Alexandra Palace, London, February 14, 2026. Motionless In White are playing their biggest-ever UK tour and tonight’s show is off to a scorching start. Meltdown is a suitably explosive opener, accompanied by huge gouts of pyro while members of The Cherry Bombs – the alternative dance troupe led by Corey Taylor’s wife, Alicia Taylor – stalk the stage twirling glowing torches. They switch to angle-grinders for the cybermetal pulse of Sign Of Life, but the overall effect is no less stunning.
With a little space to breathe, the house lights come on and frontman Chris Motionless surveys the vast crowd in front of him. “I’m just going to stare at you guys for a second, is that cool?” he asks. “It is Valentine’s Day after all, I just want to adore you.” There’s a touch of canny showmanship to all this, but it’s not just banter. The singer has a look that suggests he’s close to being overwhelmed by the experience.
“I sent the video straight to my girlfriend afterwards and joked that I should have had them wish her a happy Valentine’s Day,” Chris tells us today. “I walked away from that show with the kind of feeling like you want to call your parents and be like, ‘We did it, guys.’ It was such a triumphant moment. This isn’t just one of the best shows of the UK ever, this is one of our best shows of all time.”
Motionless In White’s last album, 2022’s Scoring The End Of The World, only narrowly missed the Top 10 of the US Billboard 200, but it was towards the end of that touring cycle that they suddenly found themselves playing a succession of sold-out arenas. Some two decades after they started this band, with no more ambitions than “to jump in a van and live out the fantasy of being on the road”, Motionless In White had finally arrived.
I want to get punched in the face when I listen to this record
Chris Motionless
Chris is joining us today from his home in Scranton, Pennsylvania – perhaps still best known to non-residents as the setting of the US version of The Office. He is, he says, using the limited time he has before Motionless In White’s never-ending tour schedule sweeps him away to Australia, to do “all kinds of house projects”.
Without the usual pale make-up he looks healthy and even a little tanned, long hair framing a casually bearded off-duty face. He also looks confident and relaxed, as well he should. There are more of those arena-sized venues looming across North America. There’s the little matter of a headlining slot at next year’s Bloodstock. And, right here and now, the band are about to release their brand new seventh album, Decades.
If the aptly titled Scoring The End Of The World rampaged out of a global lockdown with a sense of untrammelled release, Decades is an even more explosive statement. A big part of MIW’s appeal is their ability to blur boundaries, incorporating elements of industrial, electronica, rap, pop and more while always eventually circling back to the slamming metalcore heft of their earliest releases.
On Decades – an album that celebrates the band’s 20 or so years in existence – they throw in sounds picked up from every part of that journey, mix them up and turn everything up to 11.
“I want to get punched in the face when I listen to this record, because we have not had a record that aggressive since [2010 debut] Creatures,” Chris grins. “Every other record has had a lot of slow and mixed songs. This one is just energy of different variations and I felt like that is the message.”
It sounds like the album was a blast to make. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Chris says it came closer than ever before to breaking his love for making music – but more on that later.
![Motionless in White - R.I.P. (feat. Skylar Grey) [Official Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/OeRIoWmQA6k/maxresdefault.jpg)
Decades also marks another peak in a journey that the youngsters who formed the band could barely have conceived of. The band that would become Motionless In White came together in 2004 and chose their current name on New Year’s Day, 2005. The mathematically astute may notice that this makes the band at least 21 years old, but the frontman used his prerogative to name 2026 as their 20th anniversary year.
“I wanted to have earned it,” he explains. “Technically, we’re 21 years with the name, but we didn’t do our first real tour until 2006. You can play local shows with cover songs mixed in, but we weren’t a band until we had all original songs.”
Their first ‘proper’ gig was a local show supporting then-rising emo stars Senses Fail at The Staircase in Pittston, Pennsylvania in 2005.
“We didn’t even have our first demo fully finished, but I found the promoter through a friend and I called him every other day for a month straight,” Chris remembers. “Finally he just gave in, and we went out there like we were the headliners. It was cringy as hell looking back, but at the time it was the coolest thing ever!”
As soon as they could, they piled into a van (a cheap Ford Econoline that they all lived in, equipped with a trailer for the gear and a replica Triceratops skull mounted on the front) and headed out. The first few shows of their first tour had to be abandoned, after they broke down in a snowstorm and were forced to sleep on the floor of a rest stop on the side of the Interstate. They had to pool every penny to get fixed up and back on the road, but there was no way that was going to stop them.
Nothing I do can have any success if I’m not healthy
Chris Motionless
Which isn’t to say that every member of the fledgling band had the same long-term drive and commitment as the frontman. Even as they built up a cult following through constant roadwork and releases such as their 2007 EP, The Whorror, and 2010 full-length debut, Creatures, that early line-up went through a lot of churn. By 2013, Chris was the sole original member.
“When we started, it was just friends wanting to play music and tour, but I don’t think people at that moment were in it for a lifelong career scenario,” he shrugs. “We’ve had some members dealing with health issues and some just move on to other things. Thankfully, it’s been cool, because all the iterations have, in my opinion, improved the band.”
Even with a turnaround resulting in eight ex-members, MIW have remained largely drama-free, in the public arena at least. Asked if there’s been a deliberate policy of keeping any issues behind closed doors, Chris concedes that there’s “definitely been some stuff with former members of the band and their behaviour justified them being removed from the band”.
The only real public spat involved “a situation that we were pretty upset about as a band, because we felt betrayed”, he adds. Fifteen years on, he’s still reluctant to name names or point the finger, but he’s clearly talking about guitarist Thomas ‘TJ’ Bell, who ditched Motionless for Escape The Fate. In a rare diss-post at the time, they said he “basically fucked us last minute” and questioned his commitment to the band and fans.
Still, one dispute with an ex-member and a minor beef with Ronnie Radke – and who hasn’t had beef with Ronnie Radke? – is a remarkably trouble-free track record for 20 years of existence. That genre-splicing musical explosion has always been a big part of Motionless In White’s appeal, but so has Chris Motionless, also known as Chris Cerulli, himself. He’s the outcast rebel you could take home to meet your nan; unfailingly polite, respectful to his fans and seemingly wholesome in a scene that frankly hasn’t always been all that it could.
Motionless In White have enjoyed a far more stable line-up over the second half of their career, but Chris is undoubtedly its figurehead. Asked whether he is also its undisputed leader, he takes a second to gather his thoughts.
“Around the 2011-2012 timeframe, I feel like everyone had a democratic vote and we didn’t have a leader,” he says at last. “It was so chaotic and nobody could ever make a decision and… so I felt like I needed to take control of the band. Once we went in that direction, we became a lot more professional and business-oriented. The democracy is still alive today. Everyone has a say and a vote and gets to speak their mind, but it’s always because I’m bringing them something ahead of that for us to discuss and figure out. So yeah, I would say I am the leader, or the person with the forward vision.”
The frontman’s drive is undoubtedly why Motionless In White are where they are today. The first time this writer interviewed Chris Motionless was shortly after the release of Creatures. The singer was rightly and inordinately excited by the fact that Twisted Sister legend Dee Snider was appearing in the video for Immaculate Misconception.
Even then he oozed ambition, but he was also awkward and very guarded, seemingly weighing every word before he’d allow it to leave his lips. The Chris in front of us today still puts thought into everything he says, but he’s a lot more confident and relaxed. More comfortable in his own skin, perhaps?
“You are very right,” he smiles. “I have always been introverted. I’m not so much of a people person that I know how to say the right thing, and I worried with social anxiety. I’ve just had so many years of doing it that it’s not like a desensitisation, it’s more like, ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as I was worried about.’ So it didn’t feel like there was an internal implosion, I think I just care less about being serious now. I don’t care about a lot of things I used to care about, and that’s been quite liberating.”
It hasn’t, though, been plain sailing to get to this point for either the singer or the band as a whole. When Hammer spoke to Chris in 2017, as they were about to release their fourth album, Graveyard Shift, it felt like a pivotal time. MIW had their dedicated fans, but they seemed to have hit a plateau.
Keyboardist Josh Balz – then the longest-serving member after Chris – had left the band, which hit the singer hard. He was also dealing with the fact that his dad had just had a heart attack, and questioning the future of the band and his own place in life.
“Life and mortality and intention of living became more of a focal point of mine,” he nods. “When you’re younger you feel invincible, and you don’t really worry about your family. And then it just hits you like a train one day, and you develop these different feelings about what life is and what you’re doing and your choices and everything.”
One way that Chris dealt with this torrent of feelings was through attending therapy.
“The number one thing I learned was that nothing I do can have any success if I’m not healthy,” he reflects. “If I’m not putting any work into me as just a human being – band aside, friendships aside, family aside – then everything else is liable to suffer. That was something that I put off, and admittedly still very much do. It’s rather clichéd to be like, ‘How can you love anything else if you don’t love yourself?’ but it’s true.
“The biggest benefit to spending the time on therapy is that now, any time things become incredibly overwhelming or stressful, I can always be like, ‘How can I make this better by stepping away and sorting through what I need out of this situation, and then go forward after that?’”
MIW’s fifth album, 2019’s Disguise, also gave the singer an extra outlet for processing many of the issues he’d been struggling with, the title track examining what happens when you mask your true self while battling the demons inside. It was well-received among the faithful, even if it didn’t move their career much further along in terms of finding the end of that plateau.
Then came Scoring The End Of The World, which finally saw them come into their own. It wasn’t instant. The venues kept getting bigger and bigger over a four-year touring cycle, but does the singer now feel like the band have experienced a glow-up, to use the vernacular?
“Totally a glow-up, deadass for sure. Print that!” he hoots. “If the kids want to keep the glow-up going on, you can direct that right over here, ’cause we’ll be happy to keep playing these badass shows.”
When it comes to the reasons behind MIW’s recent and still burgeoning success, he’s modest about the band’s own input.
“I think that’s a little bit of a result of rock music in general just thriving, and in the past couple of years it’s gone crazy,” he says. “We just happened to be in the right place in our career where as it trickles down from these big bands like Bring Me and Bad Omens – we’re next underneath that, where people are discovering our music.”
The guest appearance of Bryan Garris from Knocked Loose on Scoring The End Of The World track Slaughterhouse and a reciprocal appearance by Chris on the hardcore superstars’ You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To song Slaughterhouse 2 probably won’t have hurt, either. Asked if that unlocked any new fans for them, he nods.
“I think most of the people that we have had on a song have, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it because we love those artists or feel they’re right for the song.
“I think some of the Knocked Loose fanbase are too cool for Motionless In White, so it’s cool that if they’re forced to be exposed to us, so to speak, at least there’s a song they could probably vibe with,” he adds with a self-deprecating grin.
With the band on an upward trajectory, it might seem like the process of making a new album marking their time together would be a celebratory affair. Not so, according to Chris.
“Making this latest record was as close as I’ve come to walking away from the band,” he sighs. “I wouldn’t, because it’s the only thing I know – the only thing I love and I’m passionate about. To walk away would feel like such a betrayal of the time spent and invested in this.”
The problem wasn’t writer’s block, he says, but more the sheer amount of work involved. “I ground myself to the bone for this record,” he admits. “I was going into these toxic cycles of workaholism and just burnt myself out. It took a little bit of my passion away, because it felt like a job for the first time, so I definitely wanted to walk away and come back to it. That’s part of why it took so long.”
It should also be noted that Decades did not start life as an album to mark the band’s 20th anniversary. A number of songs feature lyrics that circle around the theme of fear and no longer being afraid. When we tell him that, he smiles like we’ve unearthed a secret.
“The record was initially meant to be Afraid Of The Dark. So we went into the record, this is the theme, it’s about not being afraid to step into the unknown. As things took more and more time to get done, I recognised: ‘We’re coming up on 20 years here, that shifts what all of this is about. It still works, because the songs Decades and Afraid Of The Dark are the bookend messages.”
The tortuous and thematically revised process of piecing the album together resulted in a bigger pile of rejected songs than ever before. This included what Chris describes as arguably his favourite cut from the sessions. He declines to provide a title, but reveals that it was a “sad, slow, emotional song” in the same vein as R.I.P..
“Nothing has ever prohibited us from having multiple slow songs before, but I just felt like this record is supposed to be about fucking pure raw energy,” he says.
One song that bleeds raw energy and that Chris did love working on is Playing God, which features an absolutely feral guest performance from Slipknot’s Corey Taylor.
“That’s a great way to put it,” beams Chris. “I wasn’t in the room with him, but I don’t even know if I would have been able to get through it if I were, as I’d have been laughing and crying at the same time. He was very communicative and super-cool around the whole process, and when I heard it for the first time I was actually confused, because he did even more than I thought he was going to. When you’re asking someone that you either idolise or that’s just in a bigger position than you to sing, there’s an anxiety like you don’t want to overstep. But it seemed like he genuinely wanted to be a part of it on a bigger level.”
The album also features guest spots from singer-songwriter Skylar Grey (on R.I.P.) and Anthony Martinez of Dark Divine (on Blood Rave). As a metalcore act with a penchant for make-up and a dark gothic bent, the latter can clearly be seen as following in MIW’s footsteps, and Chris now finds himself in the position of mentor as well as mentee.
“I definitely resonate with what they’re doing and what they want to do, and I want to support that,” he says. While emphasising that he’s not comparing the stature of his own band to Slipknot’s, he adds that one of the most inspirational things about the Iowa legends has always been their willingness to take newer bands out – including Motionless In White.
Over the course of two decades, Motionless In White have got to tour with the likes of Slipknot, Lamb Of God and Alice Cooper. They became Warped Tour mainstays and have played countless European festivals. They’ve sold out Alexandra Palace, and icons such as Corey Taylor, Korn’s Jonathan Davis and Cradle Of Filth’s Dani Filth have guested on their albums.
Next year they’ll be headlining Bloodstock and playing a whole bunch of songs from Decades that will undoubtedly be new fan favourites by then. There have been a lot of highs, and there will surely be more to come, but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not these undoubted peaks that Chris Motionless cherishes the most.
“Sure, I have a lot of favourite shows that I’ve loved, but nothing beats my favourite times of being crammed in the van with my best friends,” he says wistfully. “Nothing beats getting caught stealing food from Walmart because we were broke as fuck. Those are the moments that me and my friends bonded over the most, and I’m so grateful I got to experience that.”
Decades is out now via Roadrunner. Motionless In White headline Bloodstock Festival in the UK in August 2027.
