BLACK VEIL BRIDES have new material recorded and most of the next album written, four months after releasing the last one.
Speaking to Rock Sound's James Wilson-Taylor at Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky last weekend, Andy Biersack said: "We've got some new material recorded, some new stuff. And then I would say [BLACK VEIL BRIDES guitarist] Jake [Pitts] and I are 75% done in terms of writing for the next record."
He followed it with the reason for the hurry: "We don't want another five-year break between records, I think."
That gap is the thing worth unpacking. "Vindicate", the band's seventh album, arrived in May via Spinefarm — five years after 2021's "The Phantom Tomorrow". Speaking to PopHorror, Biersack explained where the time went, and the answer is a record that does not exist.
"I had a whole different thing I wanted to do," he said. "It was about a year of writing on a more broad concept record that I was uninspired by. You get to a point when you go, 'I don't think this is going to be great.' And I want what we do to be great for us. If other people like it or don't, that's really not up to me. But if I look at what we do and go, 'This is the best we could do and it's awesome, and I'm really proud of it,' then I feel like it's worth doing."
He is explicit that he can tell the difference in the catalogue: "Most of the records I've ever done in my life, I felt that way about. The few times that I felt like, 'Ah, this is incomplete,' those records don't stand out as some of the best stuff in our catalog. So it was really important to me that, whatever we do, it's the best thing we could be doing."
The timeline he gives for what replaced it: a couple of years working out what he wanted narratively, earnest writing from 2023, everything coming together at the end of 2024, and tracking through 2025.
The verdict on "Vindicate" has broadly justified the delay — Kerrang! said BLACK VEIL BRIDES "have never sounded better" — which makes the 75 percent figure more interesting than it would otherwise be. Whatever the next record turns out to be, it is being written by a band that has just been told the slow version worked.
Alongside Biersack and Pitts, BLACK VEIL BRIDES are guitarist Jinxx, bassist Lonny Eagleton and drummer Christian Coma.