Empire (Let Them Sing)

Album: Sempiternal (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Vocalist Oli Sykes told Metal Hammer magazine that lyrically this is one of his favorites on Sempiternal, "because it's one of the few where I wrote the lyrics before I wrote the melodies. Most of the time I've found out that that doesn't work, but it gave me a lot of freedom."
  • Bassist Matt Kean told Sugarscape about the writing of the song's instrumentation: "The main part in this one is a part we already had, just on its own," he said, "like the main riff. So we came back to that one later and it kinda like felt like a work in progress for quite a while. It's the heaviest song on the album, I really like the chorus in it - and the ending's got like scary string sounds.

    "It's one of my favourites on the whole album, actually," he continued. "When we recorded it we got like, I think it was maybe eight musicians, like all doing different strings like violins and violas and cellos, and we had them all come into the studio when we wrote the music out for them and stuff. It was cool. I remember when they first came into the studio and we were all like just we listened to them play our songs back and we were just like 'Oh they sound like a movie soundtrack.'"

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