Blackbriar Behind the Scenes of Their Bold New Album ‘A Thousand Little Deaths’

Few bands are capable of conjuring up such vivid cinematic vision as Blackbriar. The band’s lavish history of evocative dark fairytale storytelling and compelling gothic soundscapes continues to expand as we move further into 2025 and their new third full length album, A Thousand Little Deaths. Tackling themes of love, loss, and death, Blackbriar seek to take all willing Thorns on a passionate and resounding journey filled once more with mesmerising imagery, masterful lyricism, and dark symphonic metal power. The world has taken notice of their distinctively macabre yet whimsical sense of metallic storytelling. Zora Cock (vocals) and René Boxem (drums) talk to Hi Fi Way about the album.

Congratulations on the album you’ve got to be really stoked with how it all turned out?
Zora: We are, yeah.

René: It’s a very strange thing knowing that you are one of the few people who’s already heard it. We’ve been listening to the album for a couple of months now, since it’s done. But yeah, always very cool to hear some positivity and nice words before it’s going into the world, because for us it’s very exciting and scary, and everything all at once.

How hard is it when it’s out of your hands and you can’t make any further changes to it? On reflection are you really proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish with it?
Zora: Yeah, really, really proud and I’ve deliberately not been listening to it recently so that I can fully be happy on the release day and then listen to it again. I’ve listened to it so many times and then all of the these little mistakes come to light in my mind. So that’s a bit difficult for me. The perfectionist troubles.

Was it hard finding the right time to stop touring and focus on making an album?
René: I think it came pretty naturally, the the cycle itself. When we started the album,it was basically the time where we were not playing shows anyway. So it was great timing and to be honest the way we write it’s a very long process. We’ve already started working on new music right now. It’s something that comes throughout the upcoming year, or maybe two years. We’ll write eighteen songs and pick ten or eleven for an album. That’s just the way we’ve always done it. Writing is ongoing all the time.

Being so invested in the album was it hard letting it go? Was it almost torturous or difficult finishing some songs?
René: No, I wouldn’t describe it as torturous, but sometimes you do get stuck, so it can be very torturing. We don’t write necessarily a bunch of songs and pick our favorites. So for us we have to see every song through. We do end up sometimes with, Okay, this is not a good enough song, and then we just let it be. There is music that that will probably never be released.

Was it clear in your own minds what you wanted to do with this album?
Zora: We had no idea, we don’t plan these things. It just comes as it comes and naturally.

René: It’s not a concept or something that we necessarily thought about before writing it. We knew that the third album, firstly, should be a very good successor to the previous album. That was obviously very important. But for this album, specifically, we decided to go back in time a little bit and and try to tap in into our inner Fractured Fairytales EP. On our very first release there was a music video shot for a song called Until Eternity, and we shot that in a mansion in the Netherlands. When we wrote this album or started to write it we wanted to go back to that mansion to try and get a little bit inspired by the same influences we did back in the day. We wanted to get inspired like that again. That was the only thing planned for this album. We planned a get together with the whole band, which we have never done before, because usually it is just Zora and myself writing the songs, and it still was. But we focused on a few songs for this album to do together.

Zora: Mostly The Hermit and the Lover came out of that.

Was that a deliberate move to go back to the Fractured Fairytales EP?
René: Well, that was not necessarily a natural influence. We deliberately went there to try and get back into that groove, not because we liked that music more or something, but because there was a certain darkness to the music back then. We wanted to build off of the previous album, a dark euphony, which was also very dark, but also very romantic and try to widen our horizon a bit. It felt like a good good move for us to go back.

How was it kind of managing that band dynamic creatively with six band members and balancing opinions?
Zora: Everybody had their own little bedroom where they would would lock themselves in and work on one particular song, and later in the evening we all got together, and everybody would let them hear what they did during the day which went pretty well.

René: It was actually perfect, because we were working on a song where I got stuck. So we said, Okay, I’ll give the tracks to everybody, basically Zora’s vocals with all of her backing vocals, and everybody started writing on the same song. The funny part was that Ruben, our keyboard player. He actually made the identical chorus as I had already, but he had never heard it, so we were very close there, which was funny. Then Robin did some stuff for the bridge, and Siebe did some very cool stuff. What we eventually ended up doing was basically merging parts of everybody into that song. We did that together, we had the main setup in a big room in the house. and everybody was sitting in a circle while we were working on it together. So, I was chopping things up and putting it back in, and everybody had the opportunity to share their thoughts. It was a very nice and an eye-opening workflow, which for me was very, very cool to do. I’m also used to doing it all by myself and not having all of the other influences and other thoughts.

Zora: Just mine!

René: Exactly just yours, but it was fun, and I think we’ll do it again for more songs. To be honest, we just needed time off together and be in the same place somewhere to think about the music work, it worked very well.

Was that the most exciting part being in the studio and actually seeing these songs come together?
René: No.

Zora: Being in a studio is mostly very difficult for everyone, I think. It’s a difficult process, usually not a lot of fun. Eventually, if you get to hear all those mixes back, then it’s all worth it with all the hard work.

René: I wonder sometimes! I haven’t really met anyone who loves to be in the studio. Some like the romantic idea of being in the studio, but I mean, there’s a mirror that literally shows all of your flaws and your mistakes.

Zora: I do like the writing process. But the actual recording, you want it to be exactly right and sometimes it’s difficult.

Are you looking forward to getting out on on the road and start touring these songs?
Zora: Oh, yes, we will start touring by the end of October to do our first headline tour in Europe. I’m very excited to to bring these songs to life on stage. We have some very cool ideas already to to add the storytelling into the live show as well.

René: Yeah, it’s going to be amazing, our very first European headline tour. It’s something that we’ve been working towards for over twelve years now. I can’t hardly wait to start that off and actually play the new music, because some of these songs have the live situation in mind when we wrote them, or when we produced them at least. So there are some elements that hopefully will work very well live, and that’s what I’m very excited about.

Do you think that the old and the new complement each other really well?
René: It depends on how far back you go because if you think of our previous album, I would say this is very close to the previous album. On many levels we don’t feel the need to go into strange corners and do weird stuff or try new things. That’s not what we intended to do, because we really want to tell these stories, and they are similar to what we did in the past. But if you would go back to the first Ep, it’s a world of difference.

Are you looking to tour Australia at some stage next year?
Zora: We really hope so. We’ve actually had an opportunity to do so last year. But it unfortunately didn’t happen. So we are still trying to to make it happen. It’s on top of the list and we need to go there.

Interview By Rob Lyon

A Thousand Little Deaths is out now through Nuclear Blast…