Earlier this week, Sheffield’s award-winning metalcore band While She Sleeps announced that they would stop touring for the foreseeable future, citing the demand that the music industry puts on artists and the burnout that it leads to. “Everything I ever dreamed of was happening right before my eyes,” they say in seven-minute mini-documentary The Paradox Of Progress. “We’re selling out shows, we’re climbing the bills … but there’s so much pressure to reach more success.”
The members talk about how, since forming 20 years ago, they’ve been stuck in a repeating and ever-busier cycle of album/tour/album/tour, because that’s what’s required when you’re trying to survive and expand your brand. As guitarist Sean Long puts it, “The standard of the industry sets the standard for how much artists need to release. No one’s actually telling you to do it – it’s ’cause everybody else is doing it.” But that grind with no end now has them questioning everything: what’s the point of attaining our dreams when we can’t enjoy them?
