Welcome to a feature where we sit down and talk to bands and artists about their latest albums to find out all about it. Today we speak to the metal band Ventures about the album Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.

Hello nice to meet you, tell us about yourself!

Hi, we’re Ventures from rainy Manchester, we’re a metal core band built up of the members Ollie May on vocals, Richard Taylor on guitar, Jordan Etches on bass and Jon Burrows on drums.

Tell us about the new album

Our latest release has been being released over the course of 2024 with the final single off the record “Portrait” being released this August and will close off our “Up Down” release for 2024 

Favourite track in new album and why?

Would have to give it to “Melt With Me” as we all hated this song when it was first written etc but over the years of us working on it and shaping it into Ventures we all now quite enjoy the song and keep getting asked why it’s not in our setlist.

Tell us a bit about the recording process, was it fun to do?

We’ve always done in-house recording except for our first EP back in 2017/18

We enjoy doing the recording process ourselves as a few of the lads are busy often so it helps to be able to do studio time on our time.

What inspired the album name?

Album names are never something we put much time into as we’ve never seen it as a selling point.

When was the last time you saw an album, wasn’t going to buy it. Then saw the album name and thought… go on then?

Tell us the idea behind the album cover?

Our friend over at Laurence Crow Illustration hooked us up with this amazing work, we sent him a message with the idea we had and this is what he came back with.

Laurence has done a few of our designs and even a few we still haven’t released. 

What one of your songs on the new album do you think will the most difficult to rehearse for a live audience?

Luckily we haven’t written any demanding songs, all very entry-level playing haha.

Why should people listen to the album?

Why not check out the fresh faces in the metal core world. We love what we do and hope it shows in our music and live shows, all we can ask is for a chance to make your head nod/ If we do please think about putting us in your playlists