Oliver Sykes

To be honest, I don't really like arenas. It's not easy to make the sound good, or to perform in them.

I like how our records go from super poppy to heavy then electronic, and next I'd like to make a bunch of records where each of them has a distinct vibe to it.

I just love to sit and go, 'Let's just write a song and not worry about how it needs to be'.

Happy Song' is a sarcastic open letter to the world about how we use superficial and trivial things to ignore the real problems.

When I was 17, death metal and extreme hardcore was the best music in the world to me. But as I got older, my palette changed and my thirst for melody and emotion just got bigger and bigger.

I think EDM and metal and rock have been together already for a long time. Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, the Prodigy - they all have influences from both.

Emotion is a full range of a spectrum, like colours. It's not just anger. How are you going to get that out with just a guitar and screaming? You need to explore everything else.

The guitar shouldn't be a main instrument, it should be a texture. It shouldn't be important whether it's there or not. If it's important to you whether a guitar is there or not, you're weird.

Rock's gone soft, it's gone miserable and boring, there's not really much exciting about it. So it's important that we cross over, because we feel like we belong more in a place where people just like music and it's not about how heavy it is.

I found myself reading about this 16-year-old kid inventing a micro-organism to save the ocean. It made me realise that we can do anything if we put our minds to it. Even with all the damage and destruction, things can heal if we let them.

Your favourite songs by your favourite bands are never the singles. It's when they've done exactly what they wanted without any compromise and not worried about the reaction.

We can get rid of all the plastic bags and plastic straws in the world - and we need to - but nothing is going to get better until we can make the people at the top see that there are changes to be made.

We need to be our own heroes. We need a new way of looking at things. Greta Thunberg has shown us that. It's crazy, but this kid has proven that we can be our own leaders.

Artists can be the most powerful people in the world because they can use their voice for good. Politicians should be the most powerful people in the world but they aren't going to do anything.

Everything I'd taught myself about screaming is basically a big no-no for singing. Your posture, your airflow - you're just pushing all the air out. When you start out, you're fast, heavy and loud but you're hiding behind it in a way. When you stop screaming, that's when it gets hard.

What puts people off metal is they think it's all nutters and blood. We don't want to be seen that way.

Arctic Monkeys are actually one of my favourite bands going, which is really weird cos I went to school and college with them.

I must have been about 13 when I first heard Linkin Park and, to be honest, music had never played that much of a part in my life to that point.

Once you've been painted as something it's very hard, especially when you're young, to wash that off.

We try so hard to block out negative or dark thoughts, but sometimes embracing your demons is the most vitalizing thing you can do.

You just want so badly to be the best version of what people are saying, you want to look like the covers you're on, but it's hard to do that everyday.

You have to ration your creativity over all your songs. You write a really cool pop song then you have to write a heavy song to balance out, then you need to think about singles.

I was trying to prove people wrong who said I wasn't a good guy, and I was trying to be the person that other people thought I was - people who loved our band thought I was a god.

I'm not a politically-charged person. I don't want to be. I don't want to talk about politics and I don't want to sing about politics, but if you're talking about environmental issues then you can't talk about one without the other.

The key to me recovering from drug addiction was figuring out why I was so upset and why I hated myself so much. I realised it was all to do with the way I was viewed by other people.