"I read this thing once about Robert Pattinson. He was being harassed by a fan and invited them to dinner, and then he just bored the hell out of them – talked their ears off about the most boring, uninteresting stuff until they left,” smirks Bad Omens vocalist Noah Sebastian, as he recalls a story about the A-list Hollywood actor.
“He out-punished the fan. I thought that was really amusing. If I ever had that experience where a fan wouldn’t leave me alone, and we went to dinner, once they got to know me, they’d be like, ‘Ah, OK, I’m gonna move on. Back to K–pop, back to Taylor!’”
Two years ago, Noah Sebastian was just another frontman in another mid-tier metalcore band. Well-liked, but, honestly, probably not high-profile enough to inspire the kind of mania that might make him empathise with the bloke who played Batman and that Twilight vampire.
But a lot has happened to Bad Omens since. Released in February 2022, their third album, The Death Of Peace Of Mind, was an absolute smash. Its beautifully sweet pop melodies, grooving riffs and Noah’s soul-searching, confessional vocals connected with people so quickly, and on such a massive scale, that it separated the band from the modern metalcore pack and catapulted them into the conversation about metal’s next superstars alongside the likes of Spiritbox and Sleep Token.
For context, Bad Omens’ song Just Pretend currently has an eye-watering 146 million streams on Spotify, which is about one million more than Metallica’s Battery, the opening song on Master Of Puppets – arguably the most beloved album by the biggest metal band of all time.
Meanwhile, 2024 promises to be the Richmond, Virginia quartet’s biggest year yet, featuring a European run as main support to Bring Me The Horizon, followed by huge festival appearances at the likes of Download, Hellfest, Rock am Ring, Welcome To Rockville and Nova Rock. It’s a lot.
“There is a certain pressure and a certain iron-is-hot kind of analogy to it that is always in the back of my mind,” says Noah of their busy schedule. “Because there’s times I feel like I need to take a break, but the disciplined, hard-worker, perfectionist person in me just doesn’t allow myself to do it, ever.”
This sort of success comes with a greater level of scrutiny, and a contingent of fans who expect access to the personal lives of those behind the music. Bad Omens have also cultivated their visual aesthetic to the point of intrigue, morphing from bog-standard blokes dressed in black to being part of a gorgeously futuristic, vibrantly colourful, almost cinematic world that appears in videos, photoshoots and on the artwork for their recent releases.
For someone like Noah, a young man who is quiet, sensitive, not entirely comfortable with the spotlight and claims he attempts to “live the closest to a Zen Buddhist lifestyle I can” via meditation and a healthy diet, the increased attention is proving unwelcome.
“I was trying to use my socials, and I just had to constantly mute them,” he tells us. “I got really tired of seeing my own face, or seeing a stranger’s opinion of me every day. I don’t think that’s healthy. I’ve seen these accounts that collect baby pictures of me they find on a distant relative’s Facebook and make an entire shrine out of them. It’s very one-sided, you know. If there was a female artist that I admired and I had a collection of pictures of her as an underage child, people would probably fucking try to put me in jail. It’d be weird, it’d be extremely inappropriate. It’s really funny how selective people are with their ethics.”
This is not to say Noah isn’t pleased that Bad Omens are doing well, it’s just that he’s painfully aware stardom can’t help him find true happiness. As he explains it: “I feel like the only wall left between me and whatever kind of peace I’m looking for in life is just myself, because in every other department it has been so great.”
Noah says things are great, but even when we raise the fact that Bad Omens are one of the few young bands with their logo on festival posters – something usually reserved for rock and metal’s true heavyweight artists – he struggles to muster excitement.
“When you get to the point of the festival where they start using your logo and not just text like every other opening act, that feels like a big feat,” he begins – before adding, “I don’t know… I don’t really understand festivals entirely. Like, I couldn’t imagine going to one all weekend.”
But… that’s obviously good news for your band, isn’t it? “I’m definitely observing that we’re really climbing up the roster. Maybe we’re a couple of years away from headlining main stages and stuff… yeah.”
He nods, rather awkwardly. “I don’t really know what to make of that information, because, not to sound overly humble, but I don’t really see myself as a rock star. I don’t even know if I believe in the concept of a rock star anymore. I definitely wish everyone inthe world knew me in real life and just knew how boring I was, and just knew how fucking lame I was, so that they could, you know, relax a little bit. But, that’s art, man. Art’s powerful.”
When Noah calls himself boring, you do believe he actually thinks that, which is ridiculous. Shy, wracked by self-doubt, overwhelmed by the situation he finds himself in, sure. But boring? That’s not accurate in the slightest. These days, it’s incredibly rare to find an interviewee who’s as honest and engaged as Noah. But we can agree on his final point: art is powerful, and Bad Omens have made art that’s given a lot of people power.
It’s the delicious irony of the Bad Omens story; the reason people feel so connected to Noah is because he articulates the anxiety and troubles in his mind through hismusic with such clarity that people who are suffering similarly feel they have found a release, a confidant, someone who makes them feel less alone in the world. There’s nothing boring about that.
“I think a big part of it is a lot of these people might have difficult or even unhappy lives outside of it,” Noah nods. “So when you find something to gravitate towards and attach to, and other people find that thing, you kind of mob together and turn it into more of a culture than an actual fanbase.”
That’s something Noah himself can empathise with, describing his upbringing as “turbulent” before he discovered music. “I floated around a lot as a kid, as a teenager,” he explains. “Growing up with my mom, I bounced between her house and my grandparents’ house a lot. And at some point, when I was maybe 14, 15, I started living with friends and staying at friends’ houses that also had kind of dysfunctional households. I never really had a lot of stability in that regard.”
Noah was staying at a neighbour’s house when he heard Disturbed’s song Down With The Sickness and thought it was “the most twisted thing I’ve ever heard”. After that, he went down a “metal-adjacent rabbit hole”, before embracing as much music as he could – which explains the eclectic nature of Bad Omens. It was during this time that Noah was inspired to start making music himself. He also recognises that his itinerant upbringing has created a desire for stability in his adult life.
“I’ve noticed how much I value that and compensate for it now that I have the means,” he smiles. “I have a house with two close friends in California and I just love it. I take care of it so much. I keep it clean, I keep it peaceful. I just like to make it comfortable and a place to be able to feel like you can relax, because I’m sure, somewhere subconsciously, I yearned for that as a kid. Because there was not a lot of that growing up.”
This is where fame could cause another potential problem for Noah. As Bad Omens get bigger, their live commitments will get more intense – it must be hard to feel that stability when you’re in a different city every night. “Yeah, that adds to it for sure when it comes to the excessive touring,” he nods. “But, you know, we’re getting better at making touring feel more comfortable and as much like home as we can. Now that we’re getting bigger, we can afford more luxuries.”
When we ask Noah what his favourite pastimes are while touring, they’re as far from the classic rock’n’roll tropes as you could imagine. “I bring my personal trainer out with me so I can continue my Muay Thai and MMA training,” he says matter-of-factly.
“I like reading a little bit, too. I’ll go through phases with that. The last book I read was [late 90s Seattle grunge legend] Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards And Weep. What’s interesting is that I wasn’t even aware of Screaming Trees before I read it, and then I did a deep-dive into his music and loved it. It almost made my first journey into the music more special, because I knew so much about him and his life on such a deeper level than I would just checking out a band for the first time.”
So, you felt closer to Mark’s music when you knew more about him as a person, which is a bit like… “I know,” shrugs Noah, immediately picking up on where we were going. “It’s so ironic when you think about it.”
Noah has begun writing new Bad Omens music. Although it’s early days, he hopes the follow-up to The Death Of Peace Of Mind will be “at least announced by the fall”, and he knows what he wants the material to represent. “One thing I come back to a lot is that I want our band to age with dignity,” he explains.
“I like to imagine it would reflect our age and where we are as people in real life. Because there’s two to three years between album cycles, and our music evolves, but we also evolve as individuals.”
Don’t be surprised if that means a step away from their metallic sound. “It’s hard to imagine myself in my late 30s even playing heavy, core-based music,” he shrugs. “You know, especially with how eclectic my musical interest is. I would like to think I’ll always be fond of the darker aspects of art and life and emotion. I think they’ll always be the paints that I use on my canvas when it comes to making art. But I think my main goal is to always do that tastefully, and in a way that feels true to me as a person and not forced.”
You know that will worry a lot of people when you say that, don’t you? “Yeah, whenever you say shit like that in interviews – ‘We want to reinvent ourselves’ or ‘We want to totally change things’ – everyone just assumes that means you’re going to make a bubblegum pop record,” Noah says, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t know why people think that. I think it’s a metalhead thing, because metalheads like to put a blanket over anything that isn’t metal. They just think anything that’s remotely catchy or polished is pop, and anything that’s electronic is EDM. As if there aren’t 20, 30 subgenres to those the same way metal has subgenres. I feel like metal fans forget that other genres have that as well. But it’s coming out really cool and it feels true to, without sounding too spiritual, the voice in my head and whatever it’s feeling right now.”
It’s hard not to feel both excited and nervous by what the future holds for Noah. On one hand, he’s so passionate about his music, giving absolutely no indication that he’s willing to compromise or hold back, that you really believe he and his band could be on the cusp of releasing something truly astonishing. On the other, he today expresses a kinship with Kurt Cobain, another perceptive, creative person who connected deeply with his audience, but was crushed by the weight of the music industry. He references the Nirvana frontman as portrayed in Mark Lanegan’s book.
“The heaviness of hearing him describe Kurt, or their relationship, and feeling like parts of it were relatable or understandable to me, was very interesting and thought provoking,” Noah explains. “Not to compare myself to, like, a legend like Kurt Cobain or anything, but someone with so much depth, cultural history and presence being quoted and me being like, ‘Damn, it sounds like something I’ve thought in my head before…’ It was interesting.” He may not be Kurt Cobain, but we’re still convinced Noah Sebastian is anything but boring. Where he’ll take Bad Omens next is anyone’s guess.
The Death Of Peace Of Mind is out now via Sumerian. The band recently released new single V.A.N. feat Poppy. Bad Omens play Download Festival this summer.
