Band Interview: I Fight Bears

Following the release of their excellent new EP, Liberosis (read our review here) and ahead of their appearance at Bloodstock 2022, we chatted to guitarist Chris and vocalist Dan of I Fight Bears. What follows is a short transcript of some of the things we talked about. However, you can watch the full interview below or listen to it via Soundcloud, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Let’s talk about the first great thing to come from I Fight Bears in recent time, the release of your brand-new EP Liberosis. It’s been out for almost a full month at this stage. Now the dust is settling a little bit on it. How have you found the overall reaction to it?

Really overwhelming. I was down in West Wales when an email came through from Metal Hammer and it was saying that they reviewed us. It was eight out of ten, and, like, the score is a score. That’s someone’s opinion, but just being in a prestigious magazine like that, it was pretty overwhelming. In your head you kind of say to yourself, well, it’s just a really cool hobby. So, it’s pretty awesome that people can share what we’ve been making over the last couple of years.

All these little nods and stuff and all these overwhelming reactions and positive things are coming towards us, that at the moment, like work and general life takes over, but having this really awesome sort of hobby happen and get big at the same time, it’s really cool. It’s overwhelming.

When we started work on the EP, which was originally supposed to be an album, we condensed it to an EP because we wanted to only pick the best songs that we had at that time. It was a case of, well, we were early 2000s metalcore, but we’ve all got these wildly different experiences, different genres, different tastes. Let’s add a lot of that in and what came out was we have today. I think we still play homage to the roots of what our core sound is, but there’s enough differences and variation in it that there’s something new for other people to listen to. We can do more with our music.

Was that what the original vision was when it came to creating the EP, to give this reinvention life, as it were? Did the pandemic period have a lot of effect on things?

Yes, definitely. So I’m trying to remember the dates now, but I think our first album came out in around 2017, 2018, and we already had four or five songs ready to go for EP at that point. We went to a residential recording studio up in Mid Wales and we decided to track the demos that we had. The versions of those demos that came out at the time, we loved. We came away from that recording session really happy. We didn’t want to release it immediately, we wanted to do some minor tweaks over the course of probably a few months after listening to it on repeat and talking about it. We also played a couple of the songs live too. We wanted to just make, originally, minor adjustments to the tracks. And I can’t remember whether it was myself or Mark who decided that these songs will sound heavier if we turn our guitars down to B, because I think we were originally in C before.

It was like everything’s heavier when it’s lower. Unfortunately for us, it did sound better when we tuned it down, which then means we needed to re-record all of the guitars. Then when we’ve done that, we realised that the vocals needed to be changed, tweak the melodies, and tweak the lyrics to run alongside it. So, then Dan is impacted by that and he changes all his harsh vocals along with it. I think probably the only person who wasn’t impacted that much is Scott, because the drums remain consistent.

So that’s probably, I want to say, early 2020. And we had working versions of these songs and then COVID kind of smashed everyone in the face and decided, you’re not going to do anything with your life, you’re going to stay inside. So it was at that point that we kind of re-evaluated what we were going to do. We knew that if we recorded the EP, we didn’t want to release it in the middle of a global lockdown.

So that kind of just stalled us, essentially. We did a couple of things, we did more tweaking to those tracks over the course of pandemic. We pretty much released it when everything was open again. It was quite good timing, to be honest and, coincidentally, we entered the M2TM competition for Bloodstock and we realised that our EP release will coincide with it.

It must have been quite maddening to a certain degree. You were kind of just waiting for the first opportunity when you could properly get this EP out there.

Definitely, yeah, definitely. Last year, decided to put a big sort of Halloween show on, our first one back. Yeah, literally, and the nerves on all of us. I think some of us didn’t really say it, but I was nervous. After we finished that set, I never wanted to do it more than after that show. It was just like this overwhelming feeling of, forget the past now. This is now. Rock and roll time, let’s go. And I looked at Chris, I looked at the band and I was like, this is where we’re meant to be and this is where I want to be going. And it was great.

I think that Halloween show especially, and there was another show that we played in Swansea with the guy in the pit, which we’ll come to in a minute. It really rekindled everything that we love about live music, playing live and seeing the audience in front of us.

It basically reinvigorated you.

Yeah, it did. I’ll tell you the story of the guy in Swansea because it’s my favourite story. We’re playing our usual set, about half hour, 35 minutes set and about, I want to say about 25 minutes into it. Crowd is really enjoying it. They’re kind of jumping around and there’s a section were there’s a little bit of a lull where there’s only one guitar playing and we split the crowd. This one guy walks out of absolutely nowhere into the middle of this circle of nothing, and he gets on his head and he starts spinning around and he’s break dancing. So, for the rest of the song we’re playing, he’s in the middle spinning on his head and his legs are going everywhere. And we just watched him like, this guy’s amazing.

He’s actually a professional dancer!

He took advantage of that moment. Everyone’s always trying to break records at Bloodstock, guys. There is one for you, then. Most people break dancing in a pit.

At Bloodstock, you called it. Now, that’s going to happen.

Bloodstock 2022, you are going to be playing the Friday of the festival on the New Blood stage, earned by winning the South Wales Metal 2 the Masses. Have you ever been to this festival before as fans, and how are you feeling about playing it?

I personally know hundreds of people that have been, and I always feel like the one that’s been left out, like I haven’t finished my right of passage of being a metalhead because I haven’t yet been to Bloodstock, but I’m going this year. The stories that I hear is, well, they’re filling me with confidence. I’m going to have an amazing time.

I’ve always gone to Download but I’m absolutely buzzing because I didn’t go to Download this year and even better, I get to go to Bloodstock and play the festival as well. And not only that, it’s like loads of our favourite bands are playing as well. It’s really like amazing. It’s only a couple of weeks. I literally can’t wait to go.

The New Blood line-up itself across all the days is incredibly strong.

There’s so many good bands, it’s unreal.

And with that though, that’s a lot of bands vying for an audience’s attention. What do you think if you are going to have to do to reel them in?

Well, part of that answer is not to be up against amazing bands. We’ve already got our plans for getting an audience into the new New Blood when we’re playing because we’re not a Lamb of God, for example. We’re not 400,000 streams daily or something like that. So the likelihood is the 20,000 people that are going to Bloodstock have probably not heard of us outside of the insane fans that we know are getting bus down and they get to see us because they told us. So, we’ve been doing kind of background things where we’ve got stickers and patches and stuff and we go in there, we’ll be there on a Thursday all day and the entirety of Friday we’re going to be wandering around, we’re going to be mingling and interacting with the audience and saying, by the way, tomorrow we’re playing. We want to see you break dancing in the middle.

So obviously the focus is completely on the build towards playing Bloodstock. How about the remainder of 2022? Is the hopeful plan just to be as busy as humanly possible.

The EP that we brought out is a collection of the last couple of years, whereas the tracks that we’ve been writing in the last sort of year or so, they’re like a step up again, if that’s the best way of saying it. They’re like, they’re even better. And, I mean, I was listening to the five demos that are floating around at the moment the other day and they’re just so good. It’s like, this will take it up again. I feel as if the music that we’ve done since we started is just stepping stones as to where we’re aiming to be and it’s just getting better and it’s just, like, really cool.

We’ve got no intention of slowing down. If anything, it’s the complete opposite. I mean, Bloodstock is that kind of jumping off point from my perspective. So, we’ve been able and lucky enough to play very good shows with very good bands and big bands and decent venues previously, but we’re grateful Bloodstock by the horns. We’re going to use that as an opportunity.

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