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For Sleeping With Sirens, each new chapter has always been shaped by the ending that came before it.
Across seventeen years and eight albums, the alt. rock titans have evolved countless times, changing alongside the five musicians at its centre. Through their journey into adulthood, the breakdowns of friendships and relationships, through every win and every loss, the band have always made albums that capture where they are in that moment.
After the darkness and disorientation of 2019’s ‘How It Feels To Be Lost’ and 2022’s ‘Complete Collapse’, their latest full-length ‘An Ending In Itself’ feels like the closing of a circle. Produced by Will Yip, it reconnects with the restless spirit of the band’s earliest years, whilst carrying the patience, perspective and hard-won clarity born from surviving everything since.
“I visualise those three albums as a trilogy of sorts,” frontman Kellin Quinn explains.
“They all flow into each other somehow, and that’s a big part of why I thought ‘An Ending In Itself’ was a great title to wrap up these three records. It’s an end to this season of our lives, but it’s also the beginning of something else.”
Returning to Rise Records for the first time since 2013’s ‘Feel’, that duality sits at the heart of these songs. Nostalgic without feeling trapped in the past and hopeful whilst still acknowledging the darkness, on album eight Sleeping With Sirens are going full-throttle, dialling back into everything that makes their band so great.
Taking stock of who they have been, who they are now, and who they still want to become – this is the story of ‘An Ending In Itself’.
THE SOUND
“I wish I could say that our band sits down and comes up with this immaculate idea of what an album is going to be,” Kellin smiles.
“It just doesn’t ever seem to work like that. It tends to start with us saying, ‘Let’s go in and work on some music, and we’ll see what it sounds like’.”
After a couple of early writing sessions left them uncertain about where things were headed, Kellin reached out to Will Yip over Instagram. As a longtime fan of the producer’s work with bands like Title Fight, Citizen, Turnstile and The Starting Line, he felt there was something in Will’s raw, emotionally driven approach that could unlock a different side of Sleeping With Sirens.
The band headed to Philadelphia, spent a couple of weeks throwing ideas around in a room together, and very quickly found the first real piece of the puzzle.
“I think we wrote ‘An Ending In Itself’ on the first day,” Kellin recalls.
“From then, I just knew that Will was the right producer and this was the right sound. Generally, once we have a few songs under our belt, we can start imagining what the record is going to be. We started putting the pieces together, and it formed into what it is.”
That instinct-led approach is what gives ‘An Ending In Itself’ its spark. Despite all its hinting towards the classic Sleeping With Sirens sound, it never feels like a band forcing themselves into an old costume. Instead, it’s the product of everything they’ve learned along the way.
Part of that came after their 2024 anniversary tour of breakthrough album ‘Let’s Cheers To This’. Stepping back into the orbit of that era over a decade on from when it all began, it renewed their appreciation for the energy and spontaneity of their early days.
“It opened our eyes to who we are. It made us think, ‘How do we take this band from where it’s been to where it needs to go?’” Kellin says.
“Doing that anniversary tour and then doing the Pierce The Veil tour pushed us to where we are now. We realised that what matters most is having songs that we enjoy playing live, and having songs that connect with our audience.”
Because of that, live energy is the guiding force of ‘An Ending In Itself’, stripping away all the filler and focusing on delivering banger after banger in their most direct form. That’s why a song like ‘Forever/Always’ sounds the way it does: warm, immediate, and forged by a conscious decision not to overcomplicate things.
That said, there are plenty of left turns here. There’s the As Cities Burn-inspired bridge section of ‘Need You Here’, and the part in ‘Paralyzed’ which was built on a nod to the bass breakdown in Haste The Day’s 2004 track ‘Blue 42’.
Each one of those subtle experiments serves as a reminder of how much fun this band can have when they trust their instincts, and how great it sounds when they do. Take, for example, ‘Left On Repeat’, which began life as a demo from guitarist Tony Pizzuti, who joined the band in 2022.
“It reminds me of something that would have been on our ‘Feel’ album. As soon as I heard that demo, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s work on this shit together as a band,’” Kellin says.
“Anytime there’s a new member in the band, you have to rearrange the way that you write songs,” he explains.
“Having Tony there added so much to these songs. He would come up with parts, and we’d actually change what we already had to work with what he wrote. He added so many layers, and the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without him.”
THE LYRICS
Rounding out a trilogy of albums, if ‘How It Feels To Be Lost’ and ‘Complete Collapse’ were records rooted in darkness, ‘An Ending In Itself’ marks the moment where that first glimmer of light breaks through.
That’s not to say it’s an album that sugarcoats things or pretends pain can be neatly overcome with the right inspirational phrase, though. Instead, it’s a collection of songs that frame hope as something we can all choose to strive for, simply by putting one foot in front of the other each day.
“That’s who I am as a person,” Kellin says.
“You can approach life in a couple different ways. You can either live in that darkness and stay with that outlook, or you can pivot and find a different outlook on life. For me, it makes a lot more sense to see things from a positive perspective.”
That outlook soars through the album’s title track, which Kellin has described as a love letter to anyone in the middle of struggle. It also shines through ‘Forever/Always’, a thank you to the people who stay by your side through every hardship, grounding you when you need it most.
A band who have grown to mean so much to so many people, one of Sleeping With Sirens’ greatest strengths is penning songs that are deeply rooted in Kellin’s own experiences, but open enough for listeners to find their own lives inside them.
For Kellin, looking back through their albums now feels like finding his old diaries tucked in a drawer, each song holding a version of himself that may no longer exist, but is still vividly real to him.
“It’s funny to listen back to your songs and see who you were during those periods of time,” he reflects.
“Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t come from me, but it comes from a higher place. It’s cool that I can listen back to it, and every time I do it puts me back in that moment of my life. I can see who I was, and I can compare that with who I am now.”
Having grown exponentially as a songwriter over the last eight albums, this time, he entered the studio with notebooks full of fragments, half-formed ideas and random lines that had crossed his mind. When we ask him if there’s anything that made the final record which he’s particularly proud of, he’s quick to point to a line in ‘God In My Head’.
“The line is, ‘All of my dreams cross the ocean and the sea // So I’ll paint you the sky and cast these shadows back down to the ground’,” he says.
“That line is very special to me. That’s how I feel about my outlook on life. There is going to be darkness, there are going to be shadows, and there are going to be bad thoughts in your head. You just have to get back to the point where you can be a dreamer again.”
THE COLLABORATORS
For Kellin, working with Will Yip gave Sleeping With Sirens exactly what they needed this time around.
Having spent their career with all kinds of producers, in all kinds of rooms, they know how much the emotional atmosphere of a recording process can shape an album. If the vibes are bad and no one is on the same page, there’s a fair chance you’ll be able to hear that tension in the final mixes. Luckily though, being in a room with Will brought only laughter and the freedom to try new things.
“We’ve worked with a lot of producers in our career,” Kellin says.
“We’ve worked with producers that make you feel really comfortable, and producers that make you feel really uncomfortable. Will is one of those producers that makes you feel completely at ease.”
“He’s very much a vibe guy,” he explains.
“We’d get in the room and work on stuff, but he’d be in there orchestrating it. He had a guitar in his lap, and he’d sit there and come up with all these moving parts as we worked. We laughed a lot, and had a really, really good time.”
Created across both winter and summer sessions in Philadelphia, Kellin jokes that the band made the album across “two Olympics”. As the songs took shape across the seasons, Will acted as that guiding presence, helping the band chase whatever each one needed and making sense of the free-flowing ideas.
This time around, the process was also aided by the addition of guitarist Tony Pizzuti, who joined the band’s ranks back in 2022. Each member’s contributions slotted together, resulting in an album that vividly captures where Sleeping with Sirens are at right now.
Of course, a huge part of that is their renewed relationship with Rise Records, too. Having first signed to the label in 2009 – shortly before the release of debut album ‘With Ears To See And Eyes To Hear’ – a lot has changed since Kellin was last sat in a room with the label’s head Sean Heydorn. Finally, though, it was time for a homecoming.
“I met with Sean and had breakfast with him again. We talked about life and about how both he and I had grown as people,” Kellin reflects.
“It just made a lot of sense to go back to Rise. We already have this relationship with them, and we’ve known them for the majority of our career. They’ve gone above and beyond with pushing the record and getting behind us. They’ve given us the freedom to make this record and to do it right.”
THE TITLE AND ARTWORK
At first glance, ‘An Ending In Itself’ sounds final. Really, though, it’s anything but.
“It’s almost like the idea of the phoenix rising,” Kellin explains.
Rather than a door closing, that’s how the frontman is viewing this chapter. Recognising that every ending carries the possibility of transformation, this album rounds out the trilogy that began with ‘How It Feels To Be Lost’, tracing darkness, destruction, and the long process of rebuilding.
The artwork mirrors that idea beautifully. A shadowy forest with tall black trunks and grey sky, with one small tree burning bright with orange-red light in the centre. Flecked with intentional nods to the band’s journey and also inspired by the simplicity of the artwork created by Kellin’s favourite Tooth & Nail bands, it’s a striking image that captures the spirit of ‘An Ending In Itself’ perfectly.
“I wanted to do something that looked like a throwback,” he explains.
“It started with the trees in the background. I was looking back through our album artwork, thinking about all of the things that I loved about them. I saw our first record, and I wanted to recreate something like that. It’s simple, and we nodded to that with the mountain and the tree in the middle. It’s almost a new spin on that artwork, just with the colours inverted.”
That image also expands across the different physical versions of the record, with additional visuals depicting snow, autumn leaves, and rain clouds, each one reflecting a different season of life. Tying beautifully into the album’s themes of change, it’s also a statement of how much physical media still matters to Kellin and his bandmates.
Hoping that fans can appreciate the meaning of holding onto something tangible, it’s why the band have created a CD journal featuring behind-the-scenes photos and handwritten lyrics.
“We live in a very digital world, don’t we?” the frontman says.
“My favourite thing about being a fan of music was getting albums and having special things that came with it, things that you weren’t expecting. You open up the booklet and there’s little Easter eggs, or little things in there that make you hyped that you got a physical copy.”
“It’s awesome to be able to have any music you want at your fingertips, whenever you want it, but in my opinion, it’s much cooler to have something that you can hold in your hands and actually look at. I like to be immersed in that world.”
THE FUTURE
More than anything, ‘An Ending In Itself’ finds Kellin Quinn grounded.
Not settled in the sense of standing still, but more aware of what this band means, what it requires from him and his bandmates, and what it can give back when everyone involved is truly present.
That perspective has shifted the way he thinks about the band’s live show too. After years of touring, exhaustion can take its toll on artists, clouding the importance of what they’re building. For Kellin though, his responsibility is now clearer than ever before. No matter how tired he may be, each show is somebody else’s night to escape, connect, and feel something that they truly need.
“Seeing who I was as a young artist compared to who I am now, I definitely feel an appreciation for it all,” he explains.
“People go through a lot every day in their lives. Our show is a special place for them. Whether we’re burnt out or just not in the mood… it doesn’t matter. We’re here to perform for those people.”
“This is the one night they get to go out and just leave all that shit outside. They come to have a fun night with their friends, to sing the songs that they grew up listening to, and to listen to new songs. Our responsibility as a band is to give them that night, and that’s something that I don’t take for granted anymore.”
Kellin will be the first to admit that his younger self didn’t have half the perspective that he has now, and a lot of that comes from understanding that Sleeping With Sirens is a whole lot bigger than he and his bandmates. Over the years, he’s learnt to embrace that. To take on the challenges thrown his way, to work harder to train his voice, and to be more disciplined to ensure they can keep putting the best versions of themselves into everything they do.
“As I get older and my voice changes, it takes me more time and more effort to work on it,” he explains.
“It’s just like any athlete. As you get older, your legs and muscles don’t work the same as when you were 20 years old. You have to prepare, and you’ve got to work out. We all put that work in, and that’s why it’s still going strong.”
There are plenty of flashy reasons you could give for how a band can maintain its longevity, but really that’s all there is to it. It’s about knowing what your purpose is, showing up, and doing the work to keep making it happen. It’s about choosing to wake up each day and push towards something greater, and that’s exactly what ‘An Ending In Itself’ is all about.
