Interview by Kris Peters
One of the most beautiful things about music is the individual expression that goes into creating a body of work.
Sure, a band is made up of several members on most occasions, but each of those members still contributes part of their personal DNA throughout each written and recorded piece of music.
But for those musicians adept at playing anything and everything and who record most of the instruments and vocals themselves, then that strand of DNA is magnified exponentially.
As is the case with UK outfit Confyde, who started life as a solo project by Martin Jackson and have slowly evolved to the stage where their music is enough in demand for him to start recruiting other musicians.
Jackson also moonlights as frontman for System Of A Down tribute act Chop Suey (which also features Sam Totman from Dragonforce and Andre Joyzi from Breed 77) but it is with his original project Confyde that he gets a chance to faithfully represent himself musically.
An eclectic mixture of styles with its roots in rock, Confyde have steadily built their career around a string of single releases, with the latest slab of goodness being Scalper.
Jackson sat down with HEAVY to tell us more.
"It's been brilliant," he enthused about the early reception to Scalper. "Probably the strongest reception so far. I've been putting out singles with Confyde since 2020 when it got rebooted, and by every measure this song has been the most successful so far."
We ask Jackson to go deeper into Scalper musically.
"I knew, given the subject matter of what I wanted to sing about - the housing crisis and eternal misery a lot of our generation have to live with - there's a lot of anger and resentment around this particular subject, so I knew it had to be angry," he explained. "It needed to be a loud, metal song and I've not done a metal song for quite a while and the influences that came in were big chunky guitars with a proggy tip to them, so there's a Mastodon influence there, and Sikth influence... I'm a huge fan of 12 Foot Ninja and how they switch up genres inside their songs and Confyde is very much a project where every single almost completely transforms the sound and I really admire what 12 Foot Ninja do with that. You kind of have this ebb and flow. Often when you're dealing with a really broken housing system it feels like an absolute roller coaster and nothing is ever resolved, so I like to feel like this song represents that. There are some sections that are really heavy and in your face, some that are more majestic and hopeful and there's others that are sinister and in a pit. It feels like you can never really relax while listening to it (laughs), but at the same time I wanted to have something that... even though I love all this musical experimentation I'm always keen for songs that have solid, memorable hooks. Something people can sing along and shout along to in solidarity with subject matter like this. A big influence on that was probably Alter Bridge and Nothing More."
In the full interview, Martin talks more about the musical nature of Scalper, keeping things cohesive while skipping all over the place, the strong subject matter, how Scalper differs musically to previous single Man Down, singles versus albums in the modern climate, playing live and more.