Wiki
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Length
3:53
“MANTRA” is a powerful but eerie alternative rock anthem that depicts how people blindly follow others. The highly-anticipated debut single off the band’s sixth studio album has Oli asking for people to get behind him to start a cult.
Like their previous album, That’s The Spirit, this song along with the rest of the album was solely produced by Oli Sykes and keyboardist Jordan Fish to allow the band full autonomy of their sound. Oli spoke about this during an interview after the track’s world premiere on Annie Mac’s BBC Radio One Hottest Record show:
"We want to do heavy in a completely different way. We wanna do catchy in a completely different way. I mean this is the hardest record we ever wrote and these songs are the hardest songs because we really challenged ourselves to do something completely different and not lean on anything we’ve done before."
The single and upcoming album were teased by the band via a phone number which, when called, announced small amounts of information about upcoming music as well as various social media posts.
The inspiration for this song comes from a Netflix documentary called Wild Wild Country about the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. Oli shared how the documentary influenced his writing on the song:
"I was watching all these people devoted to this one guy, doing this crazy shit for him. As I was watching it and trying to write lyrics at the same time, I was drawing these similarities to cults and love."
Oli further explained how the song includes aspects from his divorce which took place before writing the new record:
"Starting a relationship—especially a marriage—is like starting a cult, a small two-man cult, because you have to give yourself over completely to this person, you have to trust them, you have to love them unconditionally even if you start thinking ‘This is a bit suspect’ or ‘This is a bit dodgy.’ That’s what a relationship is, it’s exactly the same as a cult so that’s where the thinking behind the song came from."
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