For Shields, their new album Death & Connection wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t spent years apart.

In 2018, the U.K. metalcore band quietly stepped away from the industry following the devastating death of their guitarist George Christie, who took his own life. This unbearable loss — and indefinite hiatus — came at the exact moment their debut album Life in Exile was supposed to introduce them to the world. However, it was impossible for Shields to continue. Over the next six years, Joe Edwards (vocals) and Sam Kubrick (vocals/guitar) took time apart professionally, expanding their respective artistic horizons and healing from their grief.

When they eventually found their way back to Shields, it was with renewed energy. There was excitement. A sense of feeling like “big kids” again that wouldn’t have been possible had they pushed through the pain in 2018. Death & Connection, released Jan. 30, marks a return driven purely by joy, passion and a commitment to making the music that they want to hear. Chock-full of “left turns” — like the heartbreaking “Miss Me” that Edwards wrote directly after George’s funeral — Death & Connection is proof that hope can be found on the other side of hell.

Ahead of the album’s release, PopHorror spoke with Edwards and Kubrick about finding their way back to Shields after loss, turning grief into art and writing the most honest music of their careers.

PopHorror: Death & Connection has been in the works for over a year. How are you feeling as people are beginning to hear these songs and connect with them?

Joe Edwards: It’s kind of relieving to see the reception of it. I think one concern we had of writing this new material was that there had been a lot of time since the old material. We wondered if there would be an expectation of a follow up in a similar kind of vein. Whereas with this release, we’ve decided to just basically write whatever we thought was good, the kind of record we wanted to hear. It’s very gratifying to see the really positive and exciting reaction, seeing people comment on stuff saying, “Can’t wait till the album comes out,” “Can’t wait to hear the rest of it.” And then to see people talking about the diversity of the songs, especially releasing a couple of what I would call “left turns” for us, like “Miss Me,” which came out recently — there was a really good reception to that. It’s also made it a very exciting time for us to know that people are actually now waiting for the album.

A Slow and Steady Return

PopHorror: Newer fans might not know, but Shields — understandably — went on a lengthy hiatus back in 2018 after your bandmate George took his own life. In 2024, when you started writing together again, what made that the right time to reconnect? Was there any hesitation?

Sam Kubrick: That’s a good question. What spurred us to get back together was, we got an offer from a promoter to play this festival in England called Burn It Down Festival. They asked us to do a one-off reunion show. That sparked more of a conversation, which led to me and Joe really getting back together. Not that we weren’t friends, but we focused our minds on what that would mean. If we were going to do a show, we could even do a song. We put out a new song before the festival called “Bury Me” and that was our official return as a band. But it was very much a case of, “We’ll play this show, release a song and if we get some more shows, that would be fun.” But there wasn’t much planning or forethought past that.

As we started teasing the fact that we were going to return, our label got back in contact with us who had signed us and [with whom] we released our first album Life in Exile. They were like, “Hey, if you guys are back, what are we doing?” This then led us to having conversations with previous management, who we were still close with. All of that snowballed into Joe and I centering our minds a bit more about what we wanted out of Shields. It kind of happened somewhat by accident and I’m glad it did because we then locked ourselves away for six or seven months, four months of that just being writing this album. The last few months was looking for people to join Shields because our past drummer Alex [Raynor] has a family and he’s off living a busy life. And Larry [Welling], who was our bassist, came back with us as we returned, but he also started a family. And so we entered into this period of writing an album, rebuilding our band, and finding people who wanted to join and commit to the craziness that is pursuing being in a band.

And George’s death connecting into all of that, really at that point when we decided to get back together, it had been a good five to six years since George had passed. There was enough distance that his death and the association of his death with the band, it no longer had the sort of grey cloud that we were experiencing just after his death. Because when George died, we were on the precipice of releasing our first album. We had dropped one track called “It’s Killing Me” and then George passed away. That was just before we had a big show with Escape the Fate in London, and it was a whole harrowing and dramatic time. So at that point, when we did decide to end, we all just needed the space from Shields. It was such a fucking horrendous event that we all just needed to go off and do our own thing, which we really did. It wasn’t so much about not being around each other — me and Joe have been friends since we were 11 and we’re now both 31. We still cared deeply about Alex and Larry, who we are still in contact with. But yeah, enough time had passed. And if we hadn’t had that offer to play Burn It Down, we might not have thought to do this. It’s funny how life works, you know?

PopHorror: Once you guys started writing this new album, was there a renewed energy? And would you say Shields has evolved during this return?

Joe Edwards: Yeah, no doubt. Coming back into this project, having had huge life experiences and discovered all sorts of different kinds of music, both Sam and I, it was like being big kids again. We were writing like we had done when we first started writing together. That kind of excitement, that level of energy that you have when you’re teenagers — you have ideas, you’re sharing, you’re in the thick of it and you’re driven — it felt like that youthful energy was back in a way that it hadn’t been in, like, 10 years. It was a long time since we’d written like this. Writing like this was something we could do because we were so compatible based on our level of friendship and the amount of time we knew each other for. It was an excitement that we came back with. Had we not had the space away from Shields, we couldn’t be excited about it anymore, which is something we’d totally lost by the point of breaking up. When we broke up, everything we did was more or less tainted and colored by the death of George.

Releasing the Pain Through Music

PopHorror: You dropped a handful of singles ahead of the album’s release, including “Miss Me,” which is really resonating with fans. Joe — I understand this was a song you kept private for a while with no intention of even bringing it to Shields. What changed?

Joe Edwards: The band getting back together again — that was the thing that changed. It was a song that I’d just written, one of the ones that you don’t choose to write, but you end up writing because you’re in pain and you feel strong about something, and it just falls out of you. Some of the best songs are the ones that happen in moments. And then the other best ones, it seems, are the ones that happen from a really honest place that you don’t intend on writing. This was both. It was a song that I wrote days after George’s funeral and I think I just needed to creatively sweat it out.

Then coming back to Shields again, Sam and I reviewed our huge back catalog of unused songs and demos. As we were being open genre-wise with the new material, this was one I pulled out of the bag and thought, “Well, this is not only something that we could Shields-ify a bit, but also it’s relevant to Shields.” It’s about George and it fit perfectly into the album. I wouldn’t put it anywhere else on the album. Putting the band back together allowed me to be ready to release it and it gave me the confidence to release other songs on the album as well. “This Is Not A Dream,” which is the opening title track of the album, is a four-minute spoken word sound painting that, again, I just got down and wrote one night, and stayed up to about 5 or 6 in the morning while we were writing the album. It’s a piece of therapy falling out of you. It needs to be written so you can move on.

And it was so personal that I had no intention of showing anyone and was even nervous to show Sam. I said, “I just want to show you this and I don’t know if I’m ready to show anyone, including you. But I want to show you this thing I was working on last night until 5 in the morning.” And Sam went, “This not only should be on the album, this should open the album.” Having the band back together again wasn’t just something that allowed me to put “Miss Me” and songs like that on an album. It was an album that allowed me to move on with my pain and process it in a way that I don’t think I could have done had it not been for writing music.

PopHorror: There’s a very cool shift in “Miss Me” where Sam comes in and it’s super heavy. He’s saying, “Miss me, but let me go,” as if it’s from George’s perspective — or that of any lost loved one. Was that part in it from the beginning or did it come later on?

Sam Kubrick: The whole song was very much Joe’s skeleton. I did not contribute lyrically, But yeah, they are very much from George’s perspective. One thing that me and Joe navigated with complete ease and barely even much of a conversation was, there are tracks on this album which were primarily written just by me and there were songs that were primarily just written by Joe, and then there were some songs where we both pitched in and gave feedback. There’s even a couple songs which were kind of like Frankensteins, where Joe had an idea for something he started and I was like, “Do you mind if I fiddle with this?” Then I’d add a minute of music, then he’d add a minute on.

But with “Miss Me,” that was very much Joe’s baby. I was of the opinion that how the song originally went is that it had the building, building crescendo with this impactful shift in energy. The original shift in energy, I enjoyed, but I felt like we could bring it a bit more into the realm of what Shields is. That’s not to say, “Oh, it needs to be heavy,” or, “It needs to have a breakdown.” I remember we very much worked on that section together. I sat with my guitar and we were dialing in on the drum parts, tones and stuff, and I wanted the heaviness of the guitars when it really kicked in properly to almost feel like a march, a bit like these big, heavy chugs. Almost like a representation of the six of us — me, Joe, the rest of Shields at the time, George’s brother Arthur and his father — literally marching forward. It had that pacing nature to it. It’s like the whole song is a build. Even when we get to that drop and I’m doing this big, dramatic singing, it’s all crescendo-ing and getting larger and larger until the finale of the song, where I’m just singing the words “miss me” over and over again. Then it dissolves back into how the song started with Joe playing his guitar.

Joe Edwards: The outro of the song, where it gets heavy, is actually lyrics that I didn’t write. It’s lyrics from an unnamed, unlicensed poem that people sometimes read at funerals, which is the poem that George’s father read at the funeral. I didn’t actually know where to find it, so I just remembered some of the lines. It had made a really big impact on me hearing it at the funeral. I mean, the funeral was a pretty hard experience from start to finish, but that bit stood out. It was a pretty significant and very special part. So to take the lyrics, some of the verses of this poem that George’s father had read out, was very fitting.

The song walks in a very linear timeline from the start of the funeral to the end of it. And it was at the end that he read the poem. So it walks us through the motions of seeing him pull up in the hearse, carrying the coffin, saying goodbye to him, sitting down on the pew in the church and then hearing George’s father’s poem. And then the space and the air that comes after it — the diminuendo of the song — the strings fade out, the backing vocals fade out and the guitar is just there on its own. It kind of felt like that. You’ve got the constant build and the verses, and the stages of the funeral. Then the most important part — the heavy part of the song — and then that elated feeling after the funeral is over. It’s almost like you’re floating after. And that’s what the song is. It’s a very real representation of the step-by-step events of the funeral.

PopHorror: What does it mean to have fans resonating so deeply with this song and the music video, especially given the fact that it’s not your typical heavy metalcore song?

Sam Kubrick: It’s lovely. It’s really nice, which sounds like a pathetically basic answer. But it’s just lovely when anyone enjoys a piece of art or music that you create. I think part of me regrets making this a single, part of me doesn’t. We wanted to highlight this song as a single because it felt like a fitting homage to George. I’m not trying to throw any shade at any other band that’s experienced something like we have, but I didn’t want to capitalize on George dying and I don’t think Shields has. None of our songs are invented storylines — they all come from personal experiences and stories, whether it’s some traumatic loss, a breakup, depression or whatever. Pick your poison.

But with every song we’ve released so far, we’ve done the whole typical thing that is current these days. We make content and do these little mini music videos, 10- to 15-second clips with some sort of witty or silly caption just because that’s what you’ve got to do to get people to pay attention. I said to our label — and we had zero resistance back from them — that there’s probably not going to be much content around this one. We have a very dark sense of humor in this band, like, everyone’s a target. With our single “Parasite,” the one prior to this, Joe looks particularly flash — he’s got slick back hair, a sick jacket on and a sexy, red hollow body guitar. The caption of Joe playing a guitar solo says, “I’m going to tell my kids this was Elvis,” or something like that. We were never going to do that with “Miss Me.” Not at all. We’re not going to be that fucking band. It would be ridiculous, insensitive, hurtful and just dumb.

But we knew we had to film a video. It was thrown together last minute, but not without care. I was like, “This is not just filming any music video. Let’s think of a sick idea, a cool location and crazy shots, then we’ll put out this dope video because of the content of the song.” I felt like at times, I was dragging myself through the process of it and I’m quite happy the song is out now. And of course, the fact that there’s the type of response that has just been warm, positive and appreciative is great.

Collaboration and “Left Turns” 

PopHorror: One thing I love about this album, you go from something as emotional as “Miss Me” to crazy intensity on songs like “Abuser.” Can you speak to the range of this album?

Sam Kubrick: Ultimately, when we started writing this album, there were two things we wanted to do differently from Life in Exile — that was primarily, from an instrumental perspective, written by me pretty much in its totality. It’s very representative of where I was as a musician at the time. I was a little metalhead kid who listened to Born of Osiris, Structures, Volumes, Meshuggah and all those kinds of bands. Whereas this album, neither Joe or I wanted that. We wanted to write something that was completely selfish. It wasn’t about pleasing anyone other than ourselves, trying to write something truly authentic, something that could stand the test of time, that you could listen to in 10 years time and it’s still objectively good, not just trendy.

The other thing we wanted to do differently was to have Joe be far more involved in the writing process. The album really was, in the truest sense, the most collaborative creative process I’ve ever been a part of. The result that we ended up with would not exist if you take myself away or Joe from that process. The songs like “Miss Me,” “Red & Green,” “Parasites,” “This Is Not A Dream,” “Death & Connection” — any song that Joe was involved in or created from scratch was completely his. I would chip in here and there and say, “Have you thought about trying this? Would you mind if I had a fiddle with that?” I would be met with an emphatic “yes” or a very respectful “I’m not ready yet” or “no, this is the vision.” And that was absolutely returned in the same way.

For example, one of our singles “Wolfskin” was a song that I pretty much wrote from top to bottom. When it got to me recording my final clean vocals, the more melodic parts of my vocal performance, I showed it to Joe, who was sat in his chair across from me where the vocal booth was. He listened to it and very simply said, “You can do better than that” — very simply and swiftly. I remember feeling briefly a slight pang of resentment. “What do you fucking mean? It sounds great!” But then I went back in and altered my melody a bit. I changed up the pattern of it and I’m glad Joe hit me with that — the result was far better than what I originally did.

Joe Edwards: We didn’t write an album with the intention of becoming anything other than something that we felt was genuine to us. And with that came the decision to explore the ideas that we liked as opposed to the ideas we thought other people would like. I think a big part of us writing stuff that had such huge juxtapositions was, it was a conscious effort to put some left turns in there. It was an exciting prospect knowing that we could write something that would shock people who knew Shields and who had an idea of what we might write from eight years ago.

But we’d both explored so many other influences and genres in music, and just done different creative things outside of music as well. That led us to play with different ways of writing and different instruments. There’s a whole load of acoustic instrumentation on the album that I was able to bring in from my perspective, having a bit more of a stake in writing now. I had a whole folk and acoustic phase and I was brought up on bluegrass. My parents are really into that. My father even made a documentary about bluegrass in the Appalachians. I had a whole bluegrass, Western thing going for a lot of my life and I was able to bring that in with some strings, mandolins, acoustic guitars.

Sam had explored some really interesting kinds of electronic music that I’m now, over the last year and a half, getting into. But this was a world of music that Sam had explored that I had not, so Sam brought huge amounts of those kinds of elements in. And the way that we approached our production skills was different. It was a really interesting time just to see what we could come up with and see the kinds of things that we’re both into that fed into the album.

PopHorror: Will there be a Shields bluegrass song at any point?!

Joe Edwards: You never know! I mean, we’re one banjo away from it with the mandolins and the violins on “Miss Me.”

Sam Kubrick: I really want to do a very unapologetically Meshuggah-inspired song, so if there’s some way we could do bluegrass Meshuggah, that would be mental.

Joe Edwards: Blue-shuggah.

A Refined Live Experience

PopHorror: Shields played a headline show in London last year that seemed to be a really big deal for you guys. Can people expect anything more like this in the near future?

Sam Kubrick: This year, we are going to be trying to focus on supports as much as possible, getting out on the road and touring, basically. I think none of us want to overplay our hand quite yet. I don’t want to put Shields out to necessarily do a huge string of headline shows because I’d rather it was a moment that people wanted and were ready for rather than just doing it for the sake of playing a show. But The Black Heart London headline show we did at the end of last year, it was a success, which we were all a little bit nervous about. It was the first headline show, especially in our hometown, that we’d done in a long time. And the fact that people turned up and packed it out, it was such a privilege. There were new people that had not heard us before, people who were there for our new material, which is exactly what any band would want — for people to care about the new stuff. Whenever we do another headline show, especially in London, we want to make sure that every time, it’s going to be a bigger venue. It’s a conversation we’re already having and will be something for people to keep an eye out for.

PopHorror: You mentioned earlier that the songwriting process for this album felt like a renewed sense of energy. Did you feel that on stage too?

Joe Edwards: Yeah, it’s a different kind of energy. It felt fresh, but it wasn’t fresh and youthful in the same way that writing the album was. For me, it was more fresh and matured. On stage before, we had a very different aesthetic. Myself predominantly — beard, long hair. It felt like with this new direction, we grew up a little bit, but also refined what it is we want to look like, the impression we want to make. For me, a big part of what we do now is showing the audience that you’ve put an effort in. You look nice and, as a result, you feel nice. That delivers a certain confidence. A big inspiration for me both lyrically and stage presence-wise these days is Nick Cave, who is super smooth and very well-dressed. Every decision he makes on stage is very conscious. It’s very deliberate and not held back in a single way.

Performing these days feels like a very conscious effort to be confident in every single movement you do. That also comes with the fact that we’ve rehearsed this set to death. We now know each other pretty well. We’ve been rehearsing for months and months. And once you’re confident like that in the songs, you have space for confidence on stage and space for becoming a bit more of a character, a bit more of a show. That’s how being on stage feels in comparison to getting back together, which was a small pebble rolling down the hill. Hitting the stage at Black Heart was like a good sized boulder just steaming down at full pelt.

Horror Enthusiasts

PopHorror: Since we’re PopHorror, I must ask…what’s your favorite scary movie?

Sam Kubrick: Oh, love me some horror. I’ve been watching a lot of horror recently because my girlfriend’s a big horror movie enthusiast, too. We recently got through all of The Conjuring saga, which has been fun. I also thought the newest Conjuring film Last Rites was brilliant. But favorite horror films? My current favorite franchise is the Smile films. I am giddy with excitement for the fact that Smile 3 is in production right now. I cannot wait to see where that goes. It’s one of the only horror films where I’ve seen Smile 2 five times and I’ve seen Smile four times. I’ve shown everyone and said, “You need to watch this.” I’ve watched it with them and they’re like, “Fucking hell, that was so crazy.” My honorable mention would be The Babadook. That’s a classic for me. Both of the It films are really good. I prefer the first one over the second. The Welcome to Derry show [our interview with Miles Ekhardt] was actually really freaking cool as well, I just finished that.

There’s a few more on my list that I want to rewatch. One on my rewatch list as an adult, it’s not as scary, but one that chilled me when I saw it when I was maybe a bit too young for it — even thought it’s only rated at 12 — is a Nicole Kidman ghost story called The Others. Spoiler alert because I want to talk about it, but essentially she is this woman in this old house and she’s experiencing things move, the doors, all those classic ghost story tropes. And the big reveal is that she’s not being haunted. She doesn’t know that she’s dead and all these apparitions you’re seeing are actually real people, and she’s been the one that’s been haunting them without realizing it. It’s such a good twist, with all the chilling moments and the tension builds. There’s no traditional jump scares, so to speak. But there are moments where you’re like, “Oh, my God, that was horrible.”

Joe Edwards: I have a vague memory of you showing me that when we were, like, 13 years old.

Sam Kubrick: It’s so fucking brilliant.

Joe Edwards: Also a horror movie fan. Not as an in-depth one as Sam, but I love horror as one of my favorite genres to kind of switch on and watch. Honorable mentions are Hereditary and The Thing.

PopHorror: Did he make you watch Smile?

Joe Edwards: We watched it in the cinema and I freaked the shit out of Sam. We were in the cinema with no one in it, just us two, and we got the two back seats. There was an exit on the right side and an exit and entrance on the left side. We only thought there was one door out of the cinema and I only realized this after I went to the toilet and came back in. So there’s Sam alone watching Smile and I came in through the other side and crept up on him in the dark.

Sam Kubrick: It was just a big horrible… *smiles creepily*

PopHorror: Oh, hell no!

Sam Kubrick: What was that horror film we watched together, it has the horrible incest monster in it under the house?

Joe Edwards: The Barbarian! That was an excellent horror.

Sam Kubrick: It was excellent, agreed. But what made it good was the realization of what that monster was at the end and then the sudden sympathy that you’re forced to feel for it. Up until that point, I was like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” It was kind of scary, but then when you realize what it is, then suddenly it’s like dominos. I was like, “Oh, this was a sick film. Now I get it,” which I thought was really cool, actually. I wasn’t fully sold at first. I was watching it because it was still enjoyable, but then by the end, I was like, “Oh, Christ.”

Thanks for speaking with us, Joe and Sam! Death & Connection is now available. Keep up with Shields at shields.band/.