July 2025 Spotlight: BalaClava and the Musicians behind the Masks

What lies behind a mask? 

It’s a question that’s shadowed the public’s view of anonymous figures from pop culture and politics since before we’ve been able to paint faces on cave walls. What compels someone to hide their face? To Norfolk’s enigmatic Punk duo, BalaClava, it’s a question they’re all too familiar with. To find out what it’s like to walk the world with two faces, NTKO’s Mitch spoke to BalaClava’s resident guitarist and all-around badass, ‘B’ about punk ideology, the optics of superficiality, and filming Jesus in a mannequin graveyard…

B: No problem, man. I’m happy to chat.

M: So, my first question to you is this; Who are BalaClava?

B: Isn’t that the million-dollar question! C and I started out as two shy guys who just wanted to make music, about two years ago. I knew that C was this amazing musician, incredible at what he does, and I knew I wanted to do something with him, because he’s just this creative powerhouse.

M: Is it tough, just the two of you?

B: Lots of people see us as a two piece and ask us how we manage when it comes to mixing and performing, but honestly, it’s not difficult. I’m a bassist by trade and what I call an imposter guitarist… C is a drummer, he can do synth, he can honestly do a bit of everything. Since we started, we’ve grown into something neither of us could get our heads around. 6 months ago, we’d have been dumbfounded if you’d told us that we’d have such a loyal following. It took us a while to get booked.

M: How do you mean? Was it tough to begin with?
B: It was October 2024 where we thought ‘let’s try and make a go of this’, but it didn’t really happen straight away. We were in contact with lots of different people saying we’re looking for gigs, but we just weren’t landing, so in the end we resorted to a TikTok Live stream which had about five viewers. It really had us asking if we were doing the right thing – we were getting a reputation as this self-deprecating band online that didn’t get any gigs. It’s all we really posted about, you know, ‘we’re looking for a gig, not that anyone cares’.

Then Punked-Up Promotions picked us up and asked us if we wanted to do an all-day Punk Event, and since then, it’s just spiralled. I think we’d built up traction to the point where they maybe just felt sorry for us. Kind of like ‘let’s give them a chance and maybe they’ll shut up.’

B: It started off as a bit of fun really, we wanted to do something a bit different. Then it turns out everybody is wearing bloody balaclavas on stage these days, so that didn’t really go to plan. I just thought, wouldn’t it be cool, five, ten years down the line still doing this, with nobody knowing who we are?

M: Like Banksy, I guess.

B: There’s also this thing where the both of us suffer from anxiety when it comes to performing. Having that mask on allows us to be someone completely else for an hour. You don’t have to be yourself; you can be a different person. If you’ve had a rubbish day at work, you can go out and call people a bunch of rude names and it be all part of the performance. When I put the mask on, if you don’t like it and you let me know, I don’t feel attacked because you don’t see the person behind the music, you just see this entity who doesn’t care, and that’s fine. It’s a way of coping really. Without the mask, I don’t know if we’d have been able to write half the music we have, or for us to be able to perform half as well as we do. There’d always be a case of us feeling like people don’t like it, that we’re paranoid, or that nagging voice saying ‘I feel like an idiot’, you know?

B: For sure. It’s silly because we’re not a big band, but every time we stand on stage it feels like maybe we’re just two guys who got a bit carried away. But even if we did get carried away, and it’s the last gig we do, at least we went out and did it – it’s important that we’re true to ourselves.

M: There’s something very Punk about that attitude, and the roots of your music, too. What’s your inspiration? Do you describe yourselves as a Punk band?

B: I do, but as much as I say we’re a punk band, we listen to a lot of music. I’m listening to a lot of Yungblud right now, I think he’s a genius. From a young age I’ve always been gripped by the loudness and brashness of Green Day. In terms of more modern influences, we look at a lot of Soft Play and Royal Blood.

M: What about C’s tastes?

B: His playlist is pretty eclectic – country, K-pop, Punk Rock… I was on a trip with him the other day, he’s driving so, naturally, he’s in charge of music. And you just think, what the hell is happening right now? But to be honest it’s great. We take from every sort of genre we can.

M: You know, you see that a lot with grassroots musicians. Their playlists on Spotify draw inspiration from a whole bunch of weird places.

B: I just think in today’s musical climate, you’re competing with so many different artists, and not just musicians, but TikTok artists, too. It’s so important to be open and not musically naïve, and think beyond that genre limit. If some guys have written a catchy hook, maybe we can do something with that in our style, tweak it, make it say something else, and put our own voice to it.

M: Especially with Punk being so rooted in amplifying counterculture voices. You’re taking the experiences from all these different places, and they’ve all got something to say that you’re adding to.

B: The stuff we’ve written most recently is so different to the Saint and Sinner album because we’ve had so much more exposure to different bands. I think that’s exciting – even I don’t know what’s coming next. I do this thing where I get an earworm and I can’t get it out of my head or do anything else until I’ve written it down. If I’m driving, I have to pull into a layby and just scribble it down quickly. About 2 hours later, we had this fully formed track. That’s what I love about BalaClava – we don’t say no to each other; if we’ve got an idea, we run with it and see how it’s going to work.

‘B’ and ‘C’ cover their faces on stage.

B: It’s interesting because we’ve changed how we approach the masks over time. To begin with, we were still ourselves, just with masks on; there were elements of our real personalities shining through. But one day, it was sort of just like a light switch really. We’ve since adapted these stage personas of entirely different people, these larger-than-life punks who don’t care and aren’t afraid of speaking out.

M: How does that go down with people?

B: People are always shocked that whenever we take off the mask that we’re not as intense as we are on stage. Our first interview was with Propaganda in Norwich, and we turned up in our masks. They said to us “We expected you to be really intense, but you’re really nice guys.” I mean we try to be good people, you know? Balaclava is an act, and we’ve still got our personal lives. They don’t tend to bleed through – you hear that saying that people take their work home with them? Once that mask is off, if I’ve had a rubbish day, I’ve just shouted and screamed and I feel better for it, and I feel calmer and more grounded in myself.

M: I always think it’s fascinating how people get treated so differently for just looking like a different person.

B: We live in a world of 24/7 judgement; Instagram, TikTok… even if we just took the masks off and marketed BalaClava as ourselves, I guarantee you’d get someone making superficial comments about how we look or who they think we are, what we’re wearing. The masks make it so they can’t look at us subjectively. They have no choice but to comment on the only thing they can – our music, and we let that speak for itself.

B: That’s what I really feel like music needs to be about – it’s not about looking at someone and thinking they’re attractive, it’s about liking the art, liking what they’ve got to say, and how they say it.

M: I want to talk to you a bit about your own personal journey – the content of what you guys write about feels very raw and very honest to me.

B: If you’re not honest in your music, I feel like people can see through it. How can I expect someone to buy into something if it doesn’t feel real? It’s got to be believable. We can’t write a decent song about something we can’t relate to.

Like ‘Birthday Bitch’. It’s not deep, there’s no political message, it’s just a song about someone being an absolute diva on their birthday and throwing a tantrum, but I like it.

We’ve also explored this thing of me in ‘The Story of Loverboy’ with this narrative where Loverboy finds drugs, finds alcohol, loses everything, wants to hurt himself, and needs to start again from scratch. Initially I was worried about how people would receive it. Were they going to think this is generic, or give me pity, you know? And then I thought, honestly, the music isn’t for them; it’s for us, so it we like it, we’ll just put it out and at worst, we’ll have made something that’s true to us.

M: I think there’s something to be said about a lot of new artists coming into this industry thinking they need to make songs FOR their audience, rather than letting their songs FIND their audience. People flock to integrity and honesty, and authenticity.

B: If I write a song for me and you like it, great, fantastic. But I don’t want people to think I’ve pandered to them, I can’t write a song FOR you if I don’t KNOW you, right? But if people like what we’re writing, we know they belong in this sort of crazy little family that we’ve got going on. When we get asked ‘what’s your target audience’ by promoters, we don’t really have one, we just want people to hear us, and if they connect with it, they’re our audience.

Filming the Saint and Sinner Music Video with NTKO.

BalaClava draw inspiration from Green Day, Soft Play and Royal Blood with electric, high energy stage presence.

B: We’d never been up to the Mannequin Graveyard in Grantham before, that was all NTKO’s idea, but what a place! It’s that right kind of weird, and we got there, and the brains just kept braining, you know? There’s just this wild creativity that comes from everyone bouncing off each other with these great ideas in a great location. There’s a lot of ‘Yes, and’. We were able to wrap up filming in 3 hours. I think it only took that long because we spent so much time laughing.

M: That’s great to hear. Let’s talk about the content of the filming – what’s the narrative of the video?

B: I think the plot follows the meaning of Saint and Sinner quite literally – the idea is that Jesus represents my subconscious, that whenever I’ve been on drugs, I felt like a God.

It opens with C and I having an argument about me wanting to just give up. Then Jesus appears, chaos ensues, I go to speak to a doctor who thinks I’m completely nuts (played by NTKO Director Dale!) presses a help button and I get taken away by two security guards. Satan and Jesus form an alliance to come and rescue me… I don’t want to give too much away but there’s lots of funny little scenes, lots of chases… but yeah, it turns out that what they’re trying to do to me is not okay.

M: Sounds pretty frantic.

B: You know, now I say it out loud it sounds like a fever dream. I just feel like I need to make people laugh, you know? It’s a big part of performance for me, I like to spread a bit of joy where I can. But yeah, I get free, C is trying to tempt me with a guitar and be a saint, Jesus is tempting me with back to my old self to be a sinner, and the story is about me finding a point in between, where I’m the best of both worlds. Saint AND Sinner.

M: I’m really looking forward to seeing that. It sounds a riot.

B: For sure. Massive hats off to NTKO for funding it, they’ve been one of, if not our biggest, supporter since day one. We both want the same thing, we both advocate for positive mental health and it’s great that there’s people out there who want to work with us on that.

M: To close out, I wanted to talk to you guys quickly about what’s been going on at Glastonbury earlier this year, and your thoughts on art censorship. What do you think about the treatment that artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan have received?

B: All I’ll say is that right now, the world is a scary place. Every day there’s more war… no wonder people are turning to music to speak their mind, but then they’re being cut off from having their voices heard. If you tell people they’re not allowed to feel something, it’s going to explode as a reaction. Art is a beautiful form of protest, there’s so many ways you can say what you need to say or show what you need to show. Dissenting voices won’t make you spontaneously combust.

There’s a quote I like that goes something like “Art shouldn’t be a mirror of reflection, but a hammer to help shape society.” Kneecap have been great about it, they didn’t back down, and if the headlines read ‘Kneecap cancelled from Festival for voicing truth to power’ people are going to flock to it. Whenever there’s efforts to shut down protests or expression, people just get louder about it.

M: B, thank you for your time. It’s always a pleasure to speak to musicians who are so passionate about their work.

B: The pleasure is mine, man. Thank you so much.

Oi! Want some more?

Want to check out Balaclava live? Join us at The Matrix in Grimsby on Saturday 20th September for NTKO’s F*CK Normal On Tour, featuring Balaclava, Tanks Turning, and Suburban Toys! You can check out BalaClava’s Official ‘Saint and Sinner’ Music Video as soon as it’s released on Facebook.

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back in October to speak with Cullen Gaskell, technical maestro of music production and owner of Yellowbelly Records, about how he brings out the best from his bands’ sound!

From all of us once again at Not That Kind of CIC – stay weird, and always dare to be loud.

– Mitch