We met with Billy from Blood Dealer to discuss the band’s recently released EP “Designer Antichrist”, the creative process behind the music and their upcoming tour.
Blood Dealer is an alt-metal trio from the U.K. whose musical style is extremely original and complex. We spoke about a lot of the band’s creative processes, sporadic music video making in unique locations and more.
We started the conversation from the very beginning, when I asked Billy how Blood Dealer got its name. He said, “They knew they wanted something aggressive but alluring to the sound and inevitability, so they picked the name out of a hat! Okay, I guess we’re rolling with this now—guess that’s the birth of it.”
I asked Billy about the inspiration behind the new E.P. Billy expressed:
More than anything, the band wanted it to be a staple of their new direction of sound. There’s a lot of experimentation on there. We wanted to come up with something that stated—this is us, we’re here, we’re not changing anything, we just want to push the envelope even more, and the E.P. is a showcase of that.
He added, “The E.P. is named to sound as something lavish and cool but also dark. That’s our sound, so we wanted to embody that in our EP. The whole inspiration is the mix between light and dark, we wanted to do that sonically as well as lyrically in every essence, whether it’s in the music or the artwork.”
Blood Dealer is doing a headline tour this Summer. What can we expect from a Blood Dealer show?
“It’ll be chaotic for sure, there will be a lot of energy. We’re fun guys to be around, and we like to make our shows fun and interactive. We’re trying to bring the fun back to metal- not just in our music, but in our lives, shows too. We’re exceeding our expectations with the fan base. We took a huge gamble doing a headline tour, we’re just as much expecting a surprise as the fans are, it’s very exciting.”
When asked what Billy’s favourite song from E.P. is and which one he’s most looking forward to performing live, his response was;
I can’t speak for the other guys, they’ll fall out with me for the choice I make for sure. I am most looking forward to performing “Crossfire” live, as there’s so much energy. Favourite track from the E.P. is “Crucifix” as it’s such a huge mark of who we are as a band, sonically- even visuallyit’sts very much like this is exactly what Blood Dealer is. This is so us, it’s the most us song we have, and I couldn’t wait to drop it.
You’ve expressed that Blood dealers have “entered a new era”Can you elaborate on this?
“As far as we go, we’ve been doing music for a long time, there’s been lots of experimentation, who we are, what we want, our identity. A new era for us is the essence of being definitive and defining who we are. This is what Blood Dealer means and the message we want to get across. For people who haven’t heard us, this is a new ideology.”
‘Jealousy’, the lead single, arrived earlier this spring with an R&B-meets-metal delivery that set the tone for what this new era is about. The track landed with a video awash in red-and-blue lighting and emotional tension. It quickly became a statement piece, teasing the E.P.’s deeper themes of identity, insecurity, and the obsessive comparison culture we live in.
I asked Billy about the process of creating the song, the music video and the decision to also release an acoustic version of the track.
He stated, ” We had the song for such a long time, making a staple and a statement in our music, we were like, wow, we’ve got something here, but we sat on it for a long time. We were so excited, we knew we were gonna have to do a music video for it and also an acoustic version. The song is born out of being an R n B song, really slow and sexy and cool, but we knew it needed guitars! It has a Kehlani vibe, classic R and B, and neo-soul vibe. We loved the chorus and loved everything. We just knew that was gonna be the song that was gonna be huge.”
I asked about the detailed Artwork for the E.P.
“With the album art, we wanted it to be very contrasty, really dark and something you can associate with trauma and raw emotion. My favourite part is the white doves, almost like screaming through any sort of positive light. There’s something in the artwork that’s so interesting, it’s so melancholic. It’s a big influence of what we like to hear and see as artists, we like that good and bad contrast and mixing ir is such an interesting idea, we wanted to showcase that in the artwork, the white doves signifies the positive aspects of life, screaming through that is a voice that’s never been heard.”
You have such a huge vocal range, and all the songs have such fluctuating styles. What is the creative process behind your music, and how do you decide which parts go where and how lyrics will be delivered in each area?
“Honest, it’s kind of random. I’ve been doing vocals for a long time, since I was 12 years old. ( When I was younger) All I wanted to be was Neyo or Usher; I wasn’t into metal. Then I started listening to pop-punk. I got into metal vocals as a joke, I was rehearsing with the band I was in at the time, I thought I’m just gonna take the piss laugh (while doing metal vocals) and my drummer at the time was like you know you’re quite good at that and (I thought to myself) I’ve got to practice that more. I’ve grown up with a lot of different musical influences, it was more to me what we have at the bass or demo of a song, this is the vibe- is it a Rap vibe, or R n B? We try to cater the vocals to it. Vocals are the last things we add. We let Charlie do his thing and then add to it and figure it out. We need to be in our lane and allow the influences to be there, but make them who we are.”
The band released a music video for the song “Crucifix” last week, and I asked about the process behind creating the music video.
“We knew we wanted it to be red; we had to do it red. It’s quite funny with me travelling at the moment and some of the other band members travelling, we really wanted to make a video for it, but couldn’t quite make it work, but knew we wanted to make something cool. I was in Texas and found this massive church, I was like this seems like the right thing to do- (laughing), if someone finds out what I’m singing about here, I’m gonna be in so much trouble, but it looks cool, no one was there, not sure if it was abandoned, I thought I’m going to take liberty of this and have some fun. We’ve got an amazing editor we work with, and I like to be involved in the creative process too,o and did some post effects on this too, it’s a mess of everything creative, which we found cool. It’s so crazy because I had to film it, we got there at 7 pm and sunset was at8 pmm so we had an hour of daylight, (I thought to myself) its Sunday tomorrow, we’ve no way to film it tomorrow cos everyone’s gonna be here, so we had an hour to shoot the church scenes, a mad rush around, a hugy cool place…we got lucky I guess.”
Billy gave us some lore around the band.
“We listen to our fans a lot and through that we became prevalent in the “BookTok” (on TikTok) world, the whole band reads books, were suckers for dark romance books. I did some TikTok posts about a certain book I’m reading that I couldn’t put down, and some of the lyrics, especially in “Crucifix”, have dark elements of lore in the books we read lyrically and sonically. (There’s) Little details that people don’t know about yet. Merch books could be in the making- we’ll think about that for sure. There’s a book theme.”
I asked what the future holds for Blood Dealer, and Billy excitedly responded.
“Really exciting stuff is happening behind the scenes, all I can say is there are some reasons as to why I’m out in LA. We’re working on new music all the time, and there are songs we’ve sat on for a long time, also. We’re not done yet and have a message to get across, and we’re going to make an impact next year, that’s our aim.”
He also expressed that their upcoming headline tour is close to selling out and added that there will be no venue upgrades. At the time of writing this article, there’s still a limited number of tickets left for the Wales and Manchester shows. Get them while you can!
Listen to some of Blood Dealer: