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Guest Editorial: Ben Mills of The Smoking Hearts

• 25th Jun 2012

This special guest Editorial column comes from Ben Mills, front man of London based rock and rollers The Smoking Hearts. I first heard of the band about 2 years ago when I was sharing an office with Glasswerk before I worked for them, and their debut album Pride Of Nowhere dropped through the letterbox.

I was instantly blown away by the raw energy of the songs and the musicianship on display. The Smoking Hearts are one of the only bands for me that come close to the intensity and honesty of US punk'n'rollers The Bronx – if you like guitar music and you don't find yourself headbanging furiously to their ode to rock Thrash B4 Gash you may as well just give up now. After losing their original front man, wild card Ben Mills stepped up to the plate.

I met Ben a few months ago when me and a friend promoted a Smoking Hearts show at The Shipping Forecast in Liverpool. Since then he crops up everywhere I go and is a ball of outspoken energy and seems to be constantly partying; in other words, he's what every rock band should have in a front man. An absolute nut-job.

“The state of modern music is in peril” states Ben emphatically “The mainstream, the underground, the avantgarde and the experimental is all struggling to interest me. Everyone is playing the same songs with the same idea of being something new and innovative but instead it just sounds contrived and downright awful.

I’m not saying all the music in the world is awful, but the stuff we get force fed at shows and in the alternative media is atrocious. Bands like Emmure, Black Veil Brides, Asking Alexandria and their counterparts are making kids stupid. What happened to music that made people passionate? What happened to the ‘riffs’? All we have now is Chug Chug Subdrop, Chug, Singy-bit, sample chug chug.

I’ve not heard a new song with a killer riff or hook in about 4 years and it’s really getting to the point where I don’t listen to new music. Someone needs to take a stand, rock ‘n roll needs a revolution. There are bands out there like Our Time Down Here, Feed the Rhino and Polar making waves in a scene but kids aren’t going wild for them like they should be.

Instead they’re spending all their time watching crap ‘nu-metal’ rip offs singing about broken hearts with the same video of a band, dressed head to toe in Top Man and Supreme, jumping around in a muddy forest trying to be emotional.

It’s not big and it’s not clever.”

The Smoking Hearts on Facebook: link

Our Time Down Here:

Stream the album Midnight Mass here: link

POLAR:

Stream 'Tonight Matthew, I Am The Batman' here: link

Feed The Rhino: