Sumo Cyco Drop New Single ‘Bad News’

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Ahead of the band’s album release on Friday, Canadian alt-metal/heavy rockers, Sumo Cyco, have dropped the a new single ‘Bad News’.

“I’m sure many people can relate to feeling like everyday is ‘Bad News’ over and over again.” Frontwoman Skye “Sever” Sweetnam says. “There was a point in 2020 when I was so glued to the news and current events it felt like my personal identity was fading away into an abyss and replaced with a scrolling, media consuming robot. It made me miserable, but I felt like I had a responsibility to know what was going on. It took me a while to peel myself away from the constant barrage of negativity and find a balance.”

She continues “The music video was really fun to film. I’m so lucky to have band members who are willing to get pretty weird with me. Once the make-up and prosthetics were on, the guys and I came to life as our Cyco Terrornaut family. I included some obnoxious color combos that almost make you question your sanity when you watch the video.”

Check out ‘Bad News’ here:

Sumo Cyco’s new album ‘Initiation’ is set to release this Friday (7th May) via Napalm Records, and is set to invite a mass of new followers into their warped, dystopian-like world of “Cyco City”.

Initiation tracklisting:

1) Love You Wrong
2) Bystander
3) Vertigo
4) Bad News
5) No Surrender
6) M.I.A.
7) Cyclone
8) Run with the Giants
9) Overdrive
10) Power & Control
11) This Dance Is Doomed
12) Awakened (not available on standard digital version)

As with its predecessors ‘Lost In Cyco City’ (2014), ‘Opus Mar’ (2017) and the band’s countless singles, ‘Initiation’ is based in the imaginative conceptual location of “Cyco City”. But unlike most concept albums, the lyrical content is inspired by the band’s real-time environment – featuring timely, personal themes of love, sacrifice, anxiety, empowerment and more that all listeners can relate to.

Talking about the album, Skye says “The album’s title, Initiation, stems from wanting to invite the audience to be “initiated” into our world. There are usually two congruent themes to each of our albums – one is real-world inspiration, and the other is “Cyco City”, a comic book-esque alternate universe where all our music videos take place. With Initiation, we introduce four gangs or clubs. Our music videos for Initiation all include a theme of these clubs – whether it’s gang vs. gang, a forbidden love between opposing sides, or the idea of having to choose where you belong.”

“Outside of the story, the lyrics relate to the polarization of the world we live in now. We all have a longing to belong, but what makes one feel accepted or ostracized from a group? To be INITIATED, would you be willing to try to understand another point of view? I have always written lyrics about internal struggle, the war within oneself. Throughout the album, we bounce back and forth between struggle and overcoming. It reflects the times, and there are moments that seem a bit dark.”

In The Rock Fix’ recent interview with the band, Skye told us how it’s been working on the music video throughtout the pandemic, saying “Matt and I have always been very self-sufficient DIY focused people that take a lot of the work on ourselves. When it comes to recording Matt’s an excellent Producer and engineering, he records in our home studio here most of the time, we both really enjoy making movies and films and we have this attic type of space that we make a lot of our videos in. So in a way, we were kind of prepared in a weird way for this thing because we do so much ourselves, whereas a lot of bands I think are left in situations where there used to hiring a big crew or going to a studio and that has been a huge roadblock to get through.”

Matt added “I think even indie bands still struggle if they just haven’t even bothered trying to learn about camera gear or editing programmes. Even just having to hire out that one person or two people that would help on a small indie video is almost impossible during this lockdown… For us, it’s been ok. We’re the kind of people to usually only have two or three extra people. We’ve got the band and then maybe one or two other people besides extras that we put in the videos. Now, there are no extras. We just can’t get them. As for some of the crew, the same thing. We just can’t… We’ve produced and directed and edited and done all the effects for three music videos in three months. It’s like we put them out in three months, and it’s been almost right on the point where we’re working on it. Dropping the video to Napalm [Records] like two or three days before the release, because we’re pretty gun-ho and Skye has a lot of huge ideas and she wants to make them happen and you can’t rush that.”

Check out our full interview with the band here.