between tours. So, some of the riffs on this record I would say have evolved over the past three or four years; and some of them are super, super fresh, out of the oven. The pandemic has definitely affected the release. We were....to our fans it looked like this record took a long time to finally be born, I guess you could say because we started a crowd-funding campaign in early 2019 when we were still under the assumption that we’d be releasing independently. We started the release by releasing two tracks – “Run With The Giants” and “Love You Wrong”. Then when we got caught up in touring and Napalm came in, we kind of had to rethink our plan and instead of just moving forward with our release we’re going to put it on hold, work on a few more songs, figure out the deal with Napalm and then release. We officially signed with Napalm in early 2020, in January 2020, right before everything hit the fan and when that happened I think everyone in the industry looked around at each other and said what does this mean? It was a very confusing time.

A lot of our daily schedule and schedule for release depend on getting out there and touring. Even getting together practically with other people to shoot things and collaborate and things like that all gets put on hold. We’re stuck in our own countries, we can’t leave anywhere! It felt very confusing and limiting and in a way it had, obviously a negative impact on the industry; but as far as being a place to feed art from, whenever we go through struggle or come to a roadblock in our lives I think it’s a really great opportunity to channel that into art. So definitely a bunch of songs on the album, including “No Surrender” and “Bad News” came through the pandemic and were written during that time in isolation, where we used it as inspiration in a way to try and channel our frustrations and feelings about it.


NI ROCKS – You mentioned Matt Drake earlier; you and him have been the driving force behind the band now for ten years and write all the tracks together. Is there a standard formula or standard approach to writing tracks or do they come together in different ways?

SKYE – Matt is very proficient with all instruments, production and engineering. Most of the time what’ll do is he’ll come up with a riff or an idea that he’s working on as far as music. Then, I would say probably seven out ten times that’s kinda how he would write a song. He would just hand me an instrumental, usually chorus and verse, maybe a  kinda bridge idea; to see what I think about it and see if anything comes to mind as far as melodies and lyrics. Then I’ll go away if I dig it and start brain-storming different ideas and come back to him; and he’ll tell me what I’ve done is shit (laughs) and I’ll tell him to screw-off and I’ll go write better stuff and come back. We just kinda bounce ideas off each other until it’s the perfect amount of every ingredient and we’re really happy with it.

But there has been the odd time where I’ve come to him and I have a line; a lyric that I just feel that I need to write a song called “x” and he’ll say ok I’ll try something that has that in mind and we’ll go from there. It’s definitely not always peaches and cream; we do butt heads. Sometime he’ll love an instrumental that I’m like – ‘I don’t hear anything over this’ and he’ll just be ‘what do you mean, you have to write something, it’s so sick’ and I’m like ‘it’s not hitting me, it’s not working for me’. Sometimes he’ll push my buttons enough that I’ll work hard enough until I find something that I really love, and in some instances that’ll push him to write better riffs or put in different chords or whatever that makes the song better on his end. So between the two of us, we push each other to try to excel I guess and do our best.


NI ROCKS – Do you see the latest album “Initiation” as being a natural progression from the first two albums and what would you say makes the latest album stand out from the earlier albums?

SKYE – I do feel people will know it’s signature Sumo Cyco. We have dance hall rhythms, our punk kind of element, our fast beats, we have heavy riffs, we have the rapping, the screaming, the melodies; but I think what separates this record is just purely the amount of songs that we wrote before we narrowed it down to this record. When you go through so many stops and starts, like we did with this record, we had lots of opportunities to step back from our project, think about what other types of songs we wanted to write, what are the best of the best, how to improve upon the songs that we had already been working on and really hone in even more than usual on making sure that what we released is better than the next song and if it’s not as good as the song before it then we don’t want it. I have never written this many songs for a record. I have written probably, at least, two albums worth, if not three albums worth of songs that we narrowed down to this record. Whereas on most other records we just put everything that we’d written on the record – if the song was good enough to finish, we finished it and put it on the record. This time we really, really and in some ways may have over thought stuff because we had so much time to step back from the project and say we need a song like this, we should throw that one off! It was a bit like choosing between your children, where you’re throwing them overboard and being like ‘bye, you’re not on the record anymore but we still love you!’ (laughs)


NI ROCKS – The first single and video (released by Napalm Records) from the new album was “Bystander”, which we’ll play next. What can you tell us about that track before we play it?

SKYE – “Bystander” for me was essentially looking out my window or looking through my screen on my phone and being like ‘why is the world so messed up, I feel like I can’t do anything and I’m stuck in my house’. I think everyone has had that emotion at some point during this fiasco, this pandemic and for me it was just feeling that helplessness and almost wanting to..like I do in the video..jump out the window and be like ‘what the heck!’  It’s such a weird time. But it’s super fun, it’s energetic, it’s definitely got some sing a long parts in the chorus so I hope everyone is rockin out! I just got a video message today from my sister of my one year old nephew jumping up and down to the rhythm in his Jolly Jumper to the song. That’s totally given me the energy – yeah it’s a Jolly Jumper song, you could jump so good to this song. (laughs)


 

NI ROCKS – If I’m not mistaken, “Initiation” will be the first Sumo Cyco album to be released on vinyl. There are two versions at least, including a transparent neon orange version. Is the vinyl release something that you’re excited about?

SKYE – Yeah, I’m super excited for it. Like you said, it’s the first time we’ve done vinyl and to be able to hold that in our hands and look at the art in such a big, beautiful way will be super exciting for us. We’ve really put a lot of work into the ideas behind the art concept and the die-hard vinyl also comes with individual signed Polaroid photographs and has a contest all wrapped into too. So we’ve really put some extra effort into making these releases super special for our fans.


NI ROCKS – There are quite a few. I noticed on the Napalm site that there is a multi-colour vinyl that includes a 7” inch vinyl single that features two other tracks - “New Jive” and “We Are The Nation”. Are those some of the tracks that you wrote that weren’t included on the album?

SKYE – Yes, those will be two extra bonus tracks. We’re super excited to have the opportunity to release a few more in these kind of exclusive, different releases; so that we can get some of those babies like I said that we threw overboard (laughs) back on the boat and be like ‘ok songs, you have a way to get out into the world now’.

NI ROCKS – A new lease of life! I actually tried to order that yesterday but it was saying it wasn’t available, so I’m not sure if it’s sold out or just not available at the moment. I’m not sure.

SKYE – Yeah, I think it is sold out in the European UK/EU store, but there are still some copies available in North America. I think the system is messed up where if you’re shipping to the UK you can’t order from the US. You have to find somebody who can buy it and then send it to you I guess. It’s through the Napalm system so we don’t physically actually touch those vinyls before they get to the fans. The neon orange ones we have on our store and we’ll be able to sign those and send them out as well.


NI ROCKS – I noticed that there is also a photo-book CD version of the album – which I think may be an exclusive on your website. What can fans who pre-order that expect?

SKYE – Yeah, I was really excited to come up with an idea to present the record in a unique packaging way that is kind of a collector’s item. Our long time collaborator Francesca Ludikar who does a lot of our photography – she has worked with the band since the beginning – we were brainstorming what would be a really cool way to present the record and we came up with this book idea, which now I realise is something a lot of other bands have done (laughs). It’s called a year book, but we had the idea of this four factions or gangs from Cyco City, and I wanted to explain their kind of aesthetics a little bit more. I wanted to put in some exclusive band photos and I wanted to have the lyrics really beautifully read. So it’s a 28 page hard cover book that measures 8 x 8 inches and it has a CD pocket in the back and it has some secret stuff in there too – like a few little treasure hunts you might call it, in the book. It really just depicts all the Cyco City visuals that we have been so excited creating over the past year or two. It’s really a beautiful collector’s item and as of now there are only 400 that we have printed; so it will be a limited item.

NI ROCKS – And those are available on your website?

SKYE – Yes.


NI ROCKS – You mentioned the album cover earlier. There is a great album cover for the new album – who was behind the artwork and what can you tell us about it?

SKYE – That’s another Francesca Ludikar collab. One thing that I find, probably the hardest in putting out an album is coming up with the album cover art. You want something that represents all the music that you’ve spent so hard making, something eye-catching, something that looks big and looks beautiful as small thumbnail when you’re on Spotify, and as a huge vinyl. So it has to work in many different ways and I always tend to drive Francesca nuts (laughs) by coming up with an idea – she half produces it and I’m like ‘no,no, no this is wrong. Wrong direction. You need to start again’ (laughs). We did multiple shoots and multiple different concepts for this record cover. The one we settled on was all of our factions colours in this beautiful sunset over Cyco City where you can see the buildings poking through the clouds and I’m falling from the sky, which is the last scene in the first video, for the single “Bystander”, we ended the  video with that scene happening. Each of the buildings has our different club logos on them and I always really loved integrating Cyco City, our world, into each of the album covers and connect them in a certain way. I thought that the colour, mixed with the composition, mixed with the glitchy effect coming through the clouds – it’s almost as if it’s not quite real; it’s almost like an Alice in Wonderland falling through the rabbit hole type of idea. I thought it came together really awesome. We did some crazy photo shoots where I had to kinda jump in the air to make it feel like I was falling and then we flipped the image upside down to make it look like I was falling from the sky. It was a lot of fun to put together and I’m really happy with how it turned out.


NI ROCKS – In the past the band has recorded and released a couple of acoustic albums. Did you give any thought to doing something like that again during covid? A lot of bands seem to have taken that time during covid to do acoustic albums or covers albums. Did you think of doing something like that?

SKYE – The thing was us was that because we were still kind of behind the gun, wanting to get this record out, we actually didn’t have much time, compared to a lot of other people. We were thinking we need to finish this record, there is so much to do. But we’ve always really loved breaking down the songs. For this record I’ve posted a piano, vocal cover of our song “No Surrender”. I got an old, antique piano for Christmas and it has reignited my playing passion, so I’ve started learning the next single as well on piano. That’s the stuff that I’ve been posting as we go through each of the singles, showing a different way to perform the songs. But I’m sure that once we release this record and get the official versions out first, then we’ll do more broken down acoustic versions as well.


NI ROCKS – We’ve played the first two Napalm Records singles from the new album, but as you mentioned earlier the next single is going to be “Vertigo”. The video is coming out tomorrow (8th April), what can you tell us about that track?

SKYE – Yes, this is one of the two tracks that we wrote in Vegas with Kane. It’s so funny how a song almost has more meaning now that we’ve been through what we’ve been through. I always find that I find more meaning in my songs in hindsight than I do in the moment. “Vertigo” is about being disoriented, which is obviously what we’ve been feeling throughout this pandemic, even though I wrote this pre-pandemic. In the song it is written as if it’s directed to someone who makes you feel kinda confused or they’re messing with you or you’re declaring that you won’t let them take the best of you, even though they’re trying to knock you off balance. It’s got a very awesome, if I say so myself, riff that kind of sucks you in. It’s got a bit of that harder industrial side that I think we got introduced to through Kane and for it still has all the Sumo Cyco fun element – some crazy riff at the beginning, lots of melody, gets heavy , has a bit of that dance vibe in the bridge.

The video is...oh man, it took me many more hours to make the video than the song (laughs). The video concept started last year and we even shot some of the scenes in September of last year, then shot even more in the past month. The art and the props that were built for this is a culmination of collecting items for the past two years. When you see the video you’ll know what I mean. We call it The Tree, but it probably looks nothing like a tree. That’s how we had to structure this thing to build it – it’s basically a bunch of different odds and ends, technology mixed with random props from music videos, speakers and bull horns and all these different things that we built this entire contraption out of. Matt went to work while I was editing “No Surrender” and did a lot of the heavy lifting in that, so I have to give him a huge props as it looks so cool.


 

 

 

NI ROCKS – Covid, as we’ve mentioned has had a huge impact on bands and affected touring. Does the band have any live shows planned for later in the year to support the album? And when might we see you back in Europe?

SKYE – Yeah, we’re working on it. We have nothing to announce just yet. Obviously we’re still figuring out the rules and regulations. For instance, right now in Ontario where I live we just got put into another pretty extreme lockdown, where our Premier even banned live streaming (laughs) because they thought too many bands were getting together with each other in venues, even with their small crews, and they literally just put a ban on that today! So it’s kind of tough to imagine a touring world when those kind of things are still happening. Canada is a little bit behind when it comes to the vaccinations. Ultimately, I would love to say, and we’re hoping and looking to the end of this year, in the fall and winter, to potentially come back overseas, but obviously that is contingent on everything aligning with all the rules and regulations and us being able to leave where we are. So, fingers crossed. The fans know that there is nothing that we want more than to get back on the road and get back playing for everyone.


NI ROCKS – The band have played Ireland before, North and South, on a few occasions. Do you think we might see you back here in the near future?

SKYE – Yeah, I would love to come back. I’ve had so many good times in Northern Ireland. One time that I specifically remember, I can’t remember the name of the venue, but it was this gorgeous old theatre that felt like it was out of a movie or something, because it felt you were going back in time. It was so well preserved I guess as a piece of history. It would be great to come back and play again.

NI ROCKS – That was probably The Empire, I think you played there in 2016 (with Alien Ant Farm) and then played The Limelight after that in 2018 (with CKY).


NI ROCKS – 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of Sumo Cyco and the band’s first gig was ten years ago this month. Was there any thought of doing something to mark that anniversary?

SKYE – Ahh, well for us in a way we’d love to probably do more, but I think with the new coming out, we’ve just been focusing our energy on this release. For our fans, almost the best thing that you could do as an anniversary gift is to make another record and release more music. That’s why people love what we do. But I do have some plans for the future – a few projects that take our history and all our different art and videos and what-not, as far as documenting this entire journey that we’ve been on. I’ve a few projects that I would love to get to, but I feel that sometimes I need to have an extra pair of hands because there is so much that I want to do, but only so much time. Eventually we’ll get there and maybe for the fifteenth anniversary we’ll release some of that stuff.


NI ROCKS – You, of course, had a successful solo career prior to the band. Who were your influences when you first started recording and how have those influences developed over the past 18 years or so?

SKYE – Yeah, it’s been quite a journey. It’s crazy to think that it was like fifteen years ago and I’m still doing this (laughs). It’s crazy, what am I thinking! When I first started I was really just so fresh faced and new to the entire business. My first inspirations were really just loving to perform on stage. When I was a child I did a lot of musicals and stage performances at school and I really loved that. At first, as a young kid, I remember the Spice Girls as being my huge inspiration; I just wanted to be like the sixth Spice Girl, I was so into that. Then as I got older and my music tastes evolved I really fell in love with guitar based music, and I would say that happened fairly early, maybe at thirteen or fourteen years old. I really loved bands like Sum 41 – sort of pop punk, like Blink 182 type of stuff. Then as that evolved, my taste just kept getting heavier, even though I still loved pop music, I was just expanding my knowledge in all directions. I was learning about music history and pop music, and getting introduced to hip-hop, getting introduced to reggae and world beats. All different types of thinking kept piquing my interest, and luckily along the way I’ve had a lot of great...if you call them mentors, or friends or people I’ve come into contact with in the industry; that have kinda exposed me to their catalogues of music that have defined them and really made me appreciate all the different styles that are out there. I always did have, even with my pop career, I always had a thread of guitar based music. I’ve really tried to experiment and even at that young age, I can see that little rebel trying to find her way through the industry to fully emerge. I think with Sumo Cyco I’ve finally been able to fully realise everything that I’ve really wanted to do and I feel free with this project to really experiment which is great, whereas I think that sometimes as a young pop artist, especially when you don’t have as much experience, it’s easier to be put into a box or stay within my lane doing straight forward pop songs. But when you start a band and name it Sumo Cyco (laughs) you just start releasing random styles out there and people start to like it. It is really encouraging to just keep doing weird, crazy, wild stuff and that’s what we love.


NI ROCKS – The band have supported female fronted bands over the years such as Devilskin, Butcher Babies and you mentioned Jinjer earlier. There is a very strong female force in rock and metal these days. That must be something that you’re proud to be part of? The resurgence of female fronted bands.

SKYE – I’ve always been attracted to females that I feel that I can look up to and that have shown me that it doesn’t matter if you look a certain way or assume to be a pretty thing on a shelf, that you can scream you head off, or write your own songs, tell people off or have a voice. I’ve always been attracted to women who do that. One of my first, I guess idols you could call her, was the character Tank Girl because she would just tell everybody off and was to me, just so unapologetically herself. I think that’s why a lot of these acts in music today inspire so many people. It’s been great to make friends with some of these bands and see them every night and learn from them and get inspired by them. It’s been amazing to be part of it – to be part of watching, and even the fact that we were on tour with Jinjer. During that tour some of the venues we were scheduled to play were upgraded in size two to three times before we actually arrived. To see that type of success happen with Jinjer and see how many people were, really as the tour was happening, you could see that the shows were getting bigger and bigger and word was getting out further and further as we went along. It was really quite an awesome thing to see so many people being attracted to this heavy, heavy sound coming from somebody like Tatiana, who could see walking down the street and you’d never know that she had this HUGE voice inside her. It was quite cool to be able to see their success and I’m quite proud to say that we held our own beside them on tour and we had a great time. Really great people too.


NI ROCKS – Do you get many requests to appear as a guest vocalist and is there anyone in particular that you’d like to collaborate with on a project? I know you worked with Benji Webbe (from Skindred) on the previous album.

SKYE – Yeah, I do get requests. There are some people obviously on my wish list. But for this record, for one reason or another, whether it be the pandemic getting in the way, or us being so picky and re-doing songs over and over again. I felt that we had a lot that we needed to work through as writers in a band before we brought other collaborators in. Even the whole situation of working with Kane was very new for us and quite, I guess you could call it, a risk in a way because we were spending money in a proper studio which we normally don’t do. It’s like a big name producer and travelling all the way to Vegas where we had to pay to stay for a while. We were like, we better come up with some really good songs while we’re here (laughs) or the whole thing is a pretty expensive vacation!

Collaborations, to me, have to always feel like organic in a certain way. What was kinda cool about the stories with Kane and with Benji is that there are definitely connections there to our history. With Benji, Skindred was the band that inspired me to start a band, so working with him was almost like it’s hard to work with or have anyone else guess feature because I’ve already collaborated with one of the greats that, to me, was the most instrumental in us even becoming a band. Then with Kane, it’s a crazy story, but his dad actually did some production on my very first pop single that I ever wrote or released on Capital Records when I was like fourteen years old. So the full connection with that is kinda crazy – that it was one of his first projects that he ever done on a major label and it was my first project that I’d ever done. Then years later his son becomes this rock, crazy song-writer and producer and I end up working with him. He’s part Canadian as well So there were these connections that just made me feel....I’m not one to believe that everything is meant to be...but if felt like it fit properly! I think that the best collaborations happen when it’s like ‘this feels right, this feels like someone I should be working with’. I don’t typically find someone off the internet and just say ‘yeah sure we’ll just do a collaboration’. I feel so attached I guess to my art that it really has to feel worthwhile. I guess I’m really picky, but that’s my story with collabs.


NI ROCKS – As you mentioned earlier, the new album does feature two tracks that were previously released by the band back in 2019 – “Love You Wrong” and “Run With The Giants”. We’ll play “Love You Wrong” now. Has that been re-recorded for the new album?

SKYE – Yeah, it had been redone for the new album.

NI ROCKS – We’ll play the old version as we’ve played all the track we’re allowed to play so far. What can you tell us about the track?

SKYE – “Love You Wrong”, as soon as I heard the instrumental that Matt had made, I was immediately drawn to it. The image that came into my mind was two people just being pulled apart – like physically pulled apart from each other. I don’t know why that image came into my mind but that was what I had to run with. It basically to me depicted a relationship that almost in a way could be the best thing that has ever happened to you, but it could also be the one thing that changes the course of your life forever; and could be the detriment or death of the person you would have become without this relationship. It was kind of depicting love lost; what it means to be so connected to somebody, feeling that you can’t live without them and then being torn apart. Do you take it to your grave – is this the person? The idea I like to explore, with humans trying to relate to someone for their whole lives and have a partner for their whole live. It was just an interesting idea that I wanted to play with and I just ran with that for the lyric and for the music video as well. If you notice, in the video there is actually a couple of shots where I actually, physically made us jump apart as if we were shooting each other or being pulled apart from our bed. The tragic character gets sucked into the bed while I get flung into the ceiling. That was literally the image that I first got in my head when I first heard the track so I was happy that came full circle and I was able to actually depict it in a video.


NI ROCKS – We’ll play that one now. That’s all the questions that I have. It’s been great talking with you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

SKYE – Thank you so much. I had a good time talking through everything with you. Thanks so much for the support, I really appreciate it. It’s amazing to have people in all the different corners of the world helping to get the word out about our band. We really appreciate it.

NI ROCKS - Good luck with the album release and hopefully we’ll see you back in Belfast sometime soon.

SKYE - I can’t wait. That will be a good day when we’re back in Belfast rockin’ out.