An interview with Winter Hotel

An interview with Winter Hotel

An interview with Winter Hotel

SHINING

What inspired the name of the band? What are your influences?

The inspiration for the band’s name came from both The Shining by Stephen King and from the poem November Hotel, by Phil Bowen. These two influential sources for us are married together in our name in the same way that much of our music marries together the wide-ranging extremes of our own musical influences.Our musical influences mainly stem from the darkest and lightest extremes of metal from slamming brutal death metal to post hardcore. The landscapes of North Wales where we first met and began greatly influenced the tone, imagery and feeling of the band especially during the earlier years of our music making.

How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?

Warren (vocals) and Liam (guitar) usually work together on a 50/50 split of lyric writing. From there, having gained a sense of the kind of emotional tone the lyrics seem to convey, Liam will write some riffs and bring those to a rehearsal and as a unit we’ll flesh out the song until it becomes a complete package. Each member writes their own parts but we often throw ideas for each other’s parts out there too. In terms of themes our main focus is to portray our own life experiences, feelings, ideas and influences in a way that is honest and relatable to the audience. Most of the time we are rather quiet and shy, but our music and performing provides a platform on which we can truly and quite loudly express ourselves as individuals, musicians and as a band.

EMOTIONAL

How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?

Warren (vocals) and Liam (guitar) usually work together on a 50/50 split of lyric writing. From there, having gained a sense of the kind of emotional tone the lyrics seem to convey, Liam will write some riffs and bring those to a rehearsal and as a unit we’ll flesh out the song until it becomes a complete package. Each member writes their own parts but we often throw ideas for each other’s parts out there too. In terms of themes our main focus is to portray our own life experiences, feelings, ideas and influences in a way that is honest and relatable to the audience. Most of the time we are rather quiet and shy, but our music and performing provides a platform on which we can truly and quite loudly express ourselves as individuals, musicians and as a band.

REASONS

Why do you write the sort of music that you do?

There’s a multitude of reasons behind this. One of the things that we feel makes our specific take on alternative metal stand out is that the kind of music that we play, seems to be a genre niche that hasn’t been done on a large scale. We’re yet to find another band that combines the vast extremes of all the metal, and to a larger extent alternative genres have to offer into one package. It’s always been an enjoyable challenge to take the different influences that we each bring to the table and combine them into something that sounds truly unique to us.As a band, we strive to express ourselves as much as possible in a way that rings true to us and our listeners. When we write songs and go on to perform them we want to feel the energy as authentically as we can, and be able to provide those in the crowd with an experience that hopefully resonates with them throughout the night. We feel that writing songs together creates a very unique sense of synergy between us both as musicians and as friends and we hope that the listener will feel just as much a part of Winter Hotel from listening to the songs as we do making them.

How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?

It’s important to us that we play our songs in an order that allows us to maintain an interesting flow throughout our set, balancing speed, aggression, melody and brutality. We always come in heavy when we begin allowing our audience to experience a dynamic journey with many twists and turns; this enables us to showcase the breadth and depth of the lightest and darkest aspects of our sound. When we choose which songs to perform we want to be confident that we can transition between them seamlessly so as to avoid silences in between songs and to keep the audience engaged and in the moment along with us. We always ensure that we close the show with something anthemic, hard-hitting and most importantly, memorable.

BALANCE

How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?

It’s important to us that we play our songs in an order that allows us to maintain an interesting flow throughout our set, balancing speed, aggression, melody and brutality. We always come in heavy when we begin allowing our audience to experience a dynamic journey with many twists and turns; this enables us to showcase the breadth and depth of the lightest and darkest aspects of our sound. When we choose which songs to perform we want to be confident that we can transition between them seamlessly so as to avoid silences in between songs and to keep the audience engaged and in the moment along with us. We always ensure that we close the show with something anthemic, hard-hitting and most importantly, memorable.

VACANCIES

What plans do you have for the future?

We’ve already released 3 of the Chapters from our ongoing 5-song narrative, Vacancies. We’ll be releasing the final 2 in the coming months. On the back of that, we’re working on some more exciting plans including, but not exclusive to, writing for our next release. Aside from that, we’re still waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic and hoping we can be back on stage as soon as is safe and possible.