In the Studio with Royal BloodThe Members: Mike Kerr, vocals, bass, keyboards; Ben Thatcher, drums, percussion.Produced by: Royal Blood; Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher.Recorded at: Royal Blood’s Brighton, UK studioThe Origin: Possessing a striking powers-of-ten perspective—hearing, then capturing, the spaces where smaller sonics are found and different frequency decades are transformed into massive, colossal sounds—the globally renowned riff-rockers, Brighton, UK-based drum-meets-bass duo Royal Blood wield a natural mastery over micro-to-macro sound-craft sorcery. This acoustic skullduggery arrives naturally for Royal Blood and thrives on a longstanding friendship and love for finding and magnifying these auditory pockets.

The result is a signature style, identifiable within the first few bars: dark and brooding, bluesy, heavy-hitting rock rhythms that rise and fall in accordance with vocal verses dripping with sultry snarls and bombastic boldness. Yet it’s the duo’s application of the inverse — breaking down the loud and creating space when a song calls for a more melodious sound — that reveals the true brilliance of their sonic subterfuge. This interplay creates a high-stakes game of margins for the duo, who consistently rewrite the rulebook on how to build a beat and know when, where, and why to place a sound, defying conventional compositional assumptions and dismantling all spatial bounds.

While the full details of Royal Blood’s inception are frequently glossed over — with many accounts pinning their trajectory around the duo’s 2014 self-titled debut, then matching it alongside their meteoric rise after the duo garnered the attention of iconic rock titans like Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, and Foo Fighters — the truth beneath the mythos follows a more human path: a band pursuing its passion, fueled by a love of creating music, and ignited by the magic of performing live. By simply playing for the fun of it — by some strange twist of fate, they found success.

It was a dual hustle: slogging through the local underground lines of the London-by-the-sea music scene while finding studio time to follow a “what-if” impulse. Chasing wide-open audio dreams, they recorded murky melodies that sank deeply into dark harmonies, trying anything and everything. Listening closely to the instinct within, they maintained their two-piece dynamic, which augmented their synergy, ultimately emerging from a locked-down, soundproofed room with their four-track Out of the Black EP (2014). Its all-out rock-and-roll blues, heavily infused with their now-trademark infra-inverse-ultra frequencies, showcased the massive anthems “Little Monster” and “Come On Over.” Serving as precursors for what was yet to come, the early releases introduced the world to their supercharged output of sound, paving the way for the colossal hits that followed, ensuring everyone instantly knew that Royal Blood was here to stay — no need to “Figure It Out.”

After years of working within conventional studios, while also setting up their own personal recording environments — including an early stint turning the back of their tour bus into a recording space — Royal Blood’s sonic alchemy continued to evolve through the garage-rock heights of How Did We Get So Dark? (2017) and the sleek, electro-rock-funk frequencies of Typhoons (2021). This spatial transition eventually culminated in the duo working fully from their own Brighton-based studio, a creative milestone that became central to self-producing their fourth full-length release, Back to the Water Below (2023).

Having embraced their creative arc, yet in need of a brief respite away from the road and writing, Royal Blood stepped away for a bit — however, their urge to keep seeking all of those lost or not-yet-captured sounds lingered. Locking themselves away from the world’s external gaze, they returned to their sanctuary, their private tracking space, to let the music lead the way. Below, the affable lead vocalist/bassist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher strip away the studio mystique to detail how they found a new round of wild and supersonic sounds as they returned to the helm for their high-octane fifth chapter, Dead Company (Nov. 13th, 2026).

The Production: Ever attuned to the unpredictable energy of a room — from small clubs to massive venues — Royal Blood instantly tapped into that fritzed-out buzz during the recording process for Dead Company in their Brighton-based studio. This served as the subconscious catalyst for flipping the script on the traditional writing and recording process. Reflecting on this, Mike Kerr notes their artistic compass was beautifully simple: “to try to get as much excitement into the performances as possible.”

While Royal Blood touched the third rail in the midst of penning new material, one specific track exploded, giving the duo an immediate glimpse of the potential sonics on the horizon, sparking the energy they were seeking. Kerr recalls:

“I think 'Swallow the Bomb' was the first thing we wrote for the record. It just came out of the gates really, really hot. And I think we became excited about playing heavy and fast again… it set us on the trajectory for the record.”

That hard, driving momentum naturally began to shape a broader narrative. “After maybe another four or five songs in, I realized there was a theme that was subconsciously emerging,” Kerr says. “It was an all-in attitude. I think that helped me finish the record and work out how to fill in the gaps as the initial themes were all about perseverance, really, and the positives of having that relentless mindset. I was listening to what the music was telling me — it was all informed by the excitement.”

With that newfound adrenaline locked in, Royal Blood drew from the kinetic energy that always defined them, hammering out the material together as much as possible before officially hitting record.

“Because we wanted to play these songs live, it was just about running through these tracks together as much as possible before we started officially tracking — getting them to the point where they are ready for us to sit down and actually record,” Kerr explains.

In embracing this instinct, their signature approach of splitting open massive frequencies reemerged — but it was achieved completely without excessive studio layering, relying instead on the grit of their two-piece synergy.

“If we feel like a song requires more layers, we can become suspicious of it,” Kerr notes. “The goal for this record was, ‘how do we make things feel full and exciting with the minimal ingredients that we have?’ We wanted every track to feel completely untamed and wild, and to really come from that place. Anything we do add is subtle and effective, rather than being integral.”

To pull off this minimal, unlayered approach, the foundation of the tracking sessions fell squarely onto Thatcher. Armed with a deep familiarity with their Brighton room, the duo understood exactly how to extract the massive tones and dynamic punch desired. He explains:

“We know how to get a really good drum sound from that studio because we've worked there on previous records. It's not a massive room, but it's not small either — it has a high ceiling. Our engineer, Pete, knows the space quite well too, so we already knew how to extract what we wanted.”

That intrinsic comfort meant the most explosive, energetic takes could arrive almost instantaneously, bypassing the need for endless reps and replication.

“The most energetic drum take could be in the first three times of recording it,” Thatcher adds. “I think we had done so much work on the previous record with sound design and everything that it was all set up. But throughout the creation of this album, it felt like we wanted to do almost the opposite — to just play together and not worry about a perfect take. That letting go is what gave it the energy.”As this heavy, untamed energy surged through the tracking sessions, the duo faced their next psychological hurdle: knowing when to stop turning knobs and leave the songs alone. In a modern digital landscape, the temptation to endlessly rerecord a take or tweak a mix can easily become a trap. For Royal Blood, the beauty this time around lay in chasing the feels and prioritizing vibe over perfection. Kerr describes this mindset:

“It could be an endless process, and it could never be done really—you could endlessly be fine-tuning it. But the ethos that we were trying to embody on the record was that looking perfect isn't really what we're going for here. It was about energy and trying to capture something that was exciting and not overthought.”

That restraint requires a sharp intuition, knowing exactly when to step back before over-production spoils the magic. As Kerr explains, crossing that invisible line is often the only way to find their limit:

“So, there's just a moment where you think, ‘If I do anything more, we're going to make it worse.’ I think that's the feeling at times. You probably have to cross that line to realize, ‘Now, we're really making it worse.’ Also, you can sometimes trick yourself into thinking that it was too easy. You wonder, ‘We shouldn't be done by mix three; we should be getting to mix whatever.’ Many times you think you have to go through more processes, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's just the first or second thing you need to do, and that's it.”

Once the duo settled on the individual tracks, they turned their attention to the sequencing, an integral phase of Royal Blood’s album-crafting process. For Dead Company, the pair mapped out an auditory excursion framed by two distinct, unshakeable milestones: the title track and the final cut, “Closer,” with the frenetic energy of their studio journey filling the space in between. Thatcher describes the art of the sequence:

“I think some bits of music kind of already pick their place in the order, and it's up to you to challenge those positions,” Thatcher explains. “You kind of know what songs are going to feel good at the start of a record and what you want people to hear first, and then you want to take them on a bit of a journey. It's the same kind of journey you want to take people on with a live set list. There is definitely a method to it, but I think it's really important to challenge those methods and to change things up as well along the way.”

That willingness to shake things up meant constantly shuffling the middle positions to mirror the internal journey they envisioned. Yet, despite stress-testing the tracklist, the sonic bookends remained perfectly locked from day one:

“The very first order was almost the one that we went with, but we did change things around like, 'What if we start with this one instead?'” Thatcher notes. “But actually, the beginning and the end—the first song and the closer—were always in place, and it was just working out the journey in the middle.”

With the final arrangement permanently ordered, the duo is primed to unleash that same untamed energy captured during the recording process – right back on the stage. For Royal Blood, the entire record was also tracked to mimic a live environment. Kerr highlights one song that stands out as the definitive example:

“There's a track called 'Mother Never Told You,' which is probably the most brutal track on the record,” Kerr says. “And I think that's why we're really excited, particularly to play it live, just because it's absolute carnage.”

That hunger to translate studio adrenaline into live performance extends across the entire album. Injecting these brand-new compositions into their setlist brings a fresh physical charge to a live show. Thatcher describes the intense anticipation:

“There's a massive excitement that we're going to get from playing these new ones, just because we've been playing some of the older stuff over ten years now,” Thatcher explains. “There's always this new energy when you can see it, a new song, coming up in the set list. And there's always a bit of anticipation and a little bit of nervousness because our bodies are not quite used to having that muscle memory yet.”

Navigating those unmapped moments in the setlist forces the duo to stay razor-sharp, relying on pure focus to guide them through the demands of the new arrangements. As Thatcher notes, it is a high-stakes balancing act of adrenaline and discipline:

“So those moments for us are definitely in the set list where we can work ourselves up a little bit more,” Thatcher adds. “It's all about keeping it together and remembering to keep breathing before they come on. But they'll become like the others at some point, and they will just merge in.”

The band mirrors that live excitement through their thrill over the big reveal of the album's new imagery. Like so many elements of Dead Company that subtly surfaced along the way — unearthing fresh bursts of supersonic energy — the title and the artwork naturally did the same. In a striking twist of fate, it was the depiction of a beautifully designed, two-headed tiger that brought everything full circle. The image perfectly captured the dual-fronted energy that reflects the sonic synergy of the band, paying homage to their signature six-eyed tiger emblem — a piece of symbolism that once adorned Thatcher’s drum kit since their earliest days.

Kerr explains how this visual identity surfaced in an equally subtle way:

“‘Dead Company’ is the first track of the record. When we were working on the album artwork, we were just using the title and its corresponding dual-tiger imagery as a placeholder because we hadn't confirmed a final title yet. After about three weeks, we had almost forgotten that we hadn't even decided what the album was going to be called. I think we both just got so used to seeing the tigers and ‘Dead Company’ together that it felt like it had named itself. There's something about that title and the tigers together — it just seemed like the perfect marriage. It feels like a really good, full-circle moment, if that makes sense.

Thatcher adds a straightforward, definitive agreement: “Yeah, absolutely.”

Photo Credit: Edward CookeThe post In the Studio with Royal Blood first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.