As 156/Silence touch down on British soil for the very first time, Jack Senff and Jim Schmitt sit down with Amped Magazine at Camden’s Electric Ballroom to talk about their upcoming album, the influence of David Lynch, and why metalcore finally feels like home.

Words & photos by Felix Bartlett | March 26, 2026

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There’s a particular kind of electricity in a room when a band steps onto a stage in a country that has never seen them before. Not the nervous, uncertain kind, the kind that crackles between a crowd that has spent years screaming along to records in their bedrooms, waiting for a moment that finally, finally, arrives. That’s the energy that fills the Electric Ballroom in Camden tonight, and it’s been building since the doors opened.

156/Silence are in the UK for the first time. It sounds simple when you say it like that, but standing in this room, watching fans cluster near the barrier they’ve been writing in their heads for years, it feels like anything but. This is a band who have spent the better part of a decade grinding through the post-hardcore underground, clawing their way out of Pittsburgh, signing to Pure Noise, and then, with People Watching, detonating something that set the entire metalcore scene alight. Over here, people lost their minds over that record. And now they’re here, in the flesh, at one of Camden’s most iconic venues.

I catch Jack Senff and Jim Schmitt before soundcheck in their green room, eager to get their thoughts and insights into this histroic tour.

“This is our first time in the UK and Europe in general,” Jack says. For a band that spent years, as he puts it, “scraping at whatever offer we could get,” having a full year mapped out in advance is, in itself, a kind of miracle. “That’s the first time that’s ever happened in our band’s career,” he adds. “Like having an actual schedule planned out.”

It’s worth pausing to understand how 156/Silence got here, because it wasn’t handed to them. The band formed in Pittsburgh, not exactly the breeding ground most people would point to for metalcore royalty, and spent years trying to find their footing in a scene that wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. Jim, the only original member, watched the band evolve around him over almost eleven years. Jack joined three years in, and by his own admission, that’s around the time things started getting serious.

“Pittsburgh’s a hard crowd,” Jack says flatly. “It was very hard to get out of there. Once we got to the other side of the state and Philadelphia, things started to get bigger for us. You just have to tour. You have to get out of your home state and play for people that have never heard of you and make no money for ten years.”

“And yet here you are,” I tell them, gesturing vaguely at the Electric Ballroom around us.

Jim smiles. “Yeah.”

“You just have to tour. You have to get out of your home state and play for people that have never heard of you and make no money for ten years.” – Jack Senff

People Watching was the record that changed everything. Released on Spinefarm, it arrived like a signal flare, heavier than anyone expected, more melodic than it had any right to be, and shot through with a kind of emotional directness that hit people somewhere tender. Over here in the UK, it spread the way the best records do: person to person, one recommendation at a time, until it felt like everyone in the scene had it.

What made it work, Jim argues, was the same thing that has always driven the band: a refusal to repeat themselves. “Me and him, we do this thing where we try to make every album significantly different,” he says. “Like, this song could not be on People Watching, you know what I mean? That’s kind of all we go for.”

It’s a deceptively simple principle, but it’s one that most bands quietly abandon the moment they find a sound that sells. 156/Silence have never seemed particularly interested in playing it safe. Their earlier material leaned harder, then drifted toward something more mathematically intricate, before landing in the bruising melodic metalcore space that People Watching occupied.

When I ask Jim about his favourite moment from that record he doesn’t hesitate. “Blood Loss,” he says. “It wasn’t even on the album originally. I had written it just for fun, and at the last second I was like, what if we just put this on there? It’s super synth heavy. It’s mostly just a weirdo song with a random breakdown in the middle.” He grins. “I just feel like only we could do it in a way.”

Jack’s answer is more complicated and more revealing. He loves Better Written Villain, the band’s biggest song, because it came out nothing like it was written, rebuilt almost entirely in the studio, and ended up being the most fun to play live. But his other pick is Funeral Arrangements, and his feelings about it are rather more conflicted. “I love that song so much,” he says, “but I fucking hate performing it more than anything. It’s so hard to perform. And when you only have half an hour and that’s one of them, it becomes very hard.” He pauses. “It has to be the second song. I can’t do it at the end because I’m tired.”

“I love that song so much, but I fucking hate performing it more than anything.” – Jack Senff

The new album, due in the fall and with details still under careful wraps, is where things get genuinely exciting. Jim describes a shift away from the guitar-first approach, toward atmospherics and synthesis built from the ground up. “Synth and atmospheric stuff first, as opposed to more guitar-based stuff,” he says. “There’s still obviously tons of guitars and riffs and breakdowns, but we tried to take a different approach.”

The references they reach for tell you everything you need to know about where this record lives. Resident Evil. Silent Hill. Twin Peaks. John Carpenter. Stanley Kubrick. David Lynch, whose recent passing hangs over the conversation with the specific weight of losing someone who felt permanent. “Big David Lynch fans over here,” Jack says quietly. “Especially Jim. And Ryan, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead.”

Jim nods. “I need to watch more of his movies. I’ve only seen a couple of them. I just love Twin Peaks so much.”

There’s something almost poetic about a metalcore band from Pittsburgh finding their creative north star in the fog-wrapped forests and chevron-floored lodges of Lynch’s imagination, but it makes a strange kind of sense. Lynch built worlds that felt simultaneously mundane and deeply, unsettlingly strange, and that tension, between the heavy and the dreamlike, between the direct and the atmospheric, is exactly where 156/Silence seem to be heading.

“The newest one,” Jack says, “it’s a lot more into the soundscapes and synth stuff, relating to video games and more movie-inspired backtracking, along with heavy riffs and catchy choruses.” He pauses for a moment, then adds with a slight grin: “There’s a Cyberpunk shotgun in there.”

The Easter eggs don’t stop there. “We had a whole day where we just went through and figured out what we could sneak in,” Jim says. “There’s at least six or seven things that you probably won’t even notice, but they’re there.”.

The visual world of the album, meanwhile, is being kept alive by the same artist behind People Watching‘s striking artwork, a piece that, when it landed, stopped people mid-scroll. “Adjacent for sure,” Jim says carefully. “Keeping it in the universe.”

That word, universe, is the one that keeps coming back. Because what Jack and Jim are describing isn’t just a follow-up album. “This next album is kind of a sequel to People Watching,” Jack says. “Lyrically it is. Thematically it is. It just dives deeper into the more dreamy, movie-like soundscapes as opposed to just straightforward heaviness.”

“We try to make every album significantly different. This song could not be on People Watching. That’s kind of all we go for.” – Jim Schmitt

By the time we wrap up, the 156/Silence crew are getting ready for soundcheck. The sound of people waiting in the queue out front (bearing in mind doors aren’t for another 3 hours) drifts back to us like a tide coming in. Jim and Jack will go out there in a few hours and play to a room full of people who have waited years for this. People who know every word. People who, as Jim puts it, will make both of them feel the same way they felt in Germany, stunned, grateful, and certain they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.

“One-five-six is literally everything to me now,” Jack says. “It’s the only thing I think about in the morning. At night. This is my purpose, to be in this band and have people relate to our music. To see people get tattoos of the band logo. It’s still surreal and mind-blowing to me.”

Jim, the only original member, the man who has been building this thing for almost eleven years, puts it more simply. “This is all that I do every day,” he says. “And being over here, seeing people knowing the words, we talk about it every day after the show. Can you believe all these people knew the words in fucking Germany? It’s crazy. We’re just grateful to keep doing it.”

Tonight, Camden returns the favour. For a band making their UK debut in one of London’s most beloved rooms, with a new album on the horizon that sounds like it could be the best thing they’ve ever done, the Electric Ballroom is exactly the right stage. The scene that has been waiting for them, the one that wore out People Watching and told everyone who would listen, finally gets to tell them in person.

Listen to the full conversation below: