HMT caught up with Azrael about their new EP and all things about their music and mental health. Check out the EP and other releases here
How do the tracks on your EP relate to mental health?
Most of the EP lives in territory that anyone who’s spent time fighting their own head will recognise. “No More Time” is probably the most direct one on the record. The image of walking on tiptoe through the maze of your own mind, nightmares that feel real rather than symbolic, that specific sensation of gasping through each moment with no room left to breathe – those lines didn’t come from a conceptual exercise. They came from somewhere real, and that’s why they ended up in the song rather than on a page nobody would read.
“My Lost Delight” is grief in a quieter key – the hollow that opens up when you lose someone or something, the way memory pulls at you when you’re trying to hold still. “Call Me Rover” is about what it feels like to grow up perpetually apart: the outcast who doesn’t quite understand why they’re the black sheep, who learns to survive that way rather than overcome it. “Nemesys” turns the same frustration outward and makes it a refusal to stay down.
The thread running through all five tracks is inner struggle in one form or another. We didn’t map it that way from the start, but looking back it makes sense for a band that went silent for over twenty years and then had to find a genuine reason to come back.
Does playing and performing have an impact on your wellbeing?
Both directions, honestly. Being back in a room together after everything this band has been through – years of silence, a founding member stepping away from music entirely for health reasons, starting over from scratch – there’s something about making noise with these specific people that feels like the opposite of isolation. Writing and recording the EP was genuinely restorative. Getting something out of your head and into a finished track that actually sounds the way you heard it internally is one of the few things that cuts through when everything else feels blocked.
There’s a harder side too. Putting out music independently, managing every part of it without a support structure, carrying the uncertainty of whether anyone will care – that wears on you in ways that are easy to underestimate. But the moment you’re on a stage and the room responds, none of that is present. It’s a trade-off every one of us would take again.
What got you into listening to and playing metal music?
For most of us it started the way it usually does: someone puts a record on and something shifts that never shifts back. Iron Maiden, Metallica, Crimson Glory. What heavy metal did, and still does, is refuse to dress things up. When a song is about fear or rage or the feeling of being completely left behind, it says so without softening the edges, and then there’s a riff behind it that makes the whole thing physical rather than just emotional. That combination is hard to find in other genres.
For a lot of people in this band, growing up, metal was the music that said out loud what couldn’t be said any other way. That function hasn’t changed. Writing “No More Time” was considerably easier than talking about the same things would have been.
Do you think your fans find mental health benefits from engaging with your music?
Early feedback suggests some of them do, and we hope so. The core thing a song gives you, when it names something difficult accurately, is the feeling of not being alone in it. That’s undervalued and it’s not small. You put on a record that describes exactly where you are and suddenly you’re less isolated – not because the problem has gone anywhere, but because someone else clearly went there too and found words for it.
The metal community is built on shared weight more than shared image, and that makes it genuinely different from most musical spaces. Live, that effect is amplified considerably. Standing in a room with people who chose to be there for the same reasons, with the volume you can feel rather than just hear – it’s not therapy in any formal sense, but it’s real and it matters.
