While She Sleeps, He Is Legend, and Savage Hands at The Brass Monkey in Ottawa, ON, Canada on Feb 26, 2020

‘Brainwashed’, the second full-length from Sheffield’s While She Sleeps, is not just an album. It’s a mission statement. It’s the culmination of what the band’s five members – vocalist Loz Taylor, guitarists Mat Welsh and Sean Long, bassist Aaran McKenzie and drummer Adam Savage – went through in order to make it, a physical manifestation of pure triumph in the face of adversity. It’s an album that got made both in spite of and because of the things that threatened to prevent that happening – serious trouble with Taylor’s vocal chords that required two bouts of surgery and which essentially delayed the making of the record by a whole year. Suffice to say, for everyone involved, the fact that ‘Brainwashed’ is – almost – finally here, is a both a big relief and huge cause for celebration. “We put so much fucking time and effort into it,” laughs Adam. “It’s not gone the way we planned, but it’s come out exactly how we wanted. It’s one of those blessing and a curse situations. But I wouldn’t change anything. We needed that time for us to produce the album. It’s just a better version of us. It was a bit rough at the time but I don’t think anything’s easy if you put that much passion into it. There’s good times and bad times.” “I think,” adds Loz, “it proves that going through weird stuff that can affect the band and us as mates, is something that we can guide each other through.” What’s truly remarkable about the whole situation is the way the band dealt with it. Rather than let it get them down, they rose to the challenge, and turned what could have been a disaster to their advantage. “Loz found out about his throat condition just before he was going in to record,” explains Aaran. “It was very weird. But it did give us more time to work on little bits and guitar parts, and I don’t think the album would be what it is if it wasn’t for the time that we had with it. So every cloud does have a silver lining.” That’s an understatement. Produced by Colin Richardson and Carl Bown, the album’s eleven songs are a terrifying force to be reckoned with, a barrage of belligerent sound that straddles and combines a variety of genres the band would prefer you to just call “alternative rock”. Musically, it’s a sophisticated step up from their ‘This Is The Six’, their 2012 debut full-length, one that’s catchy and confrontational in equal measure. Just listen to the anthemic chug of “Four Walls’ – a song, no less, that Sean’s grandmother says she likes. The powerfully unrelenting and irascible ‘Trophies Of Violence’, or the epic grand finale of album closer ‘Modern Minds’, which soars into a crescendo full of grace and strength. Lyrically, too, and as its title suggests, ‘Brainwashed’ pulls no punches. Instead it delivers a formidable indictment of the way the media tries to control people.