HELL ABOVE

FROM THE MOST CHALLENGING TIMES, FIT FOR A KING HAVE CREATED AN ALBUM THAT AS HEART-WRENCHING AS IT IS VITAL. HERE, RYAN KIRBY TALKS US THROUGH HOW HE MADE SENSE OF IT ALL...

- JACK ROGERS

Ryan Kirby thought he knew what darkness and despair felt like.

It turns out he had no idea. And when it hit him, it hit him hard. I’ve always been really good at bottling up my emotions throughout the course of the tough moments in my life,” he explains. Putting on a front and pretending that it’s not happening. But what the pandemic represented for me was running out of bandwidth and me suddenly overflowing with deep anxiety and depression. felt like should’ve addressed these things when things were better. feel like took for granted how good things were.” This is absolutely a feeling that we can all relate to in some way. Yet, in the case of Ryan’s family, it wasn’t the virus that caused him to begin his descent. It was much closer to home than that. Three months before the first wave of COVID hit, Ryan and his wife Crystal fostered her niece and nephew, taking them out of a system that had seen then rehomed 17 times. Thrown in at the deep end of parenthood, with the pandemic then throwing isolation and home-schooling into the mix, whilst also working with the deepset trauma that the kids were harbouring would be enough to push anybody to the edge.

Then Crystal suffered from a stroke, almost passing away.

At the same time all of this was happening, Ryan’s band Fit For A King were attempting to promote their new album The Path’. A record centred around pushing through your hardship and overcoming obstacles with power and pride in your heart, it was the opposite of what was actually going on in the band's life at the time.

How are you supposed to tell people that everything is going to be okay when you feel like your chest is being caved in? ""The Path' is such an uplifting and defiant record, and that's not how any of us were feeling," Ryan explains.