Matt O'Neill, Journalist

“Really, I just want a copy of the album to give to my mum and I want a copy of the album to sit in my bedroom. Anything beyond that will be just a bonus, really.”

“Bands like Queen, [The] Beach Boys, even The Beatles – the greatest thing about those bands was their sense of adventure. That ability to go, ‘Well, that instrument doesn’t really go with this genre but we’ll do it anyway.’ That’s the fun of music, I think.”

“I’m really obsessed with contradiction – paradox. In everything. I’m continually headscratching. About everything.”

“At one point, it was just like, ‘fucking hell – how many producers and how much madness are we going to have to go through to get this album done? It’s just fucking music, isn’t it?‘. I definitely had a lot of moments like that. I think we ended up in a good place, though. Eventually.”

“Some songs we never even released as singles are some of our kind of definitive Shihad songs. Luckily, we were given pretty much free licence to define what was and wasn’t an essential Shihad track.”

It’s not bad at all, really. Just different. This reviewer asks that, if you seek it out, persevere past your first impressions. It’s definitely a grower.

"Yeah, that’s the plan... To make two records; another Heavy Rhyme Experience and another Brand New Heavies album with N’Dea. It’s always hard, because you never know how long an album’s going to take, but I’m looking forward to it."

“Neil Young said something brilliant, among all the brilliant things he said, something like he’s only written three songs and the rest of his career has just been kind of bad imitations of those songs – and I couldn’t agree more.”

"It’s actually a real priority for us to stick out like that... You know, I think we take a lot of pride in how we tackle our sound and how we tackle our lyric writing."

“I mean, there’s demand for our music in Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh... Places we never thought would even hear our music... And I just think that kind of following is the greatest compliment you could ever get as a musician.”

"I actually got a call recently asking if I wanted to be a part of a compilation of noise artists making techno. I kind of said, ‘Well, yeah, okay – but this will probably be the last time I really do anything with this sound’."

"Oh, I can’t even listen to [my past albums]... It makes me want to slit my wrists. It’s probably my biggest influence; wanting to be different from the last thing I did – because I hate it."