Behind The Tracks: Virtue In Vain - The Whispers Of Sleep (Single) (2022)

The Whispers Of Sleep came together throughout the lockdown in the UK due to Covid 19. With so much time confined to our homes, we spent a long time away from rehearsing together as a band so it made writing together increasingly difficult.

I (Hywel) thought I would use all the spare time I found myself with to learn how to play the guitar. I wanted to help write our music in a more practical sense than hum the ideas I had come up with.

I reached out to Nick McLernon from Make Them Suffer for guitar lessons and I was lucky enough to learn from him.

I have been a fan of Make Them Suffer for a very long time so to be able to learn from the same band that we take inspiration from was an amazing experience.

The early versions of The Whispers of Sleep came from those lessons. I took the lessons and applied them to writing a song. When I introduced the song to the rest of Virtue In Vain is when we started to see the form come together. From the amazing leads you hear in the course to the breakdown hitting hard, we felt strongly that this song was coming together.

The piece of the song was the lyrics. This was a harder problem to face than I had originally. I had fully invested myself in the songwriting that I had to switch back to writing the meaning behind the song.

I usually write concept pieces as I enjoy telling stories. So I found it difficult to come up with ideas for this song.

One night I had a nightmare that really shook me to my core. I half woke up but I was seeing things in my room that I felt weren't right. I was trying to wave them away and get rid of them.

It was a haunting experience. To this day I am unable to say when that nightmare ended and those visions began.

I wrote The Whispers Of Sleep based on that experience. The feeling of when reality and our dreams/nightmares fade into one another. How they are created from our subconscious from the people, places, and feelings we have or have had in our lives.