Interview: Betraying The Martyrs

“There’s a lot of young bands that use the electronic side and make it sound immature and gimmicky, we pride ourselves on writing real music”

Being in a band that is constantly on the road, and not always in your home country can be quite tiring. However, for French metalcore juggernauts Betraying the Martyrs, being on tour is what the band is all about and is what has helped them evolve.

“We love being on the road,” vocalist Aaron Matts told Already Heard. “Of course it’s tiring and gets hard sometimes, but on the road is where we feel at home and wouldn’t have it any other way.”

And that is exactly where the band have been, after just finishing an extensive tour around Europe and the UK with Chelsea Grin. With the recent release of the band’s third full-length record, ‘The Resilient’, the six-piece believe the new material has opened them up to a wider audience, including fans in the UK, which the band had previously struggled to leave their mark on.

For Matts, it has been a bit of a homecoming after joining the band in 2010 and moving out to France from Leicester, he hopes to aid his band to break the UK. He continued, “It’s been an awesome journey for me; I love England and am extremely proud of being English, but I have found a new home in France and don’t have any plans to move back.

We certainly felt a difference with the response in the UK after the release of this new CD, UK is a market that means a great deal to us and we’d love to really break it.”

With ‘The Resilient’ there was a sense of running the rule over old ground to find a more progressive sound unique to the Betraying the Martyrs brand, and with a two-year gap between the new record and ‘Phantom’, the vocalist said they have ironed out the creases a bit more to stay true to what the band represents.

“We have evolved in the sense that we learnt from past errors; we managed to channel our influences in a more digestible way,” added Matts. “We took the time to work more on our songwriting skills and less on getting too technical where it wasn’t necessary. We really wanted to go back to our original BTM sound on this record. We separated ourselves from over-clustered influences and did our best to write from our hearts as corny as that sounds; the sound on this record is the purest sound we could produce.

We like to mix our orchestral side with modern yet mature metal. There’s a lot of young bands that use the electronic side and make it sound immature and gimmicky, we pride ourselves on writing real music with a grown sound, in that sense we like to think of ourselves as unique.”

Even though ‘The Resilient’ has not long hit the shelves, the band is already gearing towards writing more material as well as spending even more time on the road, and Matts promised the guys would be back on UK shores pretty soon closing the interview by saying, “I’d like to say a huge thank you to the British fans for keeping us going, please keep listening and we look forward to playing for you all again.”

’The Resilient’ by Betraying The Martyrs is out now on Sumerian Records.