Bass and Drum Duo Royal Blood Release Eagerly Awaited Debut Album

Royal Blood Debut AlbumRoyal Blood, which has been generating buzz in the music press and online for almost a year, now has its first album to its credit.

The U.K duo creates a massive rock vibe, even though the only instrumentation comes from vocalist Mike Kerr’s bass and Ben Thatcher’s drums.

In our interview with Kerr, he said the group’s epic sound came “more [from] curiosity than anything,” wondering “if we can get away with doing it with two people. I was a little bit suspicious at first, really, of how much you could actually get out of it. But it turned out to be a great combination.”

The result is music that sounds far bigger than the sum of its parts.

Check out “Come On Over”:

Royal Blood is available on CD, vinyl and as a digital download (iTunes and Amazon MP3).

Royal Blood Track List:

  1. Out of the Black
  2. Come On Over
  3. Figure It Out
  4. You Can Be So Cruel
  5. Blood Hands
  6. Little Monster
  7. Loose Change
  8. Careless
  9. Ten Tonne Skeleton
  10. Better Strangers

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Leave a Reply to B-Rye Cancel reply

  1. B-Rye

    This band is stellar! The sound is heavy with Mike’s voice being an added layer that
    makes the cake tasty! I have been listening to them non stop since I first read the NT article so
    thank you for that No Treble!! I have basically been telling all my musician friends that now there is a band that can tell all guitar players to suck it!! :)

    Dig!

  2. So the bassist basically has a clean & a dirty channel which makes two unison bass parts ( thus giving the music a much heavier sound vice only having a drummer & bassist ) except for when he shuts of the clean bass for interludes where it sounds like there’s only a distorted guitar. It mos’ def’ does sound hella phat like a full band but after a while I would want to have either guitarist or a keyboardist as I would want to get away from “everything that I play on bass, the guitar players plays in unison” thang. You couldn’t really stretch out & it would limit what you could do musically. ( ex. counterpoint harmonies, etc. or just playing different melodic lines at the same time as the guitarist. ) It’ll be interesting to listen to whether they maintain the same musical formula for the entire album or not.

    • Brainback

      You’ve made a point; Willou. I guess you can’t stand solo folk guitar players, not enough “counterpoint harmonies, etc. or just playing different melodic lines at the same time as the guitarist”. Well, in fact you certainly don’t like duos neither. Too bad. Royal Blood i a really great combo. They have their own sound and they never are boring. And, guess what: the bassplayer and the guitarist often play in unison. ;-) So don’t expect them to sound like a quartet. They are only two musicians and they are really talented.

  3. I’ve been listening to this album non-stop since I got it. It’s definitely my favorite of the year. I never would have thought such a big sound could come out of a two piece outfit. Royal Blood has great things in their future, and I’ll be a fan for life.