As children bouncing between Sydney hotel and motel rooms at the whim of heroin-addicted parents, Marcus Bridge and his younger sister saw and felt depths of suffering no one should. They were depths from which their father would never return – and Bridge, now 27, is hellbent on turning his traumatic past into something positive.
“I’ve always wanted to tell this story,” he tells Guardian Australia. “I think the other guys in the band knew that.”
Bridge’s band, Northlane, has reached heights enjoyed by few Australian heavy acts, winning two Arias and selling out countless shows. Their experimental metalcore features sprawling soundscapes and dense breakdowns, alongside abstract, forward-thinking lyrics.
But for their fifth album Alien – Bridge’s third, after joining Northlane in 2014 – the band and its frontman are ready to tell a more personal story: of addiction, domestic violence and childhood abuse.
In his early teens, Bridge says, he was under the guardianship of his father and subjected to verbal and physical abuse by him. At the age of 19, he was living with his grandparents on Sydney’s northern beaches when he learned that his dad had died after an overdose. “I thought you were dreaming / eyes rolled to the stars,” he recalls in Bloodline, the first single from Alien – and the first song written for the album. Ties with his motherwere severed. Of his relationship with her, Bridge has said: “Even though [she’s] still here, I’ve already said goodbye.”
Bloodline’s video clip is set in a squalid room with a filthy mattress and ragged curtains – an eerily accurate depiction of the places Bridge stayed throughout his childhood. “I was raised in hell / I made it out by myself,” he sings. He found the shoot confronting.
“Going to that house and walking into that scene was like walking into a time capsule,” he says. “That’s something I didn’t anticipate – I didn’t think was going to happen like that.
“Actually being there, and seeing it, and being in that environment really took me back. I’ve only watched the video once or twice since it’s been out, because it’s a bit too much.”
When Bridge was just seven, a man broke down the door of a Kings Cross motel, stormed in and levelled a gun at his dad. “‘Please don’t kill me in the face of my son and daughter,’ I still hear them screaming,” he sings in the album track Freefall.
Sleepless, meanwhile, is a shattering depiction of their mother’s inability to prevent Bridge’s sister from succumbing to substance abuse herself. (His sister is now clean and the pair are close.) These are harrowing stories, even in short form, but Bridge says while society is slowly becoming more open to discussions of domestic violence, childhood domestic violence remains in the shadows.
“It’s often masked with metaphor, or presented in the least offensive way it can be,” he says. Authentic discussion, meanwhile, ought to “make you feel uncomfortable”. This is what he hopes the album will achieve.
“I think people will be able to feel that tension; the uncomfortable feeling through these songs. And that was exactly what I wanted to do. It’s small steps. It’s a matter of just doing anything you can to get that conversation going.”
It’s a difficult conversation to have in music, particularly within Bridge’s genre, where darkness, suffering and drug use are often celebrated.
“There’s been occasions where I feel like this idea of ‘heroin chic’ has been glamorised,” he says. “It bothers me a lot, because it’s not a joke.”
Should Northlane take home the heavy metal Aria award for a third time, they’d be the first band to do so. But Bridge says Alien, their first self-produced record, comes with a different metric for success: “Encouraging an acceptance of people who had a tough upbringing and not judging someone because of it,” he says. “[Showing that] you can make it out of that hell … You can defy those odds.”
“People will be able to relate to the lyrics in some way, from the mildest form to the most severe – or, even if they don’t relate to it, it’s still an insight into someone like me, or someone who’s had similar experiences.”
How his family feels about the record is an afterthought. After all, he says, he wrote the songs “to escape that”.
But he does make a concession. “If my mum was to hear some of these songs, I think it would be for the best … It is going to be quite hard and upsetting for her, but I think it’s something that might need to happen.”
• Alien by Northlane is out 2 August. The band will begin a world tour in July
