With her new album A Storm Is Coming set for release on 31 October 2025 and an album release show at London’s legendary The 100 Club tomorrow, MetalTalk’s Paul Monkhouse finds Rebecca Downes “probably more excited about this album than any other one,” as she battles “one of the many colds that’s going around.”
A storm is certainly on its way as this new album is ballsy and even more forceful than anything Rebecca Downes has released previously. For her and co-songwriter Steve Birkett, A Storm Is Coming “is a combination of the album More Sinner Than Saint and probably the last album, A Space Between Us. So it’s kind of probably what we’ve always been wanting to culminate in. I hope that other people like it as much as we do. The initial response seems to be positive, so that’s always nice.”
Not that there has been a specific plan with the albums. “It would be great if there was,” Rebecca Downes says. “It would be great if it’s like, ‘Right, OK, now we’re gonna actually do this and we’re gonna actually do that.’
“Steve and I both write all the time. We write separately, we write together, and it’s kind of an ongoing thing. It doesn’t matter if we’ve got an album coming up or we haven’t. We’re still writing songs.
“We pull that collection together, and it just seems to have been an organic thing where we’ve ended up, which is that the songs are a good representation of both sides of us. The more atmospheric, dark, bluesy-tinged side, but also the rock side as well.”
A Storm Is Coming represents something more forceful than previous albums, as far as the sound. As I suggested earlier, ballsy.
“That’s kind of what we were aiming for,” Rebecca Downes says. “There are some songs about love on there. But a lot of the material behind that, and the title track A Storm Is Coming, is about the times that we find ourselves in. I’m not gonna get political or anything like that on anyone, but these are very uncertain times, it seems, for this country, other countries, on a number of different levels.
“We needed it to really resonate sonically as well. Steve and I always love our harmonies. Steve Birkett is the harmony king. That’s it. You can know him forever by that name. The layering of harmonies here to try and build up that forcefulness in the background. I think sometimes you don’t necessarily hear everything that’s going on in the background. But it provides that crescendo of emotion, hopefully.”
As an album, A Storm Is Coming is very filmic. The lyrics are really strong, but the music is equally as forceful, and the two blend well together. It makes that power come through. When Rebecca Downes has something serious or from the heart to say, she backs it up by putting real emotion into it.
There are a couple of tracks recorded with Gavin Monaghan from Magic Garden Studios, who Rebecca first recorded with when she was “about 17 or 18 in one of my first bands.”
For the rest of the album, Rebecca Downes wanted to work with someone who understood “where the demos were coming from, ‘cos all our songs have quite intricate demos behind them to show where we think it’s gonna go.”
Recording and production were completed by Steve and his son, Steve Birkett Jr. “He’s a producer and also a university lecturer,” Rebecca says. “Once he’d got his head around what we wanted, then it would be easier working with him because it was just more symbiotic. I have to say from a really honest perspective, we could go to him, ‘hey Steve, can we just do this tonight? Have you got time tonight?’ That’s so much easier for us.
“But also him and his dad are very linked with the sonic delivery that we were looking for. They’re on the same wavelength. He’s done an incredible job, I have to say, and the initial feedback is good. They really love the production of the album. It has definitely been a labour of love, and it certainly hasn’t been something that’s been mixed and mastered in like a week.
“It has been a case of listening to it, going back to it. Do we need to create more space there for the vocal, so that line resonates? We’ve had the luxury of doing that because working with someone like Steve Junior has been a real big part of the production and how it’s turned out.”
Releasing music on their own label helps. Rebecca Downes has that control and artistic freedom, so the end product is exactly how she wants it. That must be so freeing.
“It is now,” she says. “It’s not always been the case, I have to say. Everyone we’ve worked with has been amazing over the years for different reasons. I think it had something to do with me and my ability to push my ideas forward in a mixing sense at the time. I’ve always been quite insecure, and even though I know I’m a front person of a band, I’m not the most confident of people.
“So I think maybe some things initially, not with this album but with previous albums, I let go when I shouldn’t have let them go, and I should have pushed more. So I think it’s a learning curve. I’m not blaming anyone that was to do with those albums. I think it’s as much to do with me and my confidence, which has developed over the series of these albums.
“But you are absolutely right, it is so freeing. You don’t want a producer to say everything you say is great. I’ll just do that. You wanna work with somebody that goes ‘hm, yeah, we can try that. But how about..?’
“Someone who has that relationship with you. But, luckily, now for me, I can actually go well, actually, no, I really do think it should be this. Steve’s the same as well, obviously. So it was a really good creative process, whereas sometimes in the past it’s been a bit of a struggle. So that that’s been really nice.”
Listening to A Storm Is Coming, the title track is dark and atmospheric with a foreboding sense to it. Falling Into You is big and powerful again, with real emotion in it. Hold The Reins has a stunning solo from Steve, and Rebecca’s vocals, particularly on that track, make it one of the early highlights of the album.
“I don’t think Steve gets enough recognition as a guitarist,” Rebecca says. “He would probably primarily describe himself as a songwriter, but he is a multi-instrumentalist. He’s performed most of what’s on this album. But yeah, his solo on that is outrageous, and what I love about his solos are it takes you on a journey. It’s not a solo for solo’s sake.”
While Rebecca Downes says that it is up to the listener to decide what a song is about, she hopes that by the second verse of the title track, we will pick up that a storm is coming. “People are fed up,” she says. “People have had enough. We are the storm that is coming. I don’t know whether you’ve watched The Handmaid’s Tale? I read those books years ago and sat through the pain that is The Handmaid’s Tale.
“June Osborne, the main character, does a really great I’m gonna kill you face. That was the image I had in my head as I was writing that one. Her face of ‘I’ve had enough, I’m coming for you now,’ was the vibe of that song.”
The album is really beautifully bookended because Hit The Ground Running is another epic song, one you are almost breathless after. When it finishes, it’s the whole thing, of course, I’m going to play the album from the start again.
“That makes me smile a lot,” Rebecca says. “There is a bit more of the Bruce Springsteen-y, Melissa Etheridge influence on some of the songs. They’ve always been there on other albums, like with songs like Take Me Higher and Believe. But I think those songs, especially Never Gonna Take You Back, capture how much we love that style of music as well. It is different. I don’t know how to describe it really, ‘cos it’s rock. Those kinds of songs are rock, but they have got a real ‘driven by the vocal and the guitars’ and kind of more of an attacking vibe in a way.”
Blues music has told stories throughout the years. Pop music may be great, may make you feel good and is disposable, but blues and folk are two genres that really reflect the times. How does Rebecca Downes see the blues scene in the UK?
“That’s an interesting question,” she says. “I think that there are a lot of blues bands on the scene. I have always struggled a little bit playing very straight blues, because I don’t feel I have the right to do that in a way. I mean, that’s just a personal thing because obviously, the blues come from a very dark period in time in America. So for me, it’s always been about taking the essence of what that is, and a lot of the bluesy style techniques in the vocal, and the way that the emotion in the blues gets put across.
“But trying not to do direct copies because I just don’t think I’m worthy of that. I think the scene is split between bands that maybe do more traditional blues, and then there’s like us, blues rockers. I’m wearing a King King t-shirt right now cos I saw them the other night.
“We’ve got blues elements, and we’ve got rock elements. We’re never trying to be prescriptively blues. I think it has its place. But the scene is quite a crowded one as well, I think. What I’ve been discussing in my podcast is that there are a lot of bands, but the demand is not always there. There are lots of reasons why that could be, and I know an awful lot of bands are experiencing that at the moment. An awful lot of bigger bands that are on the blues rock scene.
“So, it’s an interesting question of where the scene ends up and where it goes. I remember asking some of my students at uni if I said the blues to them, what would they immediately think of? They just went, ‘Oh like somebody’s died. It’s really slow.’ So I think sometimes even just the word blues can put people off.
“I don’t agree with that. It’s an interesting scene. I think the blues in some description will always be alive. I think it’s great to try to take it to other places. I just don’t feel that I’m really in a position to sing about cotton fields. I mean that really seriously, and what these people went through, and those are the essence of those songs. I don’t feel I can sing those, and I don’t feel I should. So that’s why we’re a little melting pot.”
I say I cannot think of a genre wider than blues because you have the Robert Johnson early stuff, just him and an acoustic guitar, but bands like Zeppelin and even Sabbath had some blues elements as well. Someone like Rebecca Downes uses music in the way that she feels best pushes what suits her. The new album is really, really rocky, but it has a soul to it.
“I’ve tried very hard as well with my vocal,” Rebecca says. “I’ve changed microphones. Apart from one song, they’re all done with an Electro-Voice RE 20, which is a dynamic, not a condenser microphone. I felt I could get closer and give more nuance and more subtlety to the vocal. It’s like a condenser is not quite right for the tone of my voice. I’m a nightmare with vocals, I have to say.
“I like to record a vocal and then listen to it on its own without the track playing with no reverb, no nothing. So I can really hear everything that’s going on and how it’s putting the lyrics across. That does sound quite clinical. If you layer that with mixed stuff and reverb and compression, you’re gonna say, well, why isn’t that vocal really hitting that at that point?
“Well, it’s not really hitting it because I didn’t put the vocal placement in the right place. So I’m a bit of a nightmare, going yeah that that’s OK, that’s decent, and then the next day going, no, I need to do that again.”
A labour of love, A Storm Is Coming is set for release on 31 October 2025. The album is brilliant, and it will be great to experience this live at the album release show at The 100 Club on 28 October.
Rebecca Downes says there are a myriad of other dates on the horizon, with a new album planned for next year, also.
For order info for A Storm Is Coming and more on the live dates, keep an eye on RebeccaDownes.com/tour.
