With their unique take on death metal and their modern, razor-sharp sound, Billy Boy In Poison presented a few days ago the fourth and final single before releasing their third album ‘Umbra‘. “Our new single combines a heavy and driving verse with a damn catchy chorus. Being one of the most political songs we have done to date, the lyrics deal with inequality, racism and how the top 1% divides and conquers” – as the guitarist, Mikkel Ellung Larsen explained. Here’s our interview with him!

Beginnings:

Billy Boy In Poison began in Copenhagen a long time ago, playing metalcore covers in someone’s parents’ basement. After going through a few members and recording a few EP’s, we settled on a core lineup and released the debut album Watchers in 2013. That’s when we found the sound that we’ve been evolving since.

Behind the name:

We have gotten a lot of comments on the name through the years. It’s not the most metal of band names, we know. The name is from the Anthony Burgess novel/Stanley Kubrick film “A Clockwork Orange” – Billy Boy (in Poison) is a minor character, the leader of a rival gang to main character Alex’s crew.

Inspiration:

We all just really like a nice groove, and we all love bands like Gojira. Actually, we recently made a playlist on Spotify of the music that inspires us at the moment. 

We moved a bit further away from straight death metal than on earlier outputs and took more inspiration from classic Swedish melodeath among other things. Our ambition was to write more memorable songs and choruses without watering down the heaviness. 

Teamwork:

We used to write most of our material together in the rehearsal room like many bands do, but it took a massive amount of time and discussion. So from this album forward, we have tried writing songs individually and then just finishing them up together. It has made for a better flow in the songs and a quicker process.

There’s a lot of work in running a band, and each member has an important role.

Guitarist Alex is the main riff writer and handles a lot of the social media, the drummer Niclas does graphics and cover art, guitarist Mikkel handles most of the business and money part of the band, vocalist Hjalte communicates with our booker, bassist Christian does sound and so on.

COVID-19:

COVID-19 more or less killed the live scene for a while. Luckily, when lockdowns started, we were finishing songs for the new album and preparing to go into the studio. So a lot of the album recording, video shooting, and other work that goes into releasing an album took place while there were no live shows to prepare for. We’re more than ready to hit the stage again now, though!

Fun facts:

Our drummer designed the logo for Thy Art is Murder. Our singer is a skilled online poker player. We once recorded a black metal music video that Abbath didn’t like. We once had a festival show ruined by an electrical malfunction because of rain. Our pre-show ritual is drinking alcoholic sodas and listening to Footloose.

Check out our new surreal music video for ‘Umbra’ and look out for the next singles coming out in the coming months. They show a lot of the new things we bring to the table on the new album!