Oliver Sykes

“Arctic Monkeys are actually one of my favourite bands going, which is really weird cos I went to school and college with them.”

“I just love to sit and go, 'Let's just write a song and not worry about how it needs to be'.”

“Artists can be the most powerful people in the world because they can use their voice for good. Politicians should be the most powerful people in the world but they aren't going to do anything.”

“I think EDM and metal and rock have been together already for a long time. Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, the Prodigy - they all have influences from both.”

“But I can't stress enough how much talking helps. I was so reluctant at first; I didn't think it would help. But even if there's no answer to your troubles, they will seem so much smaller once they leave your head.”

“Everything I'd taught myself about screaming is basically a big no-no for singing. Your posture, your airflow - you're just pushing all the air out. When you start out, you're fast, heavy and loud but you're hiding behind it in a way. When you stop screaming, that's when it gets hard.”

“Rock's gone soft, it's gone miserable and boring, there's not really much exciting about it. So it's important that we cross over, because we feel like we belong more in a place where people just like music and it's not about how heavy it is.”

“I was trying to prove people wrong who said I wasn't a good guy, and I was trying to be the person that other people thought I was - people who loved our band thought I was a god.”

“You can compromise on anything else in your life but love. It's the one time where under no circumstances should you let yourself have second rate.”

“I found myself reading about this 16-year-old kid inventing a micro-organism to save the ocean. It made me realise that we can do anything if we put our minds to it. Even with all the damage and destruction, things can heal if we let them.”

“We tour the world and my carbon footprint is massive. I feel like it's my responsibility to do something - not just to offset it but to help make a difference.”

“With rock and metal, I think a lot of people connect with the lyrics because they feel like they don't fit in.”

“We can get rid of all the plastic bags and plastic straws in the world - and we need to - but nothing is going to get better until we can make the people at the top see that there are changes to be made.”

“Emotion is a full range of a spectrum, like colours. It's not just anger. How are you going to get that out with just a guitar and screaming? You need to explore everything else.”

“Some people lose a whole world to grief sometimes, while others just don't grieve. Sometimes we're just too scared to face our emotions.”

“I like how our records go from super poppy to heavy then electronic, and next I'd like to make a bunch of records where each of them has a distinct vibe to it.”

“The guitar shouldn't be a main instrument, it should be a texture. It shouldn't be important whether it's there or not. If it's important to you whether a guitar is there or not, you're weird.”

“When I was 17, death metal and extreme hardcore was the best music in the world to me. But as I got older, my palette changed and my thirst for melody and emotion just got bigger and bigger.”

“You have to ration your creativity over all your songs. You write a really cool pop song then you have to write a heavy song to balance out, then you need to think about singles.”

“To be honest, I don't really like arenas. It's not easy to make the sound good, or to perform in them.”