Our regular run-down of as many of the upcoming Bloodstock bands as we can get to talk to us! Ofnus play the New Blood stage on the Saturday…
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
We’re from South Wales, mostly around the Cardiff area.
How long have you been playing together as a band?
We “formed” as a band idea in 2021, well, at least our drummer and guitarist laid the foundations then. The lineup was solidified around Spring 2022 with the music having largely been put together around then, and if memory serves our first practice as a band was about March 2022. Not too long in other words!
Where does the name of the band come from?
It’s the Welsh word for “Afraid”, “Scared” or “Fearful”. In a broad sense it’s just a descriptive for the themes of the music that we’ve chosen to approach, but gives us a subtle nod to our origins as well as being brief, memorable, and simple to design a logo for. Everything in a convenient and fitting package.
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
It’s definitely tough trying to find an identity in sound, no matter the genre. To assist with the pigeon-holing, we go by atmospheric/melodic/epic black metal. Ultimately our guitars take from a number of those genre tropes, but we aren’t afraid to take from a variety of other genres in the pursuit of making the sound big. We orchestrate our music in a style reminiscent of fantasy film score as what we’re striving to achieve is a more “cinematic” feel. Bombastic, and melancholic – that’s the goal.
What’s your live show like? Why are people going to watch you instead of another band?
We’re confident we bring something quite different to a lot of other bands at Bloodstock this year. Our music has a weight and intensity that is designed to draw you in and root you – an experience or journey that will hopefully help to reconnect you with your misery. We want your spine to tingle and your synapses to fizz, and we pull every trick out of a well-rehearsed book to pull this off
Have you been to Bloodstock before? What did you think?
Rich (bass) and Alyn (guitars) are Bloodstock veterans having attended since at least 2008, and Alyn and James (lead guitars) have both performed there before in other bands. Bloodstock is a huge boon for both the UK metal festival scene but also the underground, particularly with their support of the unsigned and smaller acts which is absolutely vital. Striking the perfect balance between size and intimacy, and with a familial warm and welcoming atmosphere, it’s hard to not keep coming back year after year. You step out onto Catton Hall fields, and a lot of life’s concerns simply evaporate for a weekend.
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Which M2tM region did you win, or did you come through other channels?
We applied directly online. We were sending out our debut record masters to various labels at the time and thought that it would make sense to also issue some copies to festivals. Despite being a new-ish band, we had the experience to make a case to take our prospect seriously, and we like to think the material to back it up. Bloodstock came through for us and offered us the slot, now they have one less hand as we bit it off.
Can you put into 10 words or fewer how it felt when you realised you were heading to Bloodstock?
“We absolutely cannot wait”.
What sort of setlist can we expect?
We have a penchant for longer tracks, so we’ve cultivated a set from our debut record that’ll cover as many of our bases as we possibly can within the time frame. You’ll get the heavy, the melancholic, the melodies, the gravity and the epic all wrapped up in a neat 30-minute package. Make sure you’re there from the start!
Which other bands do you most hope you’re not squished up next to so you can see them play?
As we’re on the Saturday, this is a hard question because, help, that day is stacked! As long as we can avoid Urne, Tortured Demon, Abbath, Triptykon, The Grey, Tribe Of Ghosts and Gutalax, all will be good, eh?
…We’re doomed.
What are you working on at the moment?
Plenty, as it happens! We have a small tour booked with our friends in Ba’al booked for October where we’ll be performing three Northern and three Southern dates across two weekends, as well as a show in Birmingham shortly after Bloodstock supporting Necronautical and The Infernal Sea. So the calendar has some good dates in there to share our music to a wider audience.
We have also taken it upon ourselves to not become another band that releases one record and then bleeds it dry for eternity. So we can confirm that we have already penned another album which we will start recording soon now that the demos are complete.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
Can anything really top an entire portaloo being crowd-surfed for Gutalax? We’re in two minds about whether we want to see that happen again this year as that could probably go very, very wrong…
We haven’t done too many wild things, we play sad music. We’ll leave the shenanigans to Gutalax.
What drink do you throw back to get yourself fired up before going on stage?
We’re all obnoxiously sensible and will have a delicious water. We can be found being fed Lilley’s flavoured cider intravenously after the show though.
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Header photo by Konstantina Frasia Photography
