Dead Label revisits...Are You Ready To Kill?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve gotten a chance to sit down and do one of these blogs due to all the mad shit that has been going on so I decided to just take a song myself this time instead of putting it to a vote. So I chose Are You Ready To Kill? If that’s ok with all you guys. This song was the 2nd song we put together after we finished recording “Sense of Slaughter”. We had gone in to Tracmix studios and recorded “It Burns Within” and after having such a good time going in and recording that track we just had to get back in with a new song as soon as we could. It also has to be noted here that it was around this time that we started getting heavily and I mean HEAVILY influenced by a little band from France known as GOJIRA. We had just come back from our first trip to Japan where we played to a massive crowd and at the party after the show Danny and I just had “Esoteric Surgery” and “Vacuity” on repeat. Blasting those 2 songs over and over and over again until the sun started to come up. I remember Danny saying to me “When we get home we are going to write a song as heavy as those songs” and he wasn’t wrong. It took a little longer to put this song together than Burns but it still came together pretty quick. I remember Danny coming in with the verse riff and I just remember thinking to myself “there is no way I can play and sing over that” and then Danny was just like I think we should just stomp the drums and bass like Gojira do in Vacuity, and I was just like “Yes”. That just totally freed me up to do some really cool vocals over the verse. There was also quite a bit of practice to a click for this track in the lead up to recording it. Claire has a lot of double kick in this tune and need to build up the stamina and she took that challenge head on and she still practices this song to a click to this day to try and keep it machine gun tight. On a side note we were in the studio recently putting together our next single and we done a remix of this song and I was asked to retrack the bass lines just to get better tones, and I couldn’t play this song tightly to the click at all, I mean total and utter fail on my part, so since then I have been practicing it to a click myself everyday because I didn’t realise how far it had slipped on me. Interesting fact about this song’s title is Danny actually came up with it before there was any lyrics, so I actually had to write lyrics around a pre existing title which was a unique approach for us but it doesn’t take a lyrical genius to write lyrics around a title that is asking are you ready to kill now does it. Lyrically this song is about our time spent with a total con bullshit label that scammed a lot of it’s artists out of their money. We actually got away from that deal pretty much unscathed but some bands lost thousands of pounds and never even had an album to show at the end of it and that really pissed me off. Some wannabe A&R con man preying on the hopes and dreams of people who just wanted to make music that they could share with the world and this asshole just took complete advantage of them. I remember when I went in to track the vocals for this I wanted to try and get away from that high scream that I had done pretty much throughout SOS and on Burns and I wanted to try something a bit darker and heavier so I went for more of a low growl and it just fit this song perfectly. I remember standing in the studio listening back to the track coming out of the speakers and turning to the guys and saying “It sounds like a completely different band”. This song was a real turning point in our song writing I think. Kind of a pivotal moment that actually helped us when we got into writing “Throne of Bones”. After we had the track we decided that we should do a music video for it. We really like the idea of art inspiring art so what we did was we contacted a production company to see if they would be interested in shooting the video for us and when they said they would do it we gave them the song and said come up with an idea to best suit this track and they came back to us with the idea of us torturing a person in a warehouse with our music. We were sold instantly on the idea. That day was so much fun. We got covered in fake blood that totally ruined my bass. On the drive back up to Kildare from Cork we had to stop and pay at a toll bridge and the look the woman in the toll booth gave us was priceless. 4 people covered in fake blood from head to toe, soaked and exhausted. I’d say she had no idea what was going on. Just to let you guys know that “Are You Ready To Kill?” will be back up on Spotify very soon completely remixed and remastered so hopefully you guys will check that out as soon as it is up there. What are your thoughts on this song? Let us know in the comments below Stay safe and healthy everybody