“I always say that Creeper is more in the magic business than the music business a lot of the time,” says frontman Will Gould, as cats materialise from nowhere and crawl across him in his home. “Trying to work out how to catch people off guard, especially in an age where everything is spoiled on the internet so quickly, is really difficult.”
It’s a fitting guise for a band who’ve spent a decade dining out on suspending listeners’ disbelief. Since 2017’s ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, Creeper have been building elaborate musical monuments only to burn them down and start afresh, like a very theatrical, very emo phoenix.
They’ve dabbled in horror punk, Americana and glam rock, flirted with emo, goth and indie, and in 2023’s ‘Sanguivore’, they fully committed to their vampire rock opera era. For their next trick? ‘Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death’, a sequel that makes their 80s homage bigger, better and badder (yes, that’s a WrestleMania III reference, and yes, you should ask your parents).
“The idea to do a sequel felt like the one thing people would expect us not to do, because they’d seen us aggressively reinvent ourselves twice before,” Will explains. When they announced it at Camden’s KOKO in May, something unprecedented happened: relief instead of panic. “There was a nice feeling this time that they weren’t being swerved for the worst, that they weren’t going to be lowered into the sea.”
That relief speaks to how deeply the vampire era has resonated. ‘Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death’ is less Breaking Dawn, and more The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Rather than continuing the original’s story of sinister duo Spook & Mercy, this sequel follows a vampire-infested rock band terrorising 1980s America as they play Russian roulette with vampire huntress The Mistress Of Death, hell-bent on ending their bloodline for good.
Inspired by the Satanic Panic of the 80s, when heavy metal bands were accused of converting young people into devil worshippers, ‘Sanguivore II’ sees Creeper exploring serious themes in the silliest ways possible.
“The stuff we’ve woven about religion has been a really fun way to talk about the music industry,” Will explains. “Some of the Catholic stuff in my life has been quite suffocating. When you hear that stuff when you’re younger, like the idea of right and wrong, which is clearly a spectrum, it’s simplified and made much more black and white.”
Those rigid moral binaries from his Catholic school days feed directly into an album that deliberately complicates traditional notions of good versus evil, as if it’s a good old-fashioned wrestling promo. “I think that’s a really fun thing to play with over the record where we do a double turn, to use wrestling terminology, when the heel turns face and the face turns heel midway through the record.”
The vampire band might be the villains narratively, but they’re having way more fun than the heroic Mistress of Death. Of course, Creeper are unreliable narrators, leading listeners down a garden path of nuance. Is the vampire band Creeper themselves, gorging on audiences whilst the industry huntress stalks them? Or is the music industry the bloodsucker, with artists as the unwilling victims? Its moral complexity is disguised as camp horror, like a rock and roll Jordan Peele, but with significantly more eyeliner.
Musically, ‘Sanguivore II’ steals inspiration from every corner of the 80s, like a Spotify algorithm fed on synth-pop, glam rock and goth. ‘Razor Wire’ is synth-pop for cowboys and jazz fans, ‘Prey For The Night’s’ throbbing synths feel like the perfect soundtrack for riding Disneyland Paris’ Phantom Manor ride, and ‘Crimson Bride’ sounds like Judas Priest flirting with Jim Steinman. If Alice Cooper, Eurythmics, Meat Loaf, The Sisters Of Mercy and Type O Negative formed a band, ‘Sanguivore II”s vampire rock band would be it.
All this musical ambition is possible because the band has reached peak confidence. Hannah Greenwood’s turn as the Mistress Of Death represents their most assured creative statement yet, but it’s really about the entire group hitting their stride. “Hannah is one of the coolest things about the band,” Will admits. “The weirdest thing is the band is better when I’m not singing. The band is better when I’m behind writing things.”
It’s not that Hannah was ever just someone lurking in the shadows; she’s always been integral to Creeper’s sound. But this version of her, and the whole band, represents their most complete form. “We’ve reached a point now where we’ve got a really spectacular group of musicians,” Will continues. “Now we have this big toolbox of a real rich variation of things we can pull out and use.”
Hannah’s character development across albums, from victim to lover to empowered antagonist, offers more than most Netflix series manage. “On ‘Crickets’ very early on, she was the heartbroken wife, you’ve seen her be completely destroyed, and you’ve seen her completely hopelessly in love and smitten on ‘Sex, Death & the Infinite Void’, and now you’ve seen her like this kind of ravishing harlot.”
With an army of vampire rock stars to command, Creeper’s principal songwriters, Will and guitarist Ian Miles, treat ‘Sanguivore II’ like an archaeological dig. These digs gave birth to some of the album’s most infectious moments, like the all-conquering’ Blood Magick’, which sounds like the answer to a “what if” question about Belinda Carlisle and Peter Steele catching a Queen concert together and starting a band. Discovering a motif that appears in everything from Bonnie Tyler to Bon Jovi, they couldn’t resist weaving it into the song. “There’s a motif that sits within so many 80s songs, this melody that, weirdly, is in lots of songs, so when we discovered that, we were like, we’d be fools if we didn’t put this motif from so many 80s songs in our record.”
“The chorus is one of the silliest things we’ve ever done”
Of course, beyond taking inspiration from Desmond Child, the Jim Steinman influence has always been woven into Creeper’s creative DNA; only ‘Sanguivore II’ sees them dial down the Meat Loaf worship in favour of Steinman’s deeper cuts. “This one is still a huge nod to Jim’s work,” Will explains. “Outside of just the stuff he’s well known for, it’s more like the stuff on ‘Pandora’s Box’, and the stuff he did with Sisters Of Mercy.” They’re mining the deeper catalogue now; it’s as if they’ve been studying the deep cuts while everyone else was stuck on ‘Bat Out of Hell’.
Elsewhere, producer Tom Dalgety’s return creates rare continuity for a band that usually treats creative partnerships like dating apps. “Tom Dalgety’s like the third man in the cockpit here a lot of the time,” Will notes, thrilled to have found someone who shares their passion for turning punk bands into this generation’s Rocky Horror Picture Show. “It feels like The Rocky Horror Picture Show to me, which is always one of my goals, where it’s sexually liberated, it is non-conforming to the norms around us.”
‘Parasite’ exemplifies this collaborative confidence; co-written with Dalgety’s friend Andreas, it showcases their willingness to embrace peak silliness. “The chorus is one of the silliest things I think we’ve ever done. When I was writing the vocal for it, I was like, ‘Have we gone too far here?’ and everyone was like, ‘No, it’s the best bit’.”
Meanwhile, the album’s six-minute closer ‘Pavor Nocturnus’ represents peak Creeper: indulgent, emotional, and absolutely bonkers. It starts like a candle burning, with spoken-word monologues sung solemnly over acoustic Americana, before erupting into a full-blown rock and roll pantomime, like fireworks on Bonfire Night.
“On the last one, we closed with ‘More Than Death’, which is this big ballad, this big piece, this very Steinman-esque song,” explains Will, who’s really tried to subvert fans’ expectations. “This time around, I thought it would be really fun to do a huge rock and roll closer, with a little bit of something fast from Vision Thing-era Sisters Of Mercy in there.”
“It’s breaking new ground we have never done before. The idea of making space for each of us to play, there’s lots of room to it, and it’s not dominated by vocals, it allows the whole thing to burst into flames at the very end. It’s the Mistress finally catching up with the band!”
In a world where artists are expected to be content creators first and musicians second, Creeper remain stubbornly analogue. “I don’t think we’re making music, we’re making little places to disappear to for a while,” Will reflects. “I think there’s a value in that still, you know, ‘Sanguivore II’ is no different. It’s a world of fantasy and the kingdom of dreams. The idea is somewhere you can escape into yourself and just disappear for a bit.”
“Tick Tock the Crocodile, we’re constantly evading him”
Creeper’s creative choices might enrich their souls, but they come with commercial consequences. While TikTok creators become global stars from their bedrooms, bypassing every traditional industry gatekeeping mechanism, Creeper are climbing down chart rankings while making album-long rock operas about vampire huntresses. As ever, they’re always escaping the end of the band.
“Death is constantly nipping at us. You know, Tick Tock the Crocodile, we’re constantly evading him, with our ankles slipping out of his jaws all the time,” Will says. The Peter Pan reference isn’t random; the crocodile’s persistent threat echoes themes from their debut ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, but now it’s industry mortality rather than childhood’s end.
“We are a band out of time with the current age. The things we’ve done over the years we’ve been warned not to do so many times. We’re hard to playlist, we’re really hard to serve to a new audience.” Their approach makes them digital outcasts, too weird for pop playlists, too theatrical for metal ones, too camp for serious rock consideration. “It’s a different industry where there’s no money and there’s no safety net for this. I remember record companies meeting me ahead of the first KOKO gig [back in November 2018] begging me not to break the band up because it was going to affect streaming so much, and they were only trying to cover their own arse because there was no money in it for them either.”
Yet somehow, they keep cheating death. “We are constantly evading the death of the band, and we have cheated death a number of times now. But what I love about it is that we keep coming back.” Each return feels harder-won, more precious for its improbability.
Will has every right to be pleased about living out their own Final Destination fantasies. Because for every song they release, for every album they put out, somebody somewhere screams into the void, asking for something that sounds like their EPs. “It’s difficult to live up to the expectations of people sometimes,” sighs Will, who’s well aware some fans hold certain eras of the band in higher regard than others. However, those fans shouldn’t hold their breath. “I’m not that person anymore, because neither are any of us. Time is constantly erasing who we were and pushing us forward into the people who we become.”
“It’s difficult, you never want to let anyone down. But as soon as you start making music with someone else in mind, you start making really rubbish stuff. I’d much rather someone absolutely hate what I did and fail on my ambition as an artist than try to appease an audience that really just wants to listen to a record that’s already made.”
It’s their outright refusal to bow down to label bosses and industry bigwigs that keeps the fire alive in the band. Creeper have never played by the rules, and it’s been an uphill fight since they first released their self-titled EP in 2014. As Will puts it, “The world was not always ready for us and what we were trying to do, and I still don’t think it is.”
But in an industry not built for bands like Creeper, it’s the magic they wield as a creative force that’s always kept them a step ahead of death’s clutches. Like the Mistress Of Death catching up with the vampires, Will and co. know they’re forever on the run. “I’m sure Tick Tock will catch us one day, but so far, we’ve been lucky. We’ve evaded it just enough.”
Creeper’s album ‘Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death’ is out 31st October.
Leave a Reply