BLKLST // Marked Up For Madness

There are a lot of good bands out there right now, but none of them are screaming early Korn and 36 Crazyfists. In the case of Blklst, the following words are not used lightly – hands down, their EP Hard To Swallow is absolutely killer. Sick. As. Heck.

The roots of this madness, stemmed from a love of just that era. “Old Slipknot, old Korn, all that sort of stuff,” drummer Drue Herring reels off a list of Blklst’s influences. “We wanted to bring it back with a new twist.” “We tried to think about introducing melody to our music,” adds vocalist Joshua Westwick. “We went to those bands we grew up on.

“Being we were doing hardcore stuff it seemed naturally to take influence from what we loved as kids rather than what we’re listening to at the moment. And they’re some of my biggest influences, so we thought why not?”

In the psychedelic video for single Hypocrite, Blklst are as they say emulating the bands that have inspired them, but with that modern twist, we get an introduction into who Blklst are. “You have Josh to thank for that,” says Herring, “He spent hours and hours putting that together. I think he did really well.” “Yeah it was just, I don’t know, a long time sitting at my computer seeing what would suit what the song’s about,” says Westwick. “I ended up making a joke out of it in a way but at the same time, trying to make it look like an old Rage [Against The Machine] video.”

The level of talent in this band is immense. Obviously most bands want to stand out on their own and not have too many lines drawn between themselves and the bands that came before them, but for Blklst, it’s absolutely not a bad thing to be affiliated – at the same time, apart from an outstanding EP, Herring and Westwick feel they do have that certain something to stand out above the rest. “To be quite honest, I haven’t heard anything, any band, that’s going for the sound we’re doing,” says Herring. “I think we’re doing a lot for ourselves,” adds Westwick. “If people jump onto it and start listening to it, that’s even better, but it’s an outlet for us.

We write what we want to hear at the time – if people enjoy that, even better.
[JOSHUA]

The Blklst mission is just as much about writing what they like as it is performing. Ten years down the line, they’re still going have to be pulling this material of frenzied energy off on stage. “And I think that’s where the spoken word and melodies coming into it now, we’re thinking we can’t scream hardcore our whole lives,” says Westwick. “We’re thinking if we expand [now] more into melody and use those ideas maybe we can do it for a lot longer.”

Unlike many bands entering the scene right now, Blklst were bold in their EP and entered with seven tracks of raw melodic masochism – but such was the creative output of Blklst, Hard To Swallow started life as a full blown album. “We had 13 tracks but decided to break it up into two EPs.” Hard to accept such a decision when there’s such good music to be experienced and the expectation of a full blown album is so strong. The way in which Blklst wrote their music, however, is a two part experience that needed to be introduced separately. “Rather than getting all the tracks up on our social media at once,” says Westwick, “We thought maybe all the tracks would get listened to a little bit more.

“The music industry is so quick-paced now we thought why not break it up, slow it down a bit.”

In exploring this very particular style of music, Blklst are still setting themselves up to be allowed to experiment and reinvent and evolve in their sound further down the line. “There’s all different aspects of our sound where we could take a pass into one sort of sound,” says Herring. “If we wanted to we could just stick it to the sort of heavier side, nothing’s really locked off in terms of the direction our sound could go.”