BLEED FROM WITHIN’s ALI RICHARDSON Names The Holy Trifecta Of Bands That Shaped Their Sound

Hot off the heels of their seventh studio album Zenith, and creeping up on 20 years as a band, Glasgow’s Bleed From Within – Metal Injection’s Artist Of The Month – have pause to reflect on the forces that have guided them to recent global successes. In a candid sit-down with Metal Injection, the band breaks down the major influences that have defined them over the course of two decades. The following are excerpts from our conversation with Bleed From Within founding drummer, Ali Richardson.

The top three that we always talk about is Pantera, Lamb of God and Slipknot and that’s the holy trifecta. Without those three bands, we wouldn’t sound anything like we do now. I think on the very early stuff, Goonzi and that were massively inspired by The Black Dahlia Murder back in the day, man.

That’s very apparent on Humanity and stuff. But yeah, Pantera, Lamb of God. Killswitch Engage, that’s a great one, man. Their early albums and stuff had a big effect on us. Just as like a standalone piece of work, The Impossibility of Reason by Chimaira. Just that period of time, you know, the early 2000s. All the Slipknot stuff that was coming out. It’s difficult to put ourselves back there. But those are the three we always talk about.

Pantera

Pantera just had a swagger to them. I don’t even know how to describe this, but Vinnie‘s drums just sounded like they weighed a lot, do you know what I mean? The way that he played and stuff, I used to play fucking clarinet and then I heard “Fucking Hostile” and I just changed in five minutes. That’s like a life-changing thing that happened to me where I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for it. I was listening to Andrew WK, I was listening to Sum 41. I’d heard some Slipknot, I’d heard some Lamb of God and I was like, yeah, I like this, but I didn’t know what I was doing and I was still like in an orchestra at school and stuff like that. And then just the moment that was like, fucking hell, like this is for me.

Vulgar‘s my baby, man. That was really the album though, because it was “Fucking Hostile”, right? So immediately, I went on Limewire or whatever it was at the time, and I had to download it that night because I’d just heard it. And then I went out and bought the album, obviously. And then I got the first one, went to Cowboys From Hell, and then I just went through them. And that just shaped my formative years were just based around Vinnie, Chris Adler, Joey, Mario from Gojira, like this kind of stuff. So yeah, in terms of the band though, Pantera, Lamb of God and Slipknot, that’s the formative of stuff. Killswitch in there as well, obviously, when we started to add a bit more of the melody.

Lamb Of God

My intro to Lamb of God was “Black Label”. A friend gave me a loan of New American Gospel, actually Davey the bass player, his wife Louise, she gave me that album. So “Black Label”, “Pariah”, everything that was on that. And then two days later, I was like, I need more. What else is there? And she was like, well, we’ve got this. And I remember getting As the Palaces Burn when that came out. And then fucking Ashes of the Wake mate. That was a game changer for everyone. We were lucky enough to do the Headbangers Boat, and we saw the album get played start to finish. Obviously we’ve done a bunch of tours with Lamb of God now and it’s crazy for me where I’ll see them at a festival and we’ll stop and talk and Randy will come in our dressing room and stuff like that, which is fucking crazy for us.

They’ve got a finger on the pulse, man. They’ve always looked out for bands, I think, where they can. And they’ve always had our back. In any show we’ve been with them, we’ve always been treated well by the crew and by the band. I think it’s nice to see in this day and age when you get bands of that size and that caliber with no egos. It’s refreshing.

Slipknot

If we’d been offered that tour [with Slipknot in 2024] even five years ago, we wouldn’t have been ready. You know, the tour came at a very, very good time in our career, and where we’re at as performers, as musicians, as people, we were fully equipped to handle everything that that tour had to throw at us. And I said this, I was really vocal about this on just a couple of interviews that we’d done where I was like, we wouldn’t have been ready.

And I think you’d be foolish to think that we were. We’re very aware of ourselves, but we put in the work, and we grafted, and we reached that point. They keep themselves to themselves on the road. You know, you don’t really see them much. But V-Man, the bass player, is a friend of ours. Obviously he’s from the UK, so we go way back. So I saw a lot of him. Eloy [Casagrande] the drummer, obviously had a massive effect on me when I’d seen him play for the first time a few years back in Sepultura and then we actually hung out at a festival run two years ago. I think it was, 2023, I met him for the first time properly and we shot the shit, put away a bottle of whisky together and really got on, bonded over our love of the instrument and we’re very similar people, we’re very grounded. You know, I say similar purely on a personality basis, like that guy is on another fucking level of playing.

But yeah, man, we were really well looked after by them. We got a picture with them all at the end of the run. And that was just, we got back into the dressing room and our photo guy just pulled up the photo and he’s like, that just happened boys. And we were like, it’s fucking crazy, isn’t it? You know, we didn’t really take stock of the fact. Because once you do something like that, there’s always something else you have to do. We’ve got a headline tour coming up, and we’ve got the album to release. It was just like a kind of flash in the pan insane moment that happened and then it was fucking done. It started, and it felt like it was going on for ages. And then when it finished, it felt like we’d only been touring for five minutes. It was very hard to kind of stay present there and just take it all in and take stock of where we were at and what we were actually doing, who we were playing alongside.”

We want to write the music that we want to hear now. I think it’s hard just to get good metal these days that’s just like no gimmick and just kind of straight up for me. And I’m not talking about like there’s some great extreme music that i’ve heard recently the most the stuff that’s coming to mind is that new Whitechapel album’s fucking insane, Aborted, our friends Shadow Of Intent have got some great stuff, Cattle Decapitation, but this is like fucking extreme.

On the other side of things, I think you’ve got like Bring Me the Horizon, Architects and Bad Omens and all that doing really well in the spheres, but for me there’s just something down the middle there that’s missing in the 2020s that we don’t have, like the New Wave of American Metal. That doesn’t exist anymore for me, you know, The Agony Scene, Chimaira, Lamb of God, Killswitch, all the bands that were doing New England Metal Fest back in the day. You know, I think that’s the gap that Bleed fills nicely. That’s where we want to be. That’s the kind of music that fucking lights a fire under us, you know? Yeah, if we can leave any impact on the world, then hopefully, we get our names associated alongside them at some point, but we’ll see.