eNQUIRe within
ENQUIRE WITHIN The heavy metal landscape is getting wider and despite the difficulties faced by every band and artist over the past year, many have strived to ensure they still stand up and shout, some louder than ever.
Metal Rocka Recordings stars Enquire Within are fast developing a reputation for being one of the hardest working bands in the business. Their innovative and creative projects during lockdown have demonstrated a hunger to produce quality music that has kept fans happy and eager to find out what is next in store from the London band. The band showed their resilience and determination to succeed by insisting the pandemic would not prevent them from achieving their dream of working within the music industry when they drove up the M1 in-between lockdowns to sign their recording contract at a service station! The band spoke to me about their various projects in this exclusive interview. Much has happened over the last 18 months and many artists plans have changed, where were Enquire Within before the global pandemic changed everything and how did you tackle the days ahead? Our last gig before lockdown was at HRH Metal at the O2 Birmingham over a year ago. In the absence of live gigs, we wanted to put on a show that our fans could watch and came up with the idea of a Live Session at Hackney Road Studios. We decided to perform our album Bloodlines but in a live setting which was recorded by producer Nic Baker and captured on video by his team. We had two new members of the band, Amelia Pellegrino-White playing guitar and Erim Ahmet playing bass. They brought a new energy and dynamic to our performance which meant the tracks evolved from the way we initially wrote them and produced the new Enquire Within sound. We wanted to share this evolution, this new sound and look with our fans, so we formed a new
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partnership with HRH TV with weekly videos that reached a wider audience. It’s more than a live album, it’s a live experience during lockdown, and the reaction has been fantastic. We can’t wait to perform some of these tracks, with the new line-up, when we get back on the road later this year. The 10 videos you produced for the Live Sessions at Hackney Road Studios were very well received and really do showcase a band not content to rest on their laurels in the face of adversity, but you didn’t stop there. What inspired you to follow on with the Under The Covers series? We were determined not to sit idly by and wait for lockdown to pass. We wanted to build on the momentum of the experience with HRH TV, so we decided to perform some of our favourite tracks from bands that inspired us. We have always performed live versions of Avenged Sevenfold’s Nightmare and Trivium’s In Waves, so these were very familiar songs. Our fans may have been surprised by our other choices from System Of A Down to Cancer Bats. We didn’t just want to do ‘ok’ cover versions, we wanted them to reflect how we were evolving as a band. Amelia’s musical influences and preferences are much further away from metalcore towards death and black metal and we were happy to experiment with this. Jacob has always described our music as a bit of pick and mix metal, particularly as we love thrash metal and these cover songs reflect this perfectly. Amelia has a personal connection with Power Trip having broken her ankle in the pit watching them at Download and wanted to pay tribute to their lead singer Riley Gale who died last year. She didn’t know she had broken her ankle until she got home from the gig – that’s dedication! Our version of Executioner’s Tax has been the surprise track as it’s the most viewed of all within the Under The Covers series – we love it so much and we can’t wait to bring it to you live.