Some words about Architects at Abbey Road

But more so, words about learning to live again - and escaping darkness

Everything changed in 2014. This was the year in which Architects, a good but going-nowhere-particularly-special metalcore band from Brighton, England, released their sixth studio album, Lost Forever // Lost Together. Disappointed with their present standing. Frustrated with prior creative decisions, the difference between this and their previous work was seismic. Now far enough away from 2011’s hollow The Here and Now - with the trad chug of 2012’s Daybreaker serving as a buffer between this band and that - it was here that Architects found not only their voice, but their soul.

They broke with their label Century Media. Moved to Epitaph Records, a label with more space for genre to stretch out. Decamped to Hyssna, Sweden, the location of Fredrik Nordström’s revered Studio Fredman (At The Gates, In Flames, Opeth). But more than anything, they just wrote some better songs. Bolder, but with licks of the ethereal. Unbeknown to most outside of the group, guitarist Tom Searle had been diagnosed with melanoma during the band’s 2012 world tour. This, alongside an increased focus on environmentalism, philosophy and the ugly dichotomy between spirituality and religion, led to Lost Forever // Lost Together’s songs coloured a new shade of black. In places, the record genuinely sounded a bit like the end of the world.

They kept rowing downstream, decamping to Sweden once more, making 2016’s All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us, their seventh record, again with producers Henrik Udd and Fredrik Nordström. This time there was no ‘bit’ about it. This was a death disco. The record set its stall out with an opening assault entitled ‘Nihilist’, the records title cribbed from a line in that very song; “It’s a statement about the dark and weird place the world is these days,” explained singer Sam Carter. “We seem to have abandoned the simpler ways of living life and moved to a place where we're just trying to fuck each other over. Whether our gods have abandoned us or we've abandoned them, it's a statement with real impact. When you see that title, you know this is going to be a heavy record. Heavy in title, heavy in songs…”

Released in the May of that year, by August Tom Searle – whose widescreen vision, force of will, ever growing worldview and increasingly explorative musicality had sculpted Britain’s most interesting heavy rock band in the space of four years – had succumb to cancer. He was 28-years-old.

I saw the band perform these songs – though perform is a word which suggests a degree of theatricality that sits ill at ease with the communal cleansing that took place that night – at a sold-out Brixton Academy in the November of that same year. I stood alone – I always stand alone at gigs these days; too scared to talk to anyone, too uncertain to integrate myself. And yet I’m pleased that nobody saw the state I’d got myself into. I barely knew Tom. I didn’t know his bandmates well. But these were songs, delivered with the desperation of a nautical crew trying to navigate a storm, that articulated the sadness I inherently felt about my own life. A fucking vulture, feasting on the misery of others. We all do it.

It was – and I can’t possibly imagine how it won’t always be – the most extraordinary rock concert I’ve ever attended.

As the last note rang out, I walked. And I walked some more. In no direction, no GPS to guide me home. Before I knew it, I was in Elephant and Castle. Then Southwark. Covent Garden. Hackney. A ghost trying to find its way back to its body. When I next saw Carter, at a magazine photoshoot involving him, Creeper singer Will Gould and then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn the following year, I couldn’t find the words to explain the emotion that fuelled my journey home that night. I regret organising that photoshoot, such has my understanding of and moral opposition to Corbyn’s politics shifted. I regret I couldn’t convey just how much that show mattered to me more.

“When I leave this skin and bone,” declares Carter on the opening song of the bands 2018’s excellent eighth record Holy Hell, “beyond my final heartbeat / I'll dismantle piece by piece…” And then a hushed realisation. “And I will know that death is not defeat…”

The late guitarist’s influence is woven throughout Holy Hell. We know that the spidery riff that runs throughout ‘Doomsday’ is his creation - that has been confirmed - and yet the band have long declined to reveal exactly where his other contributions lay. “We don't want to say because we don't want people's perspectives of the songs to be swayed by having that information,” explained the bands drummer and Tom’s twin brother Dan, who’d taken on from his late sibling the responsibility for writing lyrics. With touring guitarist Josh Middleton, from the ever-impressive Sylosis, Dan had picked up the songwriting too. And yet he did explain – as if such an explanation was needed – the essence of the record; “For me, broadly speaking, Holy Hell is about pain; the way we process it, cope with it, and live with it. There is value in pain. It's where we learn, it's where we grow.” As much as this was a record about Tom, it was also a record about those left behind.

Though their sound suggested anything but – if anything the band were putting more meat on the bones, not getting more skeletal, with synth and classical orchestration beginning to feature within their songwriting as a matter of course not of exception – I started to view Architects as a band more akin to Joy Division or the Manic Street Preachers who’d made 1994’s The Holy Bible; a band swirling the abyss, trying to find sprigs of beauty on scorched fields. Holy Hell closer ‘A Wasted Hymn’ was the saddest I could imagine any rock musician could sound and still possess the functionality to play and record music. ‘Modern Misery’ did just what it said on the tin.

I enjoyed the music immensely, but I feared for them. And so I was relieved when they returned, a year into a global pandemic that was beginning to make less sense in it’s management (and in truth, on the brink of breaking me), with a record whose title and contents suggested they’d begun to inch away – and upward – from the long, cold, dank way down. For Those That Wish to Exist was a record that stated it’s intent on its sleeve. Within the songs themselves, appearances from members of friends Parkway Drive, Royal Blood, Biffy Clyro and the much-missed Black Peaks, suggested that the group were building. Electronic atmospherics featured throughout. Single ‘Animals’ was the perfect articulation of this shifting sound. Fittingly the drummer explained that the record was concerned with environmental sustainability.

“I wanted to look in the mirror and ask ourselves the question of what are we going to do, as opposed to trying to point the finger at politicians,” he said. “Change has to start on a personal level. The world has developed a culture of wanting someone else to deal with it when we need to take our own responsibility. It has to start there.” With some justification, it delivered the band’s first UK number one album.  

It's hard not to view Architects live recording of the record at Abbey Road – which aired late last year on pay-per-view, again a word too ugly, with too many connotations of hotdogs and cheese drizzle to be used anywhere near discussion of the performance - as the closing of the loop that began in 2014. Recorded with BASCA-winning composer, conductor and arranger Simon Dobson and the Parallax Orchestra, and released commercially as audio on March 25th, there is surely no more sadness to be wrung. No more excavation of grief. No more refraction of pain. Surely. The swell of ‘Dead Butterflies’. The tempered rage of ‘Goliath’. There is a limit being met here. The only way forward now is to step aside and readdress.

This is perhaps best articulated within the final utterance of ‘Giving Blood’, the brassy rendition of which snarls and soars as metalcore and orchestral majesty duke it out. Here Carter, whose voice has never sounded better (and wetter) sighs softly – after the fear, the loss, the suffering. “I’d rather feel alive…”

You’d be some sort of ghoul to wish anything else for them.