Royal Blood: A band that could never beat their very first single
“This is a huge surprise for us, it’s probably more of a surprise for people here, as you probably don’t know who we are,” Mike Kerr said when Royal Blood deservedly won a Brit Award in 2015.
It was a seismic victory and a beacon of hope for music fans dwelling in the shadows of obscurity, who all wondered after that night, could this be the next band who drives British alternative music forward?
Their self-titled debut album was a shot in the arm, a fresh injection of ideas into a landscape of 2010s indie that was seemingly devoid of fresh concepts. The drummer Ben Thatcher was a tour-de-force behind the kit, and the bass-playing front man was indeed enigmatic, with this mystery pedal set up that their PR insisted they ham up in the promo of their records.
An exciting new future awaited when all of this was combined with the genuine brilliance of their debut album and its lead single ‘Out of the Black’. Its jumpy intro beat gave way to a raucous guitar riff that was powerful and resolute, leading this new monochromatic era of 2010s rock and roll forward with charisma.
Speaking of the genesis of the song, Kerr explained, “Ben was doing this rhythm, the beginning of it, when we were in a pub having a pint,” adding, “And then we were sort of going ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we did that’. We had no idea it would be on the radio or anything. We thought it was just really long and sort of our heaviest song, it didn’t feel like a single but we thought ‘Fuck it, let’s just put it out and see what happens’.”
The anger and sonic violence of the song tapped into a fan base who were concerned with a growing sense of falsity in alternative music and one who craved unfiltered honesty and expression.
But it was seemingly the product of a rather one-dimensional sonic formula. The album that followed the song was similarly compelling, and as a standalone project, it refreshed the otherwise tired landscape. But then they attributed to the same fatigue by rehashing this oh so mysterious pedal board setup into the next record, and the record after that.
With Kerr adorned in a collar-popped leather jacket and Thatcher defiantly sticking with his black tank top, the pair continued to make one-dimensional riff rock that flattered to deceive and sadly exhausted what seemed to be a winning formula back in 2014.
While the pair continue to make music, they’ve not captured the zeitgeist quite like they did back in 2014, for the simple fact that the cultural landscape in the past decade has shifted quite dramatically, and there has been a step away from the stripped-back trend that they championed. Genre-bending has become more prominent in the modern music landscape, and so the simple two-piece recipe of a heavily distorted bass guitar and an unrelenting drum beat fails to cut it.
