“It seemed like the right time to go independent.” While She Sleeps’ frontman, Loz Taylor, is reflecting on the Sheffield metalcore band’s decision to leave major label Sony following the conclusion of their last album, 2015’s ‘Brainwashed’. “We’d had a few hiccups with the label,” the vocalist explains. “We’d question why something had leaked at 4am with no hype and no push behind it. We had that realisation that we were a small fish in a big pond, and we had to put up with silly things that we didn’t need to.”

It sounds like a scenario we’ve heard many times before: rock band does well, signs to major label; major label fucks rock band around, rock band tell major label to fuck off. But Mat Welsh (guitar/vocals), despite not speaking in glowing terms of their experience, suggests that the decision to leave was amicable, and that band and label parted on good terms. “We weren’t angry at each other, we both just decided to stop,” he says. “We’d realised over the last two years that the beliefs of the band weren’t conducive to us enjoying our time with Sony. They were alright, but to us, this music and this band is the be all and end all of our lives, and we’d handed that over to some people who didn’t really care about us that much.”

We just threw ourselves in the deep end with it, and we decided to tell our management to turn any labels down, and that we were going to do this album independently and crowdfund.