Cover Feature Honeyblood: Ready for the magic

“I came up with the chorus, and triumphantly thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve nailed it!’,” Stina Tweeddale remembers. “I took my headphones off and thought, ‘Holy crap, it’s SO creepy down here’. I’m pretty sure I saw a shape at the window, and then bolted upstairs shouting ‘CAT! Are you asleep?!’”

When Stina and drummer Cat Myers decamped to an old water mill turned cottage in the middle of Scotland at the end of their extensive tour for Honeyblood’s self-titled debut, they found inspiration for its follow-up from much stranger, darker places than they had anticipated.

“In the basement where we set up, there was this little room where the mill was, and there was a little window in the door, and we joked about a face being in the door all the time,” Cat remembers, equal parts joking and genuinely fearful. “We’d be jamming and it’d be really really loud, in the dead of night, and we’d keep looking at this door, paranoid that there would eventually be a face there.”

Vocalist and guitarist Stina, a self-confessed fan of overblown horror narratives, feared the worst. “You know how it goes,” she begins in a drawn out Stateside accent, “there’s a band on tour, driving to a weird gaaaas station…”

“The drummer’s always gonna get taken out first though,” Cat hits back. “Look at Spinal Tap!”