We caught up with two-time Bloodstock Welsh black metallers Ofnus to discuss their steady rise up the Catton Hall stages, as well as their machine-like output (courtesy of guitarist Alyn Hunter), and the lack of synonyms in Welsh.
Welcome back to Bloodstock 2025 – you played here in 2023 on the New Blood Stage and now you have the honour of opening the Sophie Stage. So how does it feel?
Rich: “Absolutely incredible, honestly. I’ve been coming here every year since 2007. To play the festival was a bit of a bucket list item for me, and now I’ve done it twice!”
Will: “So it was a fantastic set today as well. A really, really nice, really good stage – it’s a good step up from the New Blood Stage. You’ve got the whole really good sound up there, fantastic crowd. It’s lovely to see lots of people out that early – just felt really good, really.”
James: “We’ll always be forever thankful for being given the opportunity to come here, especially to open the stage. I think that’s quite an honourable slot, really, opening up. But yeah, getting up there is the same as what we had with the New Blood Stage back when we did it. The Sophie Stage, the crew on there are just awesome – everything is just so effortless.”
Excellent! I wanted to get your reaction when you were informed, “Hey, we’d like you guys to come back and we’d like you to open the Sophie Stage”. What were your thoughts?
Will: “Just joy! A bit of a dream come true. You know as much as that sounds cliché, but it was a fantastic opportunity and we thought, “This is fantastic and we just got to make the most of this now”. We have really got to use this as a bridging piece and make sure that we you know keep that momentum going but also just the honour of playing what is such a fantastic stage at a great festival.”
You’ve touched on the fact that it’s an opportunity – I wanted to ask you about what you think that it says about the growth of the band and how you’ve gone from strength to strength. You started playing here in 2023 on the New Blood Stage; now you’re doing it at the Sophie Stage. What do you think that says about you all and Ofnus as a band?
James: “I think, to take nothing away from ourselves, it’s sort of an ode to the hard work we have put in. We haven’t rested on our laurels. We released the first album, and we were pretty quick behind that with album two. I mean, as we released album one, album two was almost finished.
And same now, again, with album two – album two is finished and album three is well, well in the works. It’s just not stopping, using the momentum of such a prestigious festival as a springboard and using that to lift yourself a little bit further, and use that enthusiasm you get.”
Most bands would go and record album one or whatever, tour it, and then start preparing for the next one. How come you guys have done it slightly differently and have one in the works?
Rich: “Alyn is an unstoppable force” is the answer to that. We literally released album two, and on the release day, we got a message from Alyn saying, “By the way, I’m halfway through album three”. He’s a writing machine, and obviously, we all contribute our own parts where we change things and all the rest of it, but he’s definitely an asset to have. Especially when it comes to just big, grandiose parts, and all the orchestral side of things, he’s just fantastic at it. He’s orchestrally trained. So, it’s very, very, very good to be in a band with him.”
I suppose it also helps enrich the sound that you already have.
Will: “For sure, for sure. And then we add our own parts in and contribute a bit to some of the structures. But the main underlying building blocks and all the parts he puts together, he just works constantly. He’ll sit in his house and just be coming up with demos and riffs all the time – It’s just constant, going through them. And then we just sort of select the good bits and Chuck them all together and get a good end-product.”
Briefly, going back to talking about live shows, how do you think your two shows that you’ve done here compare with one another? What has the experience of the last two years brought to you that you have been able to use?
Will: “Experiencing the New Blood, for myself and Alyn, we’ve done it previously. So, we kind of had an expectation of what’s coming too. But you get up there and you get to see how everything’s run, how sharp it is, and you look at what this is. “You know, what? This is amazing, this is worth putting in the work for”. So, you use that. I think that is what really inspires you to think that you want to keep pushing on. It took us from beyond that, into – obviously – the rest of the shows that we’ve done in between 2023 and now. It’s building on all of the experience you get from that stage and taking it to the next stage. We were absolutely fortunate enough to be asked to play on that. Hopefully, it’s shown in our performance that we have done that, that we have taken that, we’ve built on it, and we’ve learned from any mistakes that we may have made in the past. Because at the end of the day, that’s what happens – no band is faultless. Something’s gonna happen! Learn from it, grow from it.
Going from the New Blood Stage to the Sophie Stage, it was a bit of a step up in terms of, obviously, size, but also performance. We’ve had more time to really hone our craft, to get that experience on the road, play those good other shows around the country. Really craft a worthy live presence, then bring it to this stage and give it our all, really.”
I wanted to touch upon the band as a whole next. So Ofnus means “scared” in Welsh. What was it that inspired you to settle on that as the name for the band?
Will: “So I think the original story was something that they wanted to use the word “ofn”, which is a similar word for “fearful”, “afraid” in Welsh, but the trouble was that just that short of a thing as well was maybe not as catchy. But the other element was that in various Scandinavian languages it means “oven” – you cook your food in! And we thought, “no, we have to have something just a little more”. So, we kind of settled on “Ofnus” being “afraid”, “trepidation”, “scared” all these sorts of synonyms. Welsh doesn’t have many synonyms, unfortunately! Once we found that we thought, “yeah, it’s short, it’s sharp, it’s to the point. That’s what our music’s about”.
James: “When we were thinking of a name for the band, we were also picturing how a logo might look. We wanted it to be one word; we didn’t want a double-word name. And then we came up with that, and we took it to – obviously I’m going to forget the name of the artist – but the artist that did Winterfylleth and stuff like that came back to us with this logo. We were just like, “That is amazing. That is exactly what we were after”.
You briefly mentioned it a second ago that “ofnus” goes with the sound of the band. So, beyond that, what influence does that word and the connotation behind it have on the music? You said in a previous interview that it’s not the sole theme, but how does it feature?
Will: “The main lyrical themes that the band uses are mostly about a lot of depression and sorrow through the music, and that’s sort of a cathartic way of getting that out. Feeling those emotions and bringing them in a healthy way. So that kind of rolls in nicely with the name. And then our second album, ‘Valediction’, is largely a concept album around grief and death. That kind of all ties in with the whole general feeling of being afraid. That’s kind of what all the lyrical themes have been about thus far.”
James: “Especially with ‘Valediction’. The grief cycle is something that I think probably almost everybody has dealt with at some point in their life. And I think it could sometimes be a little bit real, but I think maybe sometimes that might help people deal with it in certain ways. For us at least, sometimes.”
‘Valediction’ came out in February and, as we have discussed, album three is already in the works. Have you had time to reflect on the success of it?
Will: “I think so. Yeah, I think so. You know, we’ve had a lot of interesting, positive reviews. We’ve had quite a lot of international acclaim, as well. Playing it recently live, we played it in full now, and we’re gonna be playing it in full again in a couple of weeks’ time. So I think that’s given us a lot of time to really listen to the material back and reflect on it and really get to grips with it. I mean, I’ve listened to it so many times as I mixed it, so I just listen back so many times. I have had plenty of time to really get into that material and get that reflection, that sort of introspection on it.”
So, in the writing of it, what inspired it? Apart from it being a concept album and being to do with the grief cycle, how did that influence the music, and how do you try to translate that live?
Will: “I think it kind of forms part of the performance live, you know, it’s part of the energy I try to bring. As I said that sort of cathartic element to it, that we’re really trying to push live so that you can understand the grief a little more. In some of the expressions and the movements that I go with, that kind of thing and well, the vocal line is quite sort of pained and anguished throughout the whole thing. It’s very shrieky black metal parts, but then there are also lower parts as well. That variance gives that sort of transition of feelings. But yeah, I mean, it’s influenced the music a lot, especially in the themes. You know, some of the riffs are all sort of minor riffs, a bit sadder – that sort of thing. It brings that kind of atmosphere to it a bit more. There’s a bit of doomy things as well that really emphasise that kind of low feeling that you get.”
https://www.facebook.com/Ofnus
Interview By Lee Carter
Photos By Rebecca Bush – https://www.instagram.com/beckybphoto/