A Q&A with Sentinel Complex
Industrial metal soundclash with drumnbass, beats and movie scores – here’s Bournemouth’s Sentinel Complex…
What’s the name of your latest release?
Our latest release is the song ‘Demise Of The Faithful’.
How did you get the title?
We had started writing this track towards the second half of 2019 when we had the idea to take our next record in a much darker direction. We started out with this idea to write a track about blind faith and to hearken back to end time scriptures – you can’t get darker than riffing off of old apocalypse texts! It’s essentially our take on the Book of Revelation as well as other myths and end time texts.
What was the hardest part about putting this release together, and why?
Probably just the amount of work that went into the release by doing everything ourselves including the video, promo and of course the mixing and recording.
What do you enjoy the most about producing your own material?
We are happy to say that we produce everything ourselves bar the mastering, which is done by the incredible Gareth Matthews. We love being able to produce ourselves, as it means that we have full control over how our music sounds and it means we are constantly learning about how to improve things and being able to discover unique techniques to further our style.
What do you want the listener to take away from hearing your music?
As a listener, we would love for people to see the striking imagery, hear the sounds we have created and hopefully have it stick with them. Sometimes it can be hard for people to really get into what we do and we appreciate that, especially if they are into only one of the genre types we like to write rather than multiple. But we’d love for people to at least think it’s good music, regardless of the genre.
How does a track normally come together for the band? Can you tell us a bit about that process?
When it comes to the process, we both do all of the writing and it usually goes the way of one of us will have an idea which will then be brought to the other, and then we’ll both sit down and see where we want the idea to go. At some point I’ll usually sit down with the end result and take it as far as I can go with it. Eventually we’ll end up with the final version which we are both happy with, and we won’t release anything until we are both completely satisfied with it.
How would you say that the sound of your band has changed over the last year?
Over the last year or so we have really tried a lot of different things to make our sound as unique as possible, which ranges from things like the structure of our songs, to changing the amount of a certain style we add to each song – more of a metal track to more cinematic or industrial, for example – to seeing whether a song needs vocals or whether we are able to complete the feel of a track by keeping it instrumental. We are always experimenting, and no two songs of ours sound the same.
What bands/artists have influenced you the most since you started your own band/project, and why?
Our influences actually range from a bunch of different artists, since we combine elements from metal, electronic music and also a lot of film score works. For metal, our main influences are bands like Fear Factory, Mechina and The Defiled. When it comes to electronic elements, we try to pull a lot of techniques from darker artists like 1788-L, Swarm and some of Trent Reznor’s more electronic pieces. Film score makes up a large chunk of where our ideas come from and we both have a huge mutual admiration for Hans Zimmer! He is definitely our most loved composer, but we also love people like John Carpenter and Vangelis too for the horror and cyberpunk twists.
When the world is back to normal, where would you really like to tour, and why?
Probably around the UK for a start since it would be our first, but we would love to go out and visit a few of our most dedicated fans to show them how appreciated they are! There are so many amazing people we would love to meet.
If you could only pick one track for our reader to listen to, to get a taster of your music, which one would you go for, and why?
Ah man that’s a tough question, it would have to be one of our three most recent releases (‘Grievous Angel’, ‘Dystroyer’ or ‘Demise Of The Faithful’) just because those are the songs we have released where we have really started nailing down our style. If we only have to pick one though, it would have to be ‘Demise Of The Faithful’.
Where do you see your band in five years’ time?
Hopefully still doing what we are doing but on a much larger scale!
The new release from Sentinel Complex, ‘Demise of the Faithful’ is out now
For more info visit: sentinelcomplex.co.uk
