“When we [Robert Williams & Matthew Norris, only remaining founding members of The Verdict Is Vengeance] started The Verdict Is Vengeance with Kieran Marks, Isaac Steen and Phil Nind, we didn’t expect to end up going through all the changes that we have. Originally we were just a muck around idea, doing covers of Lostprophets and Good Charlotte mainly, we were young and wanted to know what it would feel like to be a part of a band and that was that, the idea of being signed to a record label or touring England didn’t matter then.
In 2008 we actually started to try to write our own material, it was based around the increasing popularity of the hardcore music scene, and our interests of the time mainly being Bring Me The Horizon. We went for a standard deathcore idea, stupidly low guitar tones, extremely fast drums and low screamed vocals. It gained the band a certain level of popularity within the local music scene, and we even won a local battle of the bands in our home town of Southend, which was used to record our first ever demo. The demo was sent to record labels and magazines asking for opinions and reviews, and gradually increased our popularity, to the extent that we played on the Gibson Stage at Download Festival. This was what seemed to be our peek however, the amount of shows we played decreased dramatically to the point that Kieran and Isaac made a short lived alternative rock side-project [The Reject Message], but we all continued to write some new songs and toured the UK, playing small venues that barely sold out, at the time we didn’t care, but looking back it was awful.
All the tension in the band must have started when we started writing for our debut album in 2009, we all had different ideas about what we wanted Falling From Heaven For You [the unreleased debut album] to sound like. With Kieran also having a lot of strain on his vocal chords at this time, we didn’t want to add more pressure to him so we just took a break from writing and relaxed for a few weeks. It stopped the band from breaking apart before we had even got anywhere. That summer Isaac and Kieran spent all of their time working with The Reject Message and left myself, Matt and Phil to do some writing for Falling From Heaven For You, it was an odd atmosphere, I personally felt like I was being used, but chose not to say anything.
Everything seemed to go downhill once we were signed to MTN Climber Records, it wasn’t anything to do with the label, we just all started to argue again, everyone wanted to change from the deathcore style to more of a post-hardcore style, one for Kieran’s sake as his voice was being damaged with each show, and two because of how boring deathcore had become for us. Isaac disagreed and left the band, as well as causing The Reject Message to collapse and for us to leave MTN Climber Records and join our own independent record label Suicide Records.
We kept all the of recorded songs meant for Falling From Heaven For You encase we ever wanted to give fans the ‘lost album’, trust me, it’ll happen after The Verdict Is Vengeance are ready to call it quits or take a very long break. We replaced Isaac with our friend from secondary school Connor James, and then wrote and recorded our official debut album Liberation. Critics and fans of the band seemed to love the album, which was a shock for me as we’d gone from aggressive, brutal music, to a depressing and fairly mainstream style. I wasn’t bothered about the style of music, I was happy we’d made it somewhere. The record sold around 1.5 million copies, which went straight to our heads. It was the greatest and worst feeling ever, feeling better than everyone has is downsides and it lead to bigheadedness from all of us.
Everything started to go wrong when we started writing for an EP which we wanted to get recorded and released before the end of March 2010, it caused for huge arguments between Kieran and the rest of us, and lead to him isolating himself from us, talking about us negatively in magazines and eventually him quitting the band in March 2010. Replacing him wasn’t the easiest thing we’ve had to do, but after a month of searching local talents we found Sam Maine, who is easily a better vocalist, and screamer than Kieran was. We all started to work properly as a team, and worked out that it would be best for us to gradually move towards a metalcore musical style, to shock everyone more than anything. Lies Make You Famous was released, and had more of an appeal towards sub-cultures than the mainstream, which is what we all wanted really. Being a mainstream artist had lost its appeal.
After we toured the UK in support of this EP we all took a break from each other for a few weeks, I chose to spend time with my family for the first time since Liberation was recorded and released. This time went by far too quickly, and we were soon back and in the early stages of writing Oblivion. In the middle of our writing process, the band headlined Animal Festival’s Comatose Stage, and as we were preparing to leave for a tour across Japan and America with Chimera, their drummer was found dead causing the cancelation of these tours and a loss of one of our good friends. Oblivion’s recording started in September 2010, and we started to release tracks from it. Just to give fans something to listen to throughout the lengthy recording process, admittedly we spent too much time in the studio. Arguments started to occur on a daily biases about the vocals mainly. We added Lee Sanders, our touring keyboard player to the band full time, also as a second screamer and finished the recording of Oblivion and then Phil left the band. The creative differences and lack of seeing his family and made me want out, I understood this more than the others as I was feeling the same way to a certain extent, not that anyone has been aware of that until now.
When Oblivion was released, it seemed as if all the bands energy had gone. It was well accepted, but it didn’t sell nearly as well as Liberation which we were all aware would happen. Going from a popular alternative rock sound, to a highly sub-cultured metalcore was obviously going to cause a decline in sales, yet we were praised in NME magazine for the album, which was so shocking ‘cause its NME ya know? We’ve been touring since then, played our first headlining shows in Europe, and we’ll be supporting Chimera in their first UK since the loss of their drummer, and have now made plans to go and do a 27 date headline American tour across the USA whilst also releasing Idols, an EP featuring cover versions of our influences, then after that I think we’ll be taking a break from music for a while. We don’t want to burn out, but we’ll be sure to make the last tours we do will be full to energy before we step away from everything for a while.”
- Robert Williams (Lead guitarist and clean vocalist of The Verdict Is Vengeance since 2007)
