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Sylosis are back! Singer/guitarist Josh Middleton explains why he felt the time was right...

- Amit Sharma

It was a slow realisation, I guess,” answers Josh Middleton, when asked about the moment he realised Sylosis would definitely be making a return. In 2016, he announced the metal band he formed in Reading when he was just 15 years old were going on hiatus, freeing up the time needed to join Architects initially as a live guitarist and, soon after, as a full-time member. It was a move that – in the eyes of many fans – left the future of his original group shrouded in uncertainty...

“What a lot of people don’t know is that I split the band at the end of our last tour in March 2016,” explains Middleton. “I was really unhappy in the band and felt I’d boxed myself in, musically. It was like there were all these self-imposed restrictions about what we could and could not be. So I basically told the guys I didn’t really want to do it anymore.”

As fate would have it, some of the music heard on this year’s Cycle Of Suffering was actually composed with a new project in mind – one free of the self-imposed restrictions that were getting in the way. There was just one problem: a lot of it sounded like Sylosis...

“I actually had the idea of starting a new band and was already writing music from a fresh perspective, then I realised it wasn’t too different to Sylosis – so I came back round to thinking it could work,” he laughs. “I guess I needed to think of it as a new band to realise I didn’t need to be worried about doing whatever I wanted. Just as I was beginning to come round to the idea of re-starting Sylosis, after amassing all these songs, a new path opened up for me in Architects...”