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At this point in Jeff Moreira’s life, it’s all about balance.

Though Poison The Well have made appearances here and there over the last decade, celebrating anniversaries of some of the albums that make up their illustrious and influential discography, committing to making music once again was a whole different kettle of fish. Because in the past, he was able to just steamroll through. He was always pretty okay with pushing himself to his emotional limit on stage every night, because it’s all that he had ever known.

Now, after 17 years away from it, his life is very different. 2026 has actually kicked off with one of the biggest differences: the birth of his son, Weyland. Adding father to his long list of credentials is a surefire way to make you reconfigure your priorities.

And though the hunger to commit to Poison The Well has never truly faded in his time away from it, it’s in this moment now that he understands the role that it plays in his life probably better than ever before.

“It was easy to sit around and be like, ‘Man, Poison The Well, it would be great to be back in the band and do what I used to do’ after so many years had passed where I haven’t had to deal with any of the things that come with that,” he comments. “Committing to being a vocalist, confronting my emotions, being as honest and genuine as I can be, whilst being judged because of what I am creating. All that stuff was in the far distance.

“So, when I got that back, I was really scared of it. It took a lot of gathering myself, because I had been thinking about this moment for so long, but I didn’t actually have a plan for how I would go through with it. But since being away from the band, I feel that I have a larger understanding of who I am and where I am. The focus was then just on making sure we actually knew what Poison The Well was, viewed through the lens of someone who has matured and is ready to confront the experiences he has had.”

That is very much where the roots of ‘Peace In Place’ lie. A record that speaks to everything that Poison The Well has been, is and will become, delivered with a precision, power and passion that only comes from fully immersing yourself not just in your art but in your place within the world. The result is as sensational as it is savage, a fork in the road not just for the band but for Jeff as the man that he is now compared to the boy that he was.

THE LYRICS

When the only way you have ever known how to express your emotions is through screaming into a microphone, what are you supposed to do when that outlet is taken away? For Jeff, it became less about finding somewhere else aside from Poison The Well to search through the corridors of his heart and mind and more about simply closing that door altogether.

“The minute I didn’t have that anymore, I just bottled all that stuff up and walked around like, ‘Yeah, I’m all good,” he laughs nervously. “Acting like none of these things actually bother me, but you’re actually lying to yourself. Then you feel like something’s wrong, and you’re asking yourself, ‘Why am I affected by all of these tiny things?’ Then, when I had the opportunity to open all of that up again, I just went, ‘Oh, I didn’t know I still had a fucking problem with this.‘”

It’s a big change when you go from jumping in a van with your best friends and seeing what the world has to offer you to, well, not doing that. You quickly realise that the set of emotions you were feeling was actually pretty limited, thanks in part to the similarity of the day-to-day that comes with travelling, but only actually being in a city, sometimes even just the back of a venue, for a few hours.

So, in pondering if he had space in his life for this all over again, there was also a realisation of the expanded spectrum of emotions that have now been added to Jeff’s repertoire. The opportunity to process 17 years of life, with more experiences to pull from than were available to him first around the band, was one he had to take.

The result feels very much like an unburdening of half a life’s worth of baggage, too. Musing on everything from the changing state of relationships in his life, especially the ones he thought would last a lifetime, to allowing yourself the room to not just grow but, sometimes, not be enough, you can feel just how needed such an exorcism was.

That is most apparent in the first and last lines that are uttered on the record. The opening crescendo of ‘Wax Mask’ sees Jeff softly crooning the words, “I’ll change my colours and show myself out,’ whilst curtain closer ‘Plague Them The Most’ sees him defiantly bellowing that he will “never again grind my teeth in the name of kindness, never again to bite my tongue in the name of mercy.” This shift in mentality, in approach to the exorcising of feeling, serves as a signal for what this process has added back into Jeff’s life. A reminder that it is okay to be angry, upset, pissed off and broken. That he doesn’t need to put a brave face on things just because the world he has built around himself feels like such a stance is necessary.

To expel emotion is a good thing, and it becomes even more important as the years fly by more quickly.

“The first couple of years of not having Poison The Well as that outlet, it was a trickle-down effect of all of these things that I didn’t realise I was taking for granted. Like, it started with realising that when I was in the band, I was at least regularly exercising, you know? But as time went on, I realised that in certain situations, I tended to be pretty emotional in how I reacted, too. It was this realisation that the real world was very different from the one I had been living in for so long.

“So, in returning to this, I knew that I just had to be honest. I had to make all of this as genuine as possible. I always felt like the more honest I could be, the better our music would sound. We’re still here to give a piece of ourselves. We don’t feel there is a point in doing this any other way. Times may have changed, but we are still viewing this the same as we did when we were trying to sell $10 t-shirts. I don’t ever want there to be a barrier to what is going on in my life.”

THE COLLABORATORS

Though the band haven’t actively been a part of the changing face of heavy music over the last decade and a bit, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t kept their finger on the pulse in terms of what has been going on within it. And that is one of the main reasons that when it came to choosing who they wanted to man production duties, they knew they wanted to go for the very best of the best. And that is Will Putney, responsible for making so many of your favourite bands sound absolutely fucking gigantic.

And though they had been away for much of the time that Will had been cutting his teeth and establishing his reputation, there was nobody better to bring into the fold. Though aside from making the band sound more vicious, volatile and varied than they had ever been before, he also added another vital component to the mix that, in retrospect, if it was absent, would have had a real detrimental effect.

Focus.

“I wanted to make sure that we had a vision for what we were doing, and I don’t think we would have had that if it were just the three of us,” Jeff explains. “Will was huge within that. He understood us as people. When you’re making a record like this, which is pretty experimental for us, you are traversing these halls full of other people’s weird shit. The things we were going through being back in this. So if he couldn’t quickly communicate with someone who could easily get angry if they misunderstood what he wanted to do, no progress would be made.

“Will really started to come up when we were gone. So, we missed a large window of time to meet him before now. By the time I had met him, I had heard so much about him that it was kind of intimidating, but he was not at all who I had imagined him to be. He’s like the fucking coolest dude on the planet. He’s super talented. He cares. He understood our band and listened to what we were trying to accomplish, and helped us get there.”

THE SOUND

An element of all of this that Jeff really wants to hammer home is that when the wheels of Poison The Well returning properly were set in motion, there was a lot more fear than pure excitement. To admit that is a lot, but it’s also human nature, right? When you have been away from something for so long, it’s natural to wonder if you still have it in you to deliver like you could in the past.

For Jeff, that obviously came in the form of his lyrics, but from a musical standpoint, it was the same thought process for guitarist Ryan Primack, responsible for penning all of the band’s most iconic riffs.

“I think some of us, too, we’re like, ‘Does anybody care enough about this? ” Jeff explains. “We want to do this, and that’s massively important, but we also want people to listen to our record, right? Like, if the whole point of creating this stuff is to share it with other people and to have a connection if they relate to what you’re trying to say. I feel like that was the same for Ryan when it came to writing riffs, where he’s like, ‘What if this doesn’t sound like what it’s supposed to sound like?”

Though this is where spending 2025 celebrating the 25th anniversary of ‘The Opposite Of December… A Season Of Separation’ really helped. Not just dusting off the cobwebs on what it means to be in the mindset of Poison The Well, but also seeing such a rapturous reaction to those songs all these years later. Viewing such chaos every night helped cement the fact that the band’s sound still fits what heavy music is in 2026, and that whatever they end up making would only be a positive addition to it.

It’s because of that that ‘Peace In Place’ feels as familiar as it does fresh. The razor-sharp brutality at the core of ‘Thoroughbreds’ and the pummelling intent of ‘Primal Bloom’ hark back to their chaotic roots, whilst the haunting atmospheres that bolster the misty ‘Bad Bodies’ and beautifully soulful ‘Everything Hurts’ embody their more melodic tendencies, every part of the band’s journey is represented in screaming colour here. Whatever trepidation may have entered their bloodstream at the beginning of the process is all but washed away.

“It makes me proud to know that we’ve accomplished the ability to write the kind of songs that don’t die within their time,” Jeff adds. “People still care about this this much. And not only that, but there are a lot of new people here. And it reinforced that, for us to pick this up where we left off, we needed to make sure we didn’t lose the foundation of what Poison The Well. Making sure we were fully genuine with what we’re attempting to do.”

THE TITLE

Though on the surface this feels like a record seething in its approach, the reality is that peace plays a huge role in it. There is positivity in this, and to be at a point where that is possible after so many years away is something to cling to. But the truth is that the only way you can truly reach a state of clarity is by allowing the chaos to unfold first.

That’s what ‘Peace In Place’ felt like, the perfect three words to sum up this period of the band’s journey. That, despite the emotional unravelling, the worry and doubt over whether cutting off a piece of themselves once more would be worth it and opening the sort of doors that would probably have stayed closed if it wasn’t for the band, the one thing that has stayed cemented throughout is the sense that this is actually a good thing. That, on a base level, this is healthy.

“That only really sunk in when I was actually holding the record,” Jeff admits. “My wife was really excited and saying, ‘This is awesome’, and I had to catch myself and say, ‘Yeah, it really is, isn’t it?’ Because I remember that she went through all of the times with me where it almost didn’t happen. All the times I said to her, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ But when you’re in the middle of it, you forget about all of the little things. These small walls that you have to figure out how to get over. Waking up in the morning, going, ‘Alright, I’m not dead. I’m a little battered and bruised, but I can keep on pushing and pushing and pushing.’ To be on the other side and realise that I am confident in who I am is because I get to look back on the hardships and know that I made it through. That I can do this.”

THE FUTURE

The start of 2026 will always hold a special place in Jeff’s heart from here on out, simply because it has served as a pivotal moment in both his professional and personal life. But in reflecting on what it means to become not just a father but also a recording artist once again, this period has made him realise just how lucky he is to live both lives simultaneously.

The fact that a decision made back in the late 90s to try out for a metalcore band could have such a lasting and positive effect on who he is and who he has become. Where would he be if he hadn’t made that decision? What sort of life would he have lived? What would his mark in this world end up being? With Poison The Well still being such a pivotal part of who he is and who he wants to be, it’s clear that taking that risk has paid off in abundance.

“I think about that moment, when Ryan went, ‘Do you want to try singing for Poison The Well,’ all the time, because there are only two ways that that could have gone. And I think about how many fucking times in my life I said no when I should have said yes, or vice versa. And I’m just so happy that this is where I ended up, and how many of the decisions I have made have been good ones. That decision still fuels the decisions I make to this day.

“Now I’m not so scared of saying yes to something that might put me in an uncomfortable situation, because I’ve been in uncomfortable situations and made it through. Not having the band made me realise that it is the reason I am the way I am, why I got here, and why that is different for me than it is for other people.

“It feels good to be able to understand that.”