Five years in the making, the Liverpool prog-metal outfit’s debut EP is finally here, arriving with a nudge from some very famous friends, a blood-soaked music video, and a frontman who has traded the afterparty for the studio…
Words by Tanita Hingerty | 25 Sep 2026
It’s freshers’ week in Liverpool, and Cameron Warren can hear every second of it. The Grinn vocalist lives on Bold Street, a stone’s throw from the city’s club strip, and while the new intake of students pour into town, he’s staying firmly indoors. “I’m a 33-year-old grumpy old man now,” he laughs. “My drinking days are done. I’m finished bashing my brain. I just want to make tunes now.”
Those tunes have been a long time coming. Grinn began life in 2021 as a drunken promise over a game of Smash Bros., and it has taken five patient years to shape it into a debut EP: heavy, melodic, a little strange, and very hard to pin to a single genre. Along the way, the band picked up a boost from the backing vocalists of Sleep Token (Espera), sparked a brief online rumour that Cameron was Vessel himself, and built a devoted core of fans who have stuck with them from the very first post.
We caught up with Cameron the day before release (with bandmate Freddie arriving just in time to wave goodbye) to talk dream venues, deliberate genre-blurring, the art of smiling through it, and why his old guitar is still covered in fake blood…
You’ve got a gig tomorrow, on the same day the EP comes out. Tell us about it.
Cameron: We’re supporting a band called Strike Deep. We know their drummer really well and they asked us to hop on the bill. It just so happens to be the day we’re releasing the EP, so we’re going to put a good shift in, rock up with the merch and all that, and try not to steal the limelight from their headline show. We’re there to support, so we didn’t want to market it as our big release gig, but we’ve got a few people coming down.
It’s at the Kazimier Stockroom in Liverpool. The Kazimier used to be a huge, really popular venue, then they demolished it and built a load of flats on it. The garden area has become a bar and the stockroom has been turned into a venue, so it’s gone from about 600 capacity down to 150. Loads of venues in Liverpool have been demolished because of the demand for flats and student housing, which is really sad. We need to preserve the arts in whichever way possible, and the first thing we need is places to perform. There are plenty still hanging on, but there was a time maybe six or seven years ago when loads went pretty much in one go.
Is there a dream venue on your bucket list?
Cameron: Brixton Academy. That’s the one. If you can headline and sell out Brixton Academy as a band, you’ve pretty much made it. I’d happily do Wembley and all those huge mega venues, but Brixton was the first place I saw a proper multi-metal line-up. It was the Black Crusade tour, right when Machine Head had just released The Blackening, Trivium had Ascendancy and Arch Enemy had Doomsday Machine. DragonForce, Shadows Fall, Arch Enemy, Trivium and Machine Head. What a killer line-up. I think I was 13.
Walking into Brixton for the first time, it’s deceptively big. To this day Machine Head are probably the loudest band I’ve ever seen live. Everything was cranked. All I remember is strobe lights and Robb Flynn on stage. So that’s the one with the gold star in my head.
Grinn’s sound is really unique, and your vocals move all over the place. How did you develop that style, and who are your influences?
Cameron: My influences span pretty much everything. I was born in ’92, so I was listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind as a kid because my dad played it, then classical and jazz growing up. I’ve been studying music and playing loads of instruments since I was young, so it’s hard to pin down.
My angle for Grinn isn’t necessarily “let’s make metal music.” It’s “let’s make something very heavy, and if we can stuff a bunch of other things in there and it still works, we’ll do that too.” It’s still going to be metal and rock-focused, guitar-driven, but I think that’s why it comes across a bit differently.
It’s also the first purely metal project I’ve been involved in, and I hadn’t really listened to metal for about ten years before we started. I stopped around 18 or 19 when I went to uni. It had peaked for me with Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh and Lamb of God, and I had my System of a Down, so nothing was going to compete. Around that era a lot of metalcore was stagnating, loads of bands doing a similar thing, and as a muso I get fatigued by that. I’m always looking for the next thing to get obsessed with.
Then when Freddie and I decided to make this, I got nostalgic and started listening to what was going on again, and I was like, “Wow, it’s really evolved.” I didn’t even know who Sleep Token were a couple of years ago, even though they were booming. It feels like metal is in the most artistically free space it’s ever been, and that was really attractive. I can be any artist I want to be in metal right now. I like musicality, weird chords, high-level playing and heavy music, so a prog metal band just made sense.
What’s the lore behind Grinn? How did you meet, and where does the name come from?
Cameron: The lore is fairly simple. Freddie and I met at uni. We were in adjacent circles rather than close friends, but we’d seen each other’s old bands and were always friendly. He’s a sweetheart and he’d always turn up to my gigs.
We started it in 2021 after he came to an afterparty for another project of mine. Everyone was having drinks, and Freddie and I sat down while we were playing Smash Bros. and I said, “I really want to start a heavy project.” He was a bit drunk and said, “Yeah man, let’s freaking do it.” Because I don’t drink anymore, I actually remember those drunk conversations. So the next day I messaged him asking if he was still up for it, he said yes, and I think that same day I sent over the demo for “Easier To Hurt.”
We made a loose plan: let’s get six songs together and see if we don’t hate each other by the end. Learning to work with someone creatively is half the battle. Everybody has their own ideas and wants to be heard, but you also want the best ideas to be the most heard, and building that trust takes time.
The name came quickly. Grinn with the extra “n” just looked and sounded like a band name. We paid someone to do a logo and then ended up making it ourselves anyway. It comes from the phrase “grin and bear it.” It’s less about a sinister smile and more about smiling through. You can read it two ways: “the world is terrible and I have to smile,” or “regardless of the shit the world throws at me, I’m going to persevere.” Ultra positive or ultra negative. That opens up the lyrical space for us to do whatever we want, but mostly the lyrics are about the darker, unmentioned areas of the human experience.
I enjoy that stuff. If I’m comfortable around you, I’ll start making jokes I shouldn’t be making. I can be a bit spiky, I like talking about what’s going on in the world, and I like to overspeak sometimes. Having this outlet is a good way for that to manifest in a positive way, rather than just starting arguments with people.
Can you talk us through how the EP came together?
Cameron: It’s been five years in the making, really. We took our sweet time because we wanted to keep enjoying the process. We didn’t want to rush it in a week. We’ve been in bands long enough to know that if you want to build a fanbase, get on the road and maybe make a living from it, it takes time.
I mocked up six demos with Freddie with basic lyrics. Some haven’t changed at all and some changed a lot. “All For You” was completely different to how it ended up, and I think its strange structure is a sign of me tampering with it for too long, but it landed somewhere really special. I programmed all the drums, then we got Tim on board to record them live, so all the drums on the EP are real. 2022 was writing and structuring, 2023 was recording drums and then mixing and producing towards the end of the year, and we started releasing at the beginning of 2024.
All the guitars and bass were recorded either here or at Freddie’s home studio, and all the vocals here, though Freddie did a lot of his screams at home. I do the cleans and he does the growls. I might contribute to some of the growls, but I’m not technically proficient enough to do them live without messing up my voice yet. When the adrenaline’s going and you blow your voice out, you can’t sing for the rest of the night. That’s not the vibe.
Big thanks as well to the girls from Sleep Token, because I’m very good friends with them. I didn’t even know they were involved until Sleep Token blew up. One of them used to come to my old band’s gigs as a fan and then started doing session backing vocals for me, and she’d say, “I’m off to rehearsals for this metal band who wear masks.” I was like, “Alright, great, good luck with that.” And before you know it, they’re doing arenas.
They started posting our Instagram on their page, and loads of people thought I was Vessel, which was really funny. Our first photo was me and Freddie in shadow in a huge room, so no one could see who it was, and people assumed it had to be something to do with Sleep Token. Sorry guys, I’m not Vessel! They feature on “All For You” and on a couple of the other tracks coming with the EP. You don’t want to ride their coattails too much, but it gave us that first pool of fans who are still with us. We’ve got 20 or 30 little mega fans on Discord who are always commenting and will buy any new merch we put out. We love them so much.
Is there a song on the EP that resonates with you most, or that you’re most looking forward to playing live?
Cameron: “Hold The Knife” is a really special song, and it seems to be the golden track for a lot of people. “All For You” has the Sleep Token connection and has done really well streaming-wise, but “Hold The Knife” has something unique and nostalgic about it. At the end of the day it’s a dramatic love song, which I love writing, compared to the rest of the EP, which is quite dark and deep and almost philosophical. It’s about the human condition, sometimes in abstract ways and sometimes in visceral, black-and-white ways.
Someone pointed out on YouTube that it reminds them of the intro theme to The Mask with Jim Carrey, and they’re right, the chords have the same harmonic movement until the last one. I used to watch The Mask a lot as a kid, so maybe it got stuck in there somehow. I’ll take that!
The “Hold The Knife” video has a lot of blood in it. How did you come up with the concept?
Cameron: That one was quite simple. We usually try to have three elements in our videos, because it’s so easy to come up with a concept and throw everything at it. So: red, white and black. The blood, the backdrop, and us playing. The message of the song is basically “if this isn’t going to work out, then kill me, I can’t live without your love,” so it fit.
I went to the costume shop in Liverpool and bought all the blood they had, plus some poster paint. Our friend Millie, who’s a set designer, helped us build the set. We bought the timber and banged the frame together ourselves at a place in Liverpool called Vulcan, a warehouse and rehearsal studio with a massive space at the top you can rent super cheap. It’s dirty and dusty and there are pigeons, but it’s great. We covered the frame in white sheets, shot the clean white shots first, then spent two or three hours on the verses before we got covered in the stuff.
Tim hates that. He gets a bit of sensory overload with things on his skin, even though he’s covered in tattoos, so he wasn’t having it in his hair. Freddie and I had it poured over our faces, in our mouths, the lot. We were barefoot, it was cold, the floor was covered in newspaper and slippy stone underneath, and there were a couple of times we properly decked it. It could have been bad! We spray-painted everything white by hand, including a cheap black drum kit we got for about £20.
My old guitar is still covered in the blood. You can see where the white’s chipping off and it’s black underneath. The plan is, once we get big enough, maybe we auction it for charity, or maybe it ends up in the Hard Rock Cafe, who knows? It’s nice to look over at it and remember we did that. It was a really fun shoot, and fun to edit too, because I edit all our videos, and there’s all the footage of when the take stops and everyone’s just going, “Oh my God, this is disgusting.”
What does the future hold for Grinn?
Cameron: More music, definitely. Hopefully we can get on some festival bills next year. There are some maybes in the pipeline that we’re hoping turn into yeses. We’re looking at headline shows in Liverpool and probably London, small club venues. We’ve also got a little treat coming out a month after the EP, a cherry on top to finish it off, which I think people will enjoy and won’t expect.
After that, it’s finishing all the demos for the next album. I hate speaking too soon in case it takes a couple of years, but there are some really strong new tracks coming through that we’re already putting in the live set. New music is priority number one, and hopefully we can start rolling it out as early as next spring. More videos, more chaos, more Grinn.
And who knows, maybe we end up supporting someone at Brixton Academy. That would be the first step.
Grinn’s debut EP is out now.
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