Thrown into the spotlight and with a rabid fanbase amassing at a lightning quick pace, PRESIDENT dives into their incredible rise and their most personal and revealing music yet ahead of the highly anticipated debut album, ‘Blood Of Your Empire’.

You can read the full cover story interview inside Issue 320 of Rock Sound, available to order now at SHOP.ROCKSOUND.TV

‘Gather round children, sing Hallelujah’.

So declares PRESIDENT as he welcomes in the chorus of recent standout single ‘dark heaven’, shouting the instruction with a knowing, venomous irony, acting as a mosh call for the disenchanted and the disillusioned. Religion and, more specifically, its historical manipulation and corruption has been a key theme for PRESIDENT since the project’s debut single ‘In The Name Of The Father’ dropped out of nowhere in the summer of 2025. But on the eagerly awaited debut LP ‘Blood Of Your Empire’, the artist is more forthcoming and revealing about this subject than ever before.

“Man has abused religion so much over the years”, he states. “You would be hard pushed, across the history of humanity, to find something that’s caused more killing than battles over religion. ‘Blood Of Your Empire’ isn’t actually a slight on God. It’s a slight on man. It’s a slight on the abuse of power.

“We use it for greed”, he continues. “Man has sought power and greed in the name of religion that actually has nothing to do with its teachings. I find that very uncomfortable because where does human corruption stop and the truth start? I found myself wavering in between that a lot, and thematically, that’s why I wanted to call the album ‘Blood Of Your Empire’. It’s about being on my own spiritual search and how tormenting that is. You can enjoy your life so much but when the ultimate question is unanswered, it’s really tough. The way that I view my life with and without faith are very different. If there is nothing after we die, I compute the world around me in a very different way than when religion is there and there’s an afterlife. Living in that constant cycle is a struggle.”

He admits to often being “self-destructive” in dealing with these thoughts and ideas in the past, finding himself in a dark place before this project began, wallowing in self-loathing as he grappled with this bigger internal battle of ideas and belief systems. Having this musical outlet to finally express those difficult feelings has therefore come as a relief, his masked persona acting as a vehicle through which to publicly express what he could barely bring himself to discuss in private. 

“What’s amazing is that I see people saying that it helped them deal with the same struggles. That is so special. To think that anyone could be going through what I continue to go through, if this helps them in any way then that’s fucking amazing.”

Indeed, the ever expanding community around PRESIDENT appear to not just simply enjoy the mix of metalcore, pop hooks and electronic soundscapes on offer, alongside the striking visual sensibility, but are connecting on a deeper level to the primary message expressed. But knowing that this weight of fan expectation was now present added a new and unexpected pressure to the record’s creation.

“The first song I wrote was ‘Angel Wings’”, he says. “It was a really important song to write because it was the first time I was writing with purpose. When I wrote the first EP, I didn’t really know what it was going to be. The whole idea of the project hadn’t even formed at that point so it was a no pressure situation. I was really nervous going back into the writing process again. There was such a freedom with the EP because it was written in complete secrecy. After I wrote ‘Angel Wings’, one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written, I thought, okay, we’re in a good place.”

Self-produced and written largely on the road while opening up huge arena shows around the world for Architects and Bad Omens, the mobile recording rig became a moving sanctuary, allowing him to capture inspiration the moment it arrived without the restraint of finding a traditional studio. Always keen to experiment and blend genres, he married together his love of heavier music with inspiration pulled from more danceable names like Four Tet, Jon Hopkins, Bicep or Hot Chip.

Album-closer ‘White Devil’ in particular pushes these influences to the limit, arguably to the point where you could call it a straight-up House song, built, initially, on a jazzy piano riff and a Balearic island beat accompanied by a more joyful lyric celebrating a rediscovery of what makes life worth living – ‘now I hear the truth, I keep on dancing, just shaking off the rage’. There’s a newfound confidence to PRESIDENT, and its creator, that can only come from that freedom of expression afforded to them by the masked persona and the feeling of anonymity, allowing an LP to move seamlessly between breakdowns and four-to-the-floor dance breaks without fear or external baggage.

“The EP was a teaser”, he explains, “you got a taster on songs like ‘Rage’. The dance music part of PRESIDENT is just as important as the heavy side, and it’s something that I will go further with. Over the last 5-10 years, I have fallen head over heels for that whole genre. It’s lovely to be able to marry that with my roots in heavy music. There’s no boundary to what you can do.”

While the album as a whole mixes together this wide array of artistic influences, the track ‘Mercy’ then focuses solely on the sound of the bands that shaped this particular performer, from Biffy Clyro to Deftones, while also lending its lyrics to the album’s title.

“I wanted a song on there that was more straight down the line and it’s so fun to play live. We’re starting to get circle pits in that song. It’s not even that heavy, but it’s the crowd just running in circles. That was the second song I wrote and I knew when I wrote that lyric that it was what the album was going to be called straight away. The song was originally called ‘Blood Of Your Empire’ but I knew it was going to come out before the album’s out so I switched it. I didn’t want to give away the album name yet. But that’s a real cornerstone of the record, thematically.”

With that theme in mind, does the writer view ‘Blood Of Your Empire’ as a concept record of sorts?

“I guess I wouldn’t use the word concept because it’s more like a diary. When you say ‘concept’, I think of telling a story of something that is separate from you. Thematically, it’s very much centred on this one thing. That’s just the world that I’m in, the life that I’m living. That’s what’s in my head a lot of the time. I can use PRESIDENT now to express these things. It feels nice to be able to write music with no agenda other than wanting to love it and represent my headspace.”

“It’s holding a mirror up to yourself”, he adds, “and that’s uncomfortable. That’s really uncomfortable, and I’ve never done that in this way before. But it can be very cathartic. So that’s why it feels like a diary. It’s just spilling out onto the record. It’s a time capsule of my head at that time.”

Read the full interview in Issue 320 of Rock Sound, available to order here.