Formed in 2006, signed to InsideOut in August 2011 with an independently released EP already under their belts, UK-based prog metal band The Safety Fire made a name for themselves as being something decidedly different with their 2012 debut album, Grind The Ocean. Tours with Protest The Hero and Gojira - and European festival dates - sealed the deal, shoving The Safety Fire name in the public ear and paving the way for bigger and better things. Barely a year-and-a-half later and the band has returned with Mouth Of Swords, which doesn't merely pick up where Grind The Ocean left off; it builds on the established breakneck momentum as the band's second album in less than two years.

Guitarist / producer Derya "Dez" Nagle agrees that it's quite unusual in this day and age for a band to pull off such a feat. He chalks up the quick turnover of Mouth Of Swords to the fact Grind The Ocean was finished six months before The Safety Fire signed to InsideOut

"I do most of the writing," says Dez, "so I started with the new album in December 2012 and finished in March 2013. As soon as I finished writing we went straight into the studio because I wanted to keep the immediacy of the music and keep it high energy. That was important, especially with the type of music we do because I think if we sat around and waited to record it, it would just sound old and stuck in the mud."

Grind The Ocean was the accumulation of everything Dez and his bandmates had done up to that point. There was an eagerness within the music in terms of how young they were, but they never tried to be technical for technical's sake. On the contrary, if something did came across as more "out there'" than necessary, Dez admits it was a case of thinking "'That's a cool part, I'm going to put it in the song...' Rather than serving the song I was serving myself. The new songs came out of a more natural writing process, and it has more of a direct, rock kind of feel."

Fans needn't worry, however, as Mouth Of Swords is still very much a progressive metal album. The Safety Fire draw from a large pool of influences, from bands they've always listened to - Deftones, Tool, Alice In Chains - to former tourmates Between The Buried And Me, Protest The Hero and Gojira.

"Being called a progressive band encapsulates the fact that we don't do one thing," says Dez. "The 'metal' label is a bit of a weird one because some of our tracks have been picked up by daytime mainstream radio, which is not something I think you'd expect from a metal band, or a prog metal band for that matter. We think about prog in the experimental sense. We connect more with bands like Mastodon than Dream Theater, so that's how we relate to the word 'progressive' with our music."

Along with the songwriting, Dez took care of mixing Mouth Of Swords himself. The album was mastered by producer Jens Bogren (Opeth, Katatonia, Amon Amarth), who also worked on Grind The Ocean. Because Dez recorded and produced both albums he had a very defined route of where he wanted to go with the music, and it was agreed early on that Bogren should be brought on board once again. The master for Mouth Of Swords is exactly what the band wanted.

"We have a great working relationship with Jens, so we knew he wasn't going to make it too loud and suck all the dynamics out of the music," Dez reveals. "We wanted the album to sound exciting, we wanted people to hear that we're excited and we love playing this kind of music. We definitely accomplished that with Mouth Of Swords."