Let’s face it: in a year where Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold and myriad other heavyweights have unveiled new albums, nobody could have predicted Southampton goth-punks Creeper taking Metal Hammer’s Album Of The Year spot with their vampire rock opera, Sanguivore. Least of all the band themselves.
“[Creeper guitarist] Ian Miles’ favourite band is Metallica, so he feels like he’s committed some kind of crime,” admits Creeper frontman Will Gould, grinning like the Cheshire – or perhaps more accurately, Hampshire – cat. “It’s so humbling, especially for the type of record we’ve made, as the reference points we are drawing from aren’t really cool records.”
Within the swirling mix of goth, punk, heavy metal and classic rock’n’roll that is Sanguivore, 1977’s debut Meat Loaf/ Jim Steinman album Bat Out Of Hell casts a delightfully OTT winged shadow.
“Bat… was pretty much always on when I was a kid because my parents loved it, so I honestly can’t say when I first heard it,” Will admits. “But I revisited it when I was around 11. I knew all the songs from the distant haze of youth, but I just had a different appreciation for how insane they were.”
But then, Will has always been attracted to theatricality. A self-confessed “cartoon goth”, he lives in a converted church in Manchester, the shelves lined with pumpkins all year round. When Hammer calls him over Zoom, we even get a jump-scare as we’re greeted by a pair of yellow eyes staring out of a ghostly pale face. No, it’s not Will in dress-up – though we wouldn’t put it past him – but his cat. “Sorry, Tofu loves gatecrashing meetings,” he laughs.
For Creeper, business is booming. Formed in Southampton in 2014, the band have traded in mystique and mystery as far back as their 2015 EP The Callous Heart, weaving narratives around heartbreak and tales of the paranormal. Their early EPs and 2017’s debut album, Eternity, In Your Arms, established a goth-punk sound in line with AFI and Alkaline Trio, but with 2020’s Sex, Death & The Infinite Void the band ditched it all in favour of brighter colours and a poppier sonic palette. Even as that album hit No.5 in the UK charts, Will was laying plans for its follow-up.
“We always knew we were going to do a darker, vampire-themed album for our third record,” he explains. “I had the whole story written long before we began writing the music. I must’ve finished just before the pandemic.”
As grandiose as Sanguivore’s songs are, they couldn’t live up to their full Steinman potential without a rock opera narrative to match. Drawing inspiration from films such as Carrie, Let The Right One In and Interview With The Vampire, Will crafted a story about a couple, Mercy and Spook – albeit with a twist.
“We’ve done the doomed romance to death!” he says. “Looking at the stories we’d already written, I realised we’d got a lot of traditional love stories between a man and a woman and I didn’t really want to repeat that.”
Thus, he played with gender roles and perceptions. “So often in horror movies, the woman’s the one being chased, tortured and killed, but that’s not the case in ours,” Will explains. “We named Mercy after Mercy Brown – this real-life vampire story that is really crazy and gnarly [in 1892 in Rhode Island, a woman’s body was exhumed as her family believed she was undead and causing tuberculosis – Vampire Ed]. We first see her with the Ghost Brigade – this vampire gang à la The Lost Boys – and think she’s innocent, but she’s the most ferocious of all and the oldest. It’s this idea of looks being deceiving.”
But with all this talk of vampires and seduction, who would Will turn, if he were a vampire? “My girlfriend,” he says without hesitation. “Nobody else would put up with me for eternity!”
Looking for “the UK’s answer to Jim Steinman” to produce, Will found a kindred spirit in Tom Dalgety, who had plenty of experience wrangling spooky bands such as Grave Pleasures and Ghost. Tom also arranged a few surprises for the band when they set off to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record Sanguivore.
“Where they recorded Bohemian Rhapsody!” Will exclaims, agog. “Tom had this hook-up that meant we could talk to people who were there when The Damned recorded The Black Album and Iggy Pop recorded with David Bowie popping by… this incredible amount of history.”
Sanguivore certainly doesn’t cower in their shadow. Grandstanding and epic, it combines the bombast of heavy metal with the strutting slickness of classic rock’n’roll, with a gothic streak that adds a dash of sensuality – lines like Cry To Heaven’s ‘This cannibal baby, she wants a taste of what’s inside / She’s handcuffed to my backseat so she can take him for a ride’ proving Sleep Token weren’t cornering the market on sexiness in metal in 2023.
“One of our big influences is Type O Negative, who made some of the sexiest albums of all time,” Will admits. “Well, hopefully we get more horny metal songs in 2024.”
These days, no rising sensation – metal or otherwise – is complete without a rabid fanbase to call their own. Just as Slipknot have their Maggots, Creeper have the Creeper Cult. Will sees it as a reflection of the band’s own obsessive nature.
“Creeper offer fantasy,” he muses. “Our music rewards you the more you listen and go on. This music has been created by obsessives, and if you see our fanbase… you won’t often find a casual fan.”
When Creeper announced they’d play a special show at London’s 600-capacity Lafayette, two days after Sanguivore’s release, it was unsurprisingly a sellout. The band added a matinee, which also promptly sold out. Taking the stage on Sunday October 15, they were greeted by energetic fans already singing every word of their new songs.
“It was so cool, turning up and having all these young kids screaming our songs,” Will admits. “I always remember seeing footage of Ziggy Stardust when I was a kid, and seeing ll these people in make-up. People turn up to Creeper gigs now in vampire make-up, which is rad!”
For a moment, Will’s enthusiastic, witty repartee drops. “People are going through a lot at the moment,” he says. “It’s hard not to feel like the world is a tricky place, so it’s just so gratifying to hear from people who tell us how much of an escape this band is. That’s always quite touching, and I keep a lot of fans’ letters in the drawer here so that when things get tough, or money’s tight, it reminds us that it’s all worth it.”
Will is unsurprisingly tight-lipped about what Creeper have planned for 2024 beyond a nebulous mention of tour dates, following the band’s sold-out UK headline shows in November. But he admits there’s plenty they would like to do, if they had an infinite budget. Like: “The Bat Out Of Hell musical version of Sanguivore,” he says hungrily. “For years we’ve been wanting to do a full orchestra show, but doing Sanguivore like that would be so cool too.”
There’s also the matter of certain other spooky sensations Will hopes to someday tour with. “A Ghost and Creeper tour would be the dream!” he enthuses. “We saw them last year and it was one of the coolest shows I’ve been to. What a band to fly the flag for metal of the future.”
In the meantime, Creeper will still be plotting world domination from a more humble setting. “We’re currently rehearsing the show in my kitchen,” Will says with a laugh. “No matter how well things go, we’re always operating on zero budget and painting gravestones in the kitchen.”
But then, considering where that got the band with Sanguivore, we can’t help but wonder if he’s already coming up with ideas for the next album. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?!” he says, eyes glinting mischievously. “It’s hard one to answer, because we try to keep our cards close to our chest. We’ve been overwhelmed with how happy we’ve been with this record. I feel like this is the record we’ve been building towards, that maybe we didn’t have the balls to do when we were younger. I’m glad we didn’t too, because we wouldn’t have done it as well.”
He pauses to reflect. “Sanguivore represents Creeper better than any of our previous records. The first had the trappings of this pop-punk world we were never really part of, just lumped in with. The second was brilliant, but had so many songs that we couldn’t really play live because they were too soft. Sanguivore is a real representation of this band and what we’re about. So right now we’re living with it, and loving what we can do. There’s plans in place for the future, but considering this record was almost called ‘European Vampires – A True Story’, you never know what we’ll bin off next!”
Sanguivore is out now via Spinefarm. Creeper tour the UK from March 15, and the US from April 25. For the full list of dates, visit the band's official website.
