BLACK VEIL BRIDES On Their Heavier Sound: “None Of Us Were Really That Excited About The Idea Of Making A Grand Sing-Along Rock Opera Right Now”

Andy Biersack of Black Veil Brides has been doing his press rounds over the last month in promotion of the band’s brand new single, “Certainty,” off of the band’s upcoming album via Spinefarm Records that has yet to be announced, supposedly due out at the end of this year.

This time, Rock Sound‘s James Wilson-Taylor sat down with Biersack to prod a bit more into the seemingly heavier direction Black Veil Brides are heading.

“Yeah, I think there’s kind of two things [causing the shift],” Biersack starts [as transcribed by Blabbermouth], “One is obviously we’ve been around for a while and we’ve been making music together for a long time. So, we’ve always been a band that we don’t like to make the same record twice. And I think we had gotten to a place where none of us were really all that excited about the idea of making a grand sort of sing-along rock opera right now.”

Black Veil Brides have been together since 2006, nearly 20 years ago, and have released six studio records during that time. Biersack has also gone on to have solo pursuits of his own like Andy Black.

“And then for me, creatively, that really wasn’t where my head was at in terms of writing. So everything, at least on a narrative level, was skewing much more, for lack of a better term, darker or serious or whatever. And so I think the music just sort of — it was birthed from the same perspective. We didn’t wanna make a record that was, ‘Hey, now we’re gonna make the heavy record.’

“What we’re trying to build here and what my ideas are in terms of the narrative, along with what [guitarist] Jake [Pitts] is writing from a musical perspective, was really kind of going hand in hand with each other. And so I think the record is heavy because it has to be for it to make sense with the narrative. And I also think it’s a really solid record in the perspective that we weren’t trying to go, ‘Every song is the screamy song,’ ‘Every song is the’ whatever. When people hear the whole album, I think that the heavy moments are purposeful and there are moments of what you might call more traditional Black Veil Brides.”

In a roundabout way, Biersack sums up: “But I would say overall the record is much more aggressive than previous albums.”

The darker tone in the record is rather apparent as Biersack says in a statement alongside the release of “Certainty,” “The concept of “Certainty” is central to this record and appears throughout the album. The song was inspired by the film Conclave, particularly its reflections on religious certainty and how rigid belief systems can become prisons of our own making. When certainty hardens, curiosity, growth, and the willingness to change become impossible. Much of today’s political and social discourse exists inside these echo chambers of absolute belief, and that tension drives the narrative of this record.”

You can check out the single single below, or stream it here.