Bloodbath / Paradise Lost vocalist Nick Holmes is our latest guest to tell us exactly how he learned to scream.

Holmes credits the legendary Venom as the first band he ever heard with “extreme” vocals. “[Cronos] was just insane, I’d never heard anything like that before,” Holmes says. “When I heard that I was like, ‘Wow, this is insane.’ Kinda got me into the whole thing, you know?”

As for the technique itself, Holmes was “a lot more shouty” when he began harsh vocals, but he warns fellow singers that you can’t keep that up forever. “You don’t last long doing that, you’ll rip your voice out," he says. "I’ve had people do impersonations of their favorite death metal singer and they just completely rip their voice out.”

Since becoming the third vocalist for Bloodbath, Holmes has had to follow the death metal brilliance of two all-time greats — Mikael Akerfeldt and Peter Tagtgren. Holmes deeply admires both vocalists and attempts to replicate them both as closely as possible when performing live, while keeping his own flavor on it, of course.

As for maintaining his voice, Holmes credits getting plenty of sleep as an absolute essential. “Good sleep, not drunk sleep,” the vocalist elaborates. “Healthy diet, exercise if you can, and also don’t talk. Just don’t talk to anyone. Save it for the performance.”

Check out how Nick Holmes learned to scream in the video below and click here to pre-order Bloodbath’s Survival of the Sickest, coming out Sept. 9.

How Nick Holmes (Bloodbath / Paradise Lost) Learned to Scream

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