Employed To Serve singer Justine Jones leans back in her chair and flashes her widest smile. “Don’t be fooled, everything we’re doing now is totally out of necessity,” she says with a laugh. “No one wanted to book us or wanted to take a chance on us. It’s just that you’ve got to make your own opportunities or just sit and sulk. So we stopped sulking and made our own opportunities.”
We’ve just asked Justine if the DIY ethics that drive both her band and the underground metal empire she and her husband – ETS guitarist and co-vocalist Sammy Urwin – have built alongside it were born from a staunch punk rock spirit, or simply a necessity to survive in the music business.
“I think it’s true of anything, isn’t it?” she continues. “If you want anything to happen, then you’ve got to start moving and shaking. It’s the only way to do it.”
Hammer is sitting with Justine and Sammy in The Sovereigns, a pub in ETS’s hometown of Woking. The two of them are getting ready for the release of the band’s fifth album, Fallen Star, a record whose confidence is reflected by the heavyweight guests it features. Lorna Shore’s Will Ramos appears on recent single Atonement, Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach is on Whose Side Are You On?, and Svalbard’s Serena Cherry pops up on Last Laugh.
Dressed in baggy jeans and death metal long sleeves – no sign today of the elegant, flowing dresses Justine has started wearing in recent photoshoots – they could be a couple of regular greebos sipping Coke Zeros amid The Sovereigns’ afternoon drinkers.
In reality, they’re the driving force behind one of the country’s most respected underground metal outfits and the heart of a vibrant, growing cottage industry that aims to help a new generation of British metal bands. As well as keeping busy with ETS, they also run underground label Church Road Records, plus their newly founded publicity company, Since Always Press. At a time when so many musicians are struggling to exist, Justine and Sammy are carving out their own path.
“I like to manifest these things,” Justine jokes. “I’m aiming for millionaire status and headlining stadiums on this next album."
Onstage, Sammy and Justine are twin tornadoes, banging their heads and trading growled and screamed vocals. Offstage, they couldn’t be more different: friendly, enthusiastic, constantly upbeat. They met at school, and are still seemingly inseparable even after all this time.
Ahead of their wedding in 2020, they didn’t bother with separate stag and hen parties, instead putting on a gig for family and friends – including members of Conjurer and Palm Reader – that culminated in Justine bellowing out Mastodon’s Blood And Thunder. So joined at the hip are they that they even get up at 7.30am and go to the gym together.
“We’re just very chill people,” shrugs Sammy, when asked how they manage to live and work together. “I’m very lazy when it comes to arguing. We just nip it in the bud immediately, I can’t be bothered.”
The story of their band is equally inspiring. Formed by the pair in 2011, it’s been a long road to this point. Their 2015 debut album, Greyer Than You Remember, was a slab of viciously chaotic, mathy hardcore that firmly established them as a band to watch. Each subsequent record has added something new to their sound: hooks and choruses on 2017’s The Warmth Of A Dying Sun, groove metal on 2019’s Eternal Forward Motion (their first album for major label subsidiary Spinefarm Records) and, on 2021’s Conquering, a massive arena metal attitude.
In a scene that’s increasingly obsessed with viral hits and shiny new things, Employed To Serve are a reminder that slow and steady can still win the race. “I feel like Gojira are a good example of that,” says Justine. “They have slowly built over years and years to the point where they’re able to play at the Olympics. Not everyone has that viral moment, some people just have to go the long route and, you know, work it. Which is kind of what we’re hoping to do.”
The next step towards that tongue-in-cheek dream of being millionaire stadium-fillers comes with Fallen Star, an album that distils everything that they have ever done in their career, adding some extra melody and a sprinkle of star power via those guest spots.
Sammy says the more melodic moments come from his current obsession with prog, but Employed To Serve were also keen to bring back some of the tumultuous hardcore noise of early releases such as 2014’s Change Nothing Regret Everything EP. He adds that, lyrically, the album is about “facing negative problems head on and overcoming them, or turning them into positives”.
The latter is something that Justine and Sammy have first-hand experience of. Employed To Served were previously signed to UK label Holy Roar, where Justine also worked in a management capacity. In September 2020, two people made allegations of sexual abuse against Holy Roar founder, Alex Fitzpatrick. Justine recalls the feeling of reading the posts that made the original allegations as akin to “being punched in the stomach”.
She resigned from her role at the label almost immediately, as did every other employee, with several bands signed to Holy Roar also severing their connections to the label (Fitzpatrick denied the allegations, and no legal action was taken against him. Holy Roar was officially dissolved in 2021).
“It was, in all honesty, a super-traumatic event,” says Sammy. “I can only speak for myself, but I think it took both of us quite a while to get over it. You start to question your sense of judging someone’s character. It was a very horrible experience that it’s nice to have come out the other side of, for sure.”
Aside from the emotional impact of those events, Justine found herself without a job at the height of the pandemic – a situation made worse by the fact that Covid meant ETS couldn’t tour. The future looked bleak, but they weren’t about to give up.
In 2017, Sammy had set up Church Road Records as a small mail order company to distribute the hardcore and death metal albums he liked. Within 24 hours of Justine leaving Holy Roar, the pair decided to turn Church Road into a proper label.
They scrambled to release albums by Svalbard, Palm Reader and Respire, all of which were originally set to come out via Holy Roar. Artwork for the records had been printed, which meant Justine, Sammy and various friends and family members frantically putting Church Road’s stickers over the original label logo. It was a testing time, emotionally and physically, but it’s an inspirational story too – proof that it is possible for musicians to take their destinies into their own hands, and help other bands while they’re doing it.
“I just needed a job,” counters Justine. “I’d literally just lost everything, and it was during lockdown as well. I couldn’t exactly go job hunting. So, I was just like, ‘Right, let’s make this work.’”
More than four years on, Church Road has grown from those frantic beginnings to become a crucial part of the UK metal ecosystem. The label has released excellent EPs and albums by the likes of Heriot, Cruelty and Slow Crush, while 2025’s slate includes records from old-school metalcore crew Iron Form and blackened metallic hardcore merchants Grief Ritual, among others.
But Church Road has also been important to the survival of Employed To Serve themselves. Without it, there’s a chance they would have been unable to continue as they have. It’s something they’ve seen countless times in recent years – talented, promising bands struggling to balance careers in music with family and financial responsibilities.
We’re speaking just a few days before their friends and contemporaries Ithaca play their farewell headline show.
“A lot of it is we can’t afford to be in a band,” Ithaca singer Djamila Azzouz recently told Hammer. Justine and Sammy appreciate how fortunate they are to be in the situation they’re in.
“If the whole Church Road situation hadn’t come up, I would have had to start thinking that I need to have a career outside of the band by now,” Sammy nods.
“Neither of us would begrudge any band that decided they just couldn’t make it work anymore,” Justine says. “When you are that mid-sized band, on the cusp of being able to make it almost a full-time vocation, but then hitting that point where if your whole band decides they just want to go for the family route and not do bands anymore because it’s time-consuming. That could have been us, for sure, but the business side has meant we’re sort of the last ones standing from the scene when we formed.”
Both laugh when asked what a regular day involves when it comes to Church Road business. They reel off the things running a label involves: customer emails, mail orders, data entry, sorting out press for bands, the ongoing “Tetris challenge” of storing boxes of vinyl, plus lots and lots of coffee.
But Church Road is now at a point where it’s self-sustaining. It’s a lot of hard work, but, as both point out, it’s better than working for someone else.
“I have never done a business degree,” admits Justine. “I’m very much learning as I go along, and have been fumbling my way through for these last five years. It would be nice having someone else worry about paying me and paying others. But equally, I know that I wouldn’t have the amount of freedom I’m afforded now.”
Given everything they’ve got going on, you’d imagine the last thing they want to do is take on even more responsibility. But they recently launched their aforementioned new company, Since Always Press, to focus on promoting and raising the profile of bands they are passionate about throughout the metal, rock and punk scene. The likes of UK groove metal band Harbinger and prog metallers Calyces are two of their earliest clients.
“I wanted to work with more bands [on Church Road] but we couldn’t,” says Justine. “We have a set amount of budget. Once a month we have a release, we can’t do more than one release a month. Because there’s no upfront costs on Since Always, we get to work with more bands we love.”
Employed To Serve may never get to headline stadiums, and the chances of them becoming millionaires are, to be brutally honest, pretty slim. But for Justine and Sammy, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Even after more than a decade of slogging it out on the UK metal circuit, they’re still the same pair of passionate, metal-obsessed kids they where when they started the band. The only difference is that they’re now in a position where they’re able to give something back, to help nurture the scene that has nurtured them. Like they say, the couple that stays together slays together.
Fallen Star is out now via Spinefarm. Employed To Serve play Mystic and 2000 Trees festivals this summer. Order an official, exclusive Employed To Serve t-shirt design via the Metal Hammer online store, where you can also pick up a T-shirt/mag bundle featuring Employed To Serve on the cover of Metal Hammer issue 399.
