Bloodstock Bound: Ruled By Raptors
As Bloodstock gets closer, we delve deep into the line up to find out more about some of the bands playing the New Blood and EMP stages at this years event.
Today we chat with Ruled By Raptors
The Razor's Edge: Please introduce yourself and your band mates.
Ruled By Raptors:
Chris Bradley - Lead Vocals and guitar
Matt Dewar - Lead Guitar and backing vocals
Nick Oliver – Bass and backing vocals
Will Robson – Drums and samples.
The Razor's Edge: How would you describe your sound?
Ruled By Raptors: We’re a post-hardcore band, but we toe the line between metal and punk. We’re all very eclectic in our musical tastes, but we’re partial to a lot of things that are more common in metal like time signature changes, odd C tunings and shouty vocals that lean heavily towards metal genres.
The Razor's Edge: How did you land your spot on the Bloodstock bill?
Ruled By Raptors: We came through the Newcastle leg of the Metal 2 The Masses competition.
The Razor's Edge: How tough was the competition this year?
Ruled By Raptors: Weirdly we felt it was a lot closer this year. We made it to the final last year, but lost out to our friends in Kraken Waker. Matt is usually the optimist of the band and even he thought it was tight in both the semi final and the final. When he says it’s close, you know it is!
The Razor's Edge: What does playing at Bloodstock mean to you?
Ruled By Raptors: It’s mind blowing really. We’ve played Slam Dunk before with a Nerdcore rapper called MC Lars, for that we were hired as his backing band, this time we feel like we’ve got there on our own merit playing our own stuff and we’re looking forward to doing it for a crowd that really loves heavy music.
The Razor's Edge: For people who’ve never seen you live, what can they expect at Bloodstock?
Ruled By Raptors: We sing songs about politics and mental health. Chris writes from a personal perspective and doesn’t like to write about thing he hasn’t experienced. We try to put a lot of atmospheric stuff into our music so going from stuff sounding claustrophobic and tight to big and large and impactful. We also like to get involved in the crowd a bit. We’d usually jump in and try to incite a pit and we’ll look to try and do that even from a big festival stage such as the New Blood one. At the very least we’ll chuck ourselves around the stage a bit!
The Razor's Edge: What day are you performing?
Ruled By Raptors: We’ll be playing on the Sunday. We’ve been informed that Sunday is also dinosaur day this year as well, so we’re expecting folk in Dinosaur costumes in our crowd during our set!
The Razor's Edge: What other bands are you looking forward to watching at Bloodstock this year?
Ruled By Raptors: We’ve all got a lot of different bands we want to check out, names thrown about in our practices include Heriot (we played years ago with Debbie’s old band so it would be nice to have a catch up), Thrown, Kublai Khan TX, Paleface Swiss, LN (who we played with in last year’s M2TM final), Waterlines, Gojira, Trivium, Machine Head is a big one for us, Mastodon, August Burns Red and Static-X.
The Razor's Edge: Playing the New Blood Stage is just the first steppingstone in a bands journey. What’s next in your plans for world domination?
Ruled By Raptors: We’re actually working on a EP/Mini album right now, we tracked it down in Lincoln about a year and a half ago, but Chris’ mam has been unwell and so it ended up on the back burner until this year, Matt is now working on the mixes. We’ve also got some tour dates planned for September & November that we’re just about to announce.
The Razor's Edge: Are you camping with the fans? Which campsite are you heading for?
Ruled By Raptors: When we won M2TM they gave us all camping tickets for the whole weekend in the artist’s campsite which is really neat, we hadn’t expected that at all!
The Razor's Edge: You’ve gotta keep hydrated at Bloodstock, what is your drink of choice for the weekend?
Ruled By Raptors: For most of us it’ll be some combination of lager, ale, IPA and whiskey. Nick is a cider drinker.
The Razor's Edge: See you at Bloodstock in a few weeks!
Ruled By Raptors: Be sure to say hi! See you there!
