Sheffield U.K. quintet, While She Sleeps have released their brand new single “SELF HELL”, the title track to their long-awaited sixth studio album, which will follow on March 15th, 2024.

Drawing upon a far wider palette of influences to create a sonic collage of each member’s musical passions, SELF HELL feels like a second debut album from a band who have become such a vital force over the past decade. 

This incarnation of While She Sleeps is uncompromising and unpredictable, the riffs are still granite-heavy, but this album sees them drawing upon more diverse influences such as Aphex Twin, Gorillaz, The Prodigy, and Kendrick Lamar. Those influences have seen a broader range of instruments incorporated on SELF HELL, especially with vintage synths such as the Korg MS-20 and the Behringer TD-3. While She Sleeps were all raised in mining villages around Sheffield and remembered how Britpop surrounded the environment during their youth, its working-class swagger informing the album’s defiant nothing-to-lose and everything-to-gain spirit.

Guitarist Sean Long says, “The name of the album is the foundation of how we view ourselves and the world. Everyone has a subjective experience like no other. Yet the constant that binds us IS the differences between us and the fact that we are all suffering in our own way. Don’t be too quick to judge and demonise, your time will come for redemption or damnification”. 

“SELF HELL” demonstrates the sonic leap-forward that While She Sleeps are taking with the new album. It does seemingly everything all at once – huge riffs, thumping big beat grooves, a maelstrom of synth textures, melodic vocals contrasted with bloody-throated screams and swirling backing harmonies – all in a way that remains coherent while pushing their boundaries to a maximalist new level.