Category: news

London-based alt singer-songwriter A.A. Williams has produced some of the most hauntingly melancholic but beautiful sounds to have hit the UK underground in recent years. Her own tastes range from clattering industrial to 90s alternative rock to OTT horror metal – and everything in between. With that in mind, we asked her to make us a playlist and tell us all about it.

“My parents brought me the VHS of QUEEN Live At Wembley when I was six or seven and obviously it’s mindblowingly good. Who Wants To Live Forever is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. They also brought me the piano book for that release, it was a two-pronged attack: ‘You can enjoy this, but you’ve also got to learn it.’ It was my introduction to really good songwriting and I’ve internalised that.

“Before GARBAGE’s I Think I’m Paranoid, I’d never heard a woman in heavy music. I didn’t have many mates who weren’t into pop, so liking heavier music made me feel like an outsider at times. I went to see Garbage for my first concert and not only was I floored by Shirley Manson being an absolute goddess – confident, brash and ballsy, walking around the stage like she owned everything – but there were kids like me in that audience and I was like, ‘Maybe I’m not doing this on my own after all.’

“PLACEBO’s Without You I’m Nothing is one of the best songs of all time. I loved it so much I had to cover it. One of the things I loved about them was that they did proper B-sides, not just remixes. So I’d go and buy all the singles, it made me feel like a proper fan. I remember a version that had David Bowie on. It was absolutely incredible! I was 14, 15 when this came out and I don’t remember another song feeling so resonant in the sense of the angst, anguish and longing.”

“A friend of mine introduced me to CULT OF LUNA and Amenra around 2012. I had no idea post metal was a thing, that these textures existed. Hearing Finland, I was working away a lot that year, and I was on tour in America with another artist. I basically spent the whole trip looking out the window watching landscapes shift and change, listening to Somewhere Along The Highway. Managing to get Johannes [Persson, vocals] and Fredrik [Kihlberg, guitars] on my first record made it feel like I’d come full circle.

“I didn’t know music could be sexy until I heard Dragula by ROB ZOMBIE. As a kid, you think rock music is full of angry blokes in baggy trousers, but actually it’s so, so hot. It was in The Matrix – or on the soundtrack at least – and I ate it up. You could attribute my entire musical personality to that movie and soundtrack, at least as a starting point.

“I could pick pretty much any song by NINE INCH NAILS. But Right Where It Belongs was the first time I cried to a song on first listen. I have to be in a certain frame of mind to listen to some songs, I can’t just have something on in the background. I can’t actually remember how I first heard it, but it just got me – maybe it was the wrong time, wrong place. It’s this little piano-vocal thing, but it’s beautiful and I love the sentiment behind it.

“It’s not always easy to understand how you feel about something, and it’s certainly not easy to vocalise that. So when you hear a song like Exit Music (For A Film) that resonates with you, that links with something inside of you, it’s almost like talking to someone about that thing. It’s like having a friend who is listening to those words. RADIOHEAD have always been that for me. As a teenager and a kid, I’d never even try to say some things out loud, so when I found songs that could do that for me, because I was a bit shy or didn’t have the bravery to talk to somebody, it was a huge help.

“I did a lot of classical music when I was a kid. I listened to a lot of alternative rock and metal, but I didn’t actually play any. Neon Ballroom by SILVERCHAIR came out in 1999 and it blew my tiny mind. I listened to the opening track, Emotion Sickness, and it verified both parts of me because I’d not realised those things could cross over. There’s strings, pianos, all this beautiful stuff, and the arrangements are absolutely killer. It was a seminal discovery.

“I really loved PORTISHEAD early on and then kind of forgot about them. Machine Gun came out when I was in my 20s and the jarring juxtaposition of jagged, disgusting drums and beautiful, raw, delicate vocals just did it for me. It was beautiful, a real masterclass in minimalism. It’s brilliant! I saw them live at Glastonbury and the whole set was incredible: understated, but in front of thousands of people. They created an intimate environment in the dark in front of 10,000 people or whatever. It’s a reminder you need beautiful and disgusting things to coexist.

“Is Rat Wars not the best album of all time? I absolutely adore HEALTH; Sicko has such a good groove to it and ever since the album came out that song has been on my pre-show playlist. Every night before a gig, I put it on because I want to dance around and have a good time. Its nice to have music that centres you. I feel weird now if I play a gig and there’s some other guy playing music before I go on. I don’t know what to do! So I have a playlist that gets me from doors to close every night.”

New A.A. Williams album Solstice is out now via Reigning Phoenix Music. She plays ArcTanGent in August

In 2023 one of metal’s biggest bands – at one point hailed as the next Metallica – threw caution to the wind, embracing psychedelics, absurdity and a wilful disregard for the limits of genre. Avenged Sevenfold frontman M Shadows gave Prog an insight into the philosophy, sound and pursuit of discomfort that shaped their most recent album to date, Life Is But A Dream…

“We were cognisant of the fact that this could get crazy,” says M Shadows about his band’s genre-diverse new album. Despite their status as torchbearers for the next generation of heavy metal stadium-fillers, Avenged Sevenfold first revealed their interest in colouring outside the lines on 2016’s The Stage, which ventured into prog metal territory. However, Life Is But A Dream… goes above and way beyond anything they’ve done before.

“As we started the writing, we were really attracted to the music that was making us feel uncomfortable or things that would throw you off-kilter,” says Shadows. The album moves from metal riffs to lullabies, techno and industrial to lounge music, often within the space of a single song.

“We had this philosophy where we didn’t want to stay anywhere too long,” says Shadows. “We wanted things to jump around and be more ADHD to get in and out of these ideas quicker. I think it becomes a lot more exciting, interesting, discombobulated. It’s all over the place.”

Many bands might feel nervous stepping so far outside their comfort zone, but Shadows felt it was essential “because the discomfort we were feeling on the other side, from doing the same music again, was worse.”

While Avenged embraced the concept of using the studio as a creative tool, Shadows wanted to avoid the slick, over-produced sound that’s now commonplace in metal. They used real instruments to create the sounds they were seeking instead of samples and plug-ins.

“There’s a 30-second piece in Beautiful Morning where it sounds like Beach Boys meets Beatles and it goes down the rabbit hole. There’s flute, there’s Wurlitzer, there’s a whole other drum kit, there’s all these things but we’re recording 30 seconds,” says Shadows. “During Nobody there are three drum kits. Somebody could say, ‘Well, that’s overproduction,’ but to me there are three different sections of the song that have a different feel.

“Overproducing to me would be to lay down one drum kit, then go in and find samples of the tones you want and just stick them in those parts and then you’ve got a glossy, almost sterile environment where everything sounds the same. If you keep it organic, you’re really playing instruments, you’re getting what you want, then that doesn’t cross the line of overproduction.”

One memorable part of the creative process involved spending a week with a shaman and consuming 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic that induces hallucinations. Shadows describes the experience as “the most impactful thing I’ve done in my life,” saying that the trip made him realise how short life is, “and how negative the ego can be if you let it get out of control; and also that if you’re going to make art, don’t be a slave to audience capture, where people expect something of you and you keep doing that because you’re too afraid to let them down.

Shadows says he’s a classic Type A personality, but wanted to strip away his ego. “What it really taught me was to be bold and just do the things you want to do, and once you are free in that sense, it helps with everything,” he says. “It helps with not worrying about if people like it or not, worrying about how it’s going to go over live. You’re just doing, you’re just creating, and so it had a bunch of positive effects in my life in dealing with my family, my friends, love, understanding people better and empathy. Lyrically, the whole record is based around the purpose and meaning of life, or the meaningless life that we have, how you find purpose and make sense of this place.”

One significant influence was the writings of Albert Camus, the French philosopher who explored existentialism and absurdism, ideas that permeate Life Is But A Dream… and set it apart further from its predecessor.

“Albert was an influence definitely on things like Game Over and (D)eath,” says Shadows. “The Stage doesn’t have a lot of human experience in it; it has bigger ideas, like the Big Bang and the starting of life on the planet, but it doesn’t explain how it feels to be a human.”

What attracted Shadows to Camus was his musings on finding meaning in the face of a universe that’s utterly indifferent. “He talks about how the mundane things in life are actually the beautiful things,” says Shadows. “When you’re doing the mundane – watching a show with your family or getting lunch – you’re always thinking about the next thing. But one day you’re going to be 80 years old and you’ll look back on your life and go, ‘Where the hell did that go? Did I do what I wanted to do? Did I love the people I wanted to love the most? Did I spend the time with them?’

“What I love about his philosophy is that it’s the meaninglessness that creates the meaning, it’s the mundaneness, you should be trying to live in the moment. Smell the roses, it’s the simple things. That’s what I love about it.”

Life Is But A Dream… is divisive among fans as it marks such a departure even from the prog metal of The Stage, but for Shadows, there was simply no other way to move forward.

“It was either this or nothing,” he says. “It was either, we’re going to make the things that really inspire us and make us happy, or we’re not doing anything. When you get to that point, there’s no fear to have. Someone likes the record or doesn’t, it’s the same thing. The art is out there, it’s part of the human conversation – that’s all art is anyway – and it’s in the ether and you’re going to let it be.

“For us it was about putting something out there that we really enjoy and something that inspired us. That’s all we can do.”