Forked Tongues: Sanguis Mortem
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Sweat and chaos collide as Sanguis Mortem discover just how far Brotherhood can take them in their debut video.
A Record in Motion
For a band formed in 2023, Sanguis Mortem have travelled a considerable distance in a remarkably short time. What began as a teenage thrash-metal outfit has developed into something considerably harder to pin down, pulling together old-school thrash, hardcore, groove and heavier modern influences without seeming particularly concerned about where one genre ends, and another begins – in the best possible way!
Their debut album, Merry Doomsday, is a substantial introduction: thirteen tracks that don’t necessarily sound as though they were written with one fixed musical identity in mind. Instead, the album documents a band in motion, with each song capturing a different point in their journey and the influences, tastes and emotions that shaped them along the way.
Brotherhood
One of the album’s more immediate tracks, Brotherhood, is an obvious choice for their first official music video, lending itself naturally to the physicality of a live environment.
Taking a deliberately DIY approach, rather than attempting to create an elaborate narrative or highly polished performance piece, Sanguis Mortem recreate the feeling of an intimate basement show: cramped, sweaty and chaotic.
We chat with guitarist Nickolas Mieszkowski on how things feel now compared with what the band imagined at its birth:
“When we were starting, we never imagined that music would take us in the direction and trajectory it has taken us. In 2023, had you asked us then, we would have been ecstatic at the thought of having written just one original song! So, to have thirteen of them, released as a debut album, paired with a music video, is a surreal feeling, and nothing we could have ever anticipated.”
That sense of disbelief is useful context for watching Brotherhood. This isn’t a band trying to manufacture an image of an underground scene from the outside; they’re discovering what happens when their music leaves the rehearsal room and enters a world they already know and love. They move through it with the ease of seasoned gig-goers, as comfortable in the crowd as they are on stage. The performance itself is confident and accomplished, but it’s the audience interaction that stands out. When the band are immersed within the crowd they look most at ease; the honesty of simply loving to be part of a show, in any capacity, is unmistakable.
The professional appearance of the stage performance gives way to a blindingly obvious happiness and sheer fulfilment in simply being there with friends and fans. It feels less like performance and more like: “fuck, we’re actually doing this?”
“The overarching theme/idea was to convey that vibe of an intimate basement show. From the beginning, we wanted the video to hold a very D.I.Y. atmosphere. And, with the help of our director, Mat Green, I’d say we pretty much nailed the concept we had in our heads. It was sweaty — it was chaotic.
“A few times, when the camera turned towards the crowd, and we could see the events unfold through the screen of the camera, we could definitely feel that sort of excitement, where we could tell and imagine that this was going to come out exactly as we wanted it.”
Sometimes the line between band and audience is blurred entirely; the video’s ownership unknown. The camera often feels like it’s being swallowed by the crowd, the entanglement so happily exhausting that you almost forget you’re watching from the comfort of your own home. From the crowd barging its way down narrow streets to Nick being carried aloft before Tadhg Pinheiro concludes the video, looking like he’s wearing everyone’s sweat, it’s a genuinely raucous affair.
Behind the Camera
For all its apparent spontaneity, Brotherhood was also a learning experience for a young band making their first music video. Sanguis Mortem found themselves learning the language of music video production alongside director and cameraman Mat Green, rather than arriving on set with every detail mapped out.
“The experience has definitely helped us learn and better understand the process of how a video is made. We went into it, without necessarily having a set expectation of how it was going to work, but the more we progressed through the shoot, the more we understood the thought process of our director/cameraman, and the more we also understood the technical process of how music videos are generally filmed.”
That learning process doesn’t overwhelm the finished product. Brotherhood doesn’t feel overly conscious of its own construction. The camera is rarely allowed to sit comfortably for long, searching for another face, fist, fall or burst of movement, with the crowd constantly threatening to overwhelm the frame.
At times it feels less like a polished music video and more like somebody happened to have a camera in the room when Brotherhood kicked off – and in this case, that’s a complete compliment.
Capturing the Chaos
The band seem to have been caught slightly off guard by what happened after releasing it. Nick admits that the reaction has been considerably more enthusiastic than anticipated:
“We’ve been beyond pleasantly surprised at the fresh wave of overwhelmingly positive feedback. As the song itself, ‘Brotherhood’ isn’t one of our newest tracks, we didn’t expect quite the wave of engagement we have received, which we are overjoyed by, and we thank everyone for the enormous support!”
It’s easy to understand the response. The visuals don’t ask you to admire Sanguis Mortem from a distance; they put you in the room with them. The heat of the basement presses in, sweat and shouted chants hang in the air, bodies collide and exhaustion becomes part of the experience.
The band’s performance is confident and accomplished, but Brotherhood isn’t selling an image of what an underground show should look like. It captures what it feels like to be caught up in one.
A Snapshot in Time
There’s also an interesting parallel between the video and Merry Doomsday itself.
While the album brings together material written across the band’s lifespan, Brotherhood captures Sanguis Mortem at a particular point in that journey; a band beginning to realise that the thing they’ve been building together can exist beyond the rehearsal room.
“We always say, specifically regarding this first record, that the album itself is a documentation of our journey throughout the past three years of our lives. For us, the unique thing about this album is that you can really distinguish between and feel what songs were written at different parts of our lives, whether that be regarding music taste, and what music we were listening to at the time, or to do with emotion, and how certain songs convey a feeling that was relevant to any of the members at that point.”
That makes Merry Doomsday an intriguing debut. Rather than presenting a band who arrived fully formed, there’s a sense of evolution running through it. Brotherhood exposes another side of that evolution: perhaps not the most technically polished, but certainly one of the most immediate – the uncensored visualisation, of four musicians discovering what happens when their music is shared with a room full of people.
Learning the Hard Way
And, inevitably, the first video came with a few lessons that couldn’t have been learned in rehearsal. Looking back, Nick knows exactly what advice he’d give their younger selves:
“A big hurdle for us during the recording was the difficulty of syncing to the original track. If we could tell our younger selves one thing about the video recording, it definitely would have been to practice the song as a group to the original track beforehand, just to gain the experience of syncing up to the recording and making it a lot easier on the day.”
It’s a wonderfully grounded note to end on. For all the energy and apparent abandon of Brotherhood, there’s a lot of learning beneath the surface. The band might look completely at home in that basement, but they’re still figuring out how to translate what happens naturally between four musicians and a crowd into something that works through a camera lens.
Perhaps that’s ultimately what makes the video so enjoyable. Brotherhood doesn’t feel like the finished product of a band that has everything figured out. It feels like a snapshot of a band discovering that they’re actually doing this — and enjoying the hell out of it.
Stream Marry Doomsday here.
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