Interview and Text: Saro Lo Bue
There are bands you discover and immediately wonder how they slipped past you. ‘Asomvel’ are one of those bands. The Yorkshire four-piece have been doing this since 1993, built on a foundation of excessive volume, leather jackets, bullet belts, and an absolute refusal to compromise. Their fifth album “Set Your World On Fire” is out now, and vocalist and bassist ‘Ralph Robinson’ is exactly the kind of person you’d want carrying a band like this forward. Loud, honest, funny, and carrying the weight of a family legacy that runs deeper than most people realize.
Robinson joined the band after the passing of his uncle, ‘JJ Winter’, the original vocalist and bassist who co-founded ‘Asomvel’ and shaped its identity before his death in 2010. Robinson’s brother is also in the band now on guitar. This is not just a rock band. It’s a family affair, and it shows in every conversation.
“My uncle was the original singer and bass player,” Robinson explains. “He passed away in 2010, which is sort of when I joined the band. Do you want to join the band? Keep it going for your Uncle Jay. Well, fuck yeah, man. Because we’ve been brainwashed since an early age to enjoy this music. And now we want to play it. We’ve got that reason for doing it. Let’s keep his memory alive. Let’s do what we love.”
“Set Your World On Fire” marks the second album with the band’s current lineup, which is itself something of a milestone. In the entire history of ‘Asomvel’, they have never before made a second album with the same lineup. That continuity has allowed the band to refine things, to look back at how they did it last time and make deliberate adjustments. They have their own studio now, with drummer ‘Ryan’ handling the technical side of demos on Cubase, which means they can properly thrash out ideas, kill the bad ones, and arrive in the recording studio with material that has already been tested and proven. The result, Robinson says, is their most thoroughly developed record to date.
The album’s title track promises to take a blowtorch to any doubts about rock and roll, and Robinson is direct about what ‘Asomvel’ represent in that context. He doesn’t subscribe to the Gene Simmons school of rock-is-dead clickbait, but he does feel a genuine sense of responsibility to keep a certain kind of music alive. “Bands like AC/DC and Motörhead and Saxon and the new wave of British heavy metal. All this good shit from your granddad’s record collection. We’re like, if you’ve got doubts, it’s here to stay, man.” The week of our conversation, ‘Cronos’ of ‘Venom’ had just passed away, another reminder that the generation that built this music is disappearing. “We’re losing all these legends. We just want to keep it going, keep that music alive.”
Robinson was born in 1996, three years after ‘Asomvel’ formed. He grew up listening to the band. When he went through a rough stretch as a teenager, getting kicked out of school for fighting, being a scrawny long-haired kid who got picked on and fought back, ‘Asomvel’ was always on in the background. He would train to them. Build himself up. The music gave him something. “Asomvel was always the soundtrack to that, because there’s so many songs that are just, no, fuck you. And there’s a lot of that on this new album. I’m back from the dead. It’s your funeral. That sort of attitude of, we’re going to show them.”
The Motörhead comparison is unavoidable, and Robinson doesn’t duck it. The look, the voice, the sheer volume of the band all carry echoes of ‘Lemmy’, and the connection runs through the family. ‘Asomvel’s’ biggest influence before Robinson even joined was ‘Motörhead’, passed down from his uncle and his father, absorbed so deeply that it became simply how rock and roll was supposed to sound. Robinson saw ‘Motörhead’ once, at Download Festival in 2013, and not long after that they were gone. “There’s not too much of it left. But we’ve got Airbourne, man. They’re going to be doing it till they’re 90. And you’ve got us as well. We’re not going to stop.”
The ‘Airbourne’ connection goes beyond admiration. Robinson was a devoted fan long before ‘Asomvel’ ever shared a stage with them. He used to drive 200 miles to catch their shows, once borrowing money from his sister just to afford a ticket to Download. So when ‘Airbourne’ commented on one of ‘Asomvel’s’ social media posts after seeing a clip of Robinson playing bass through eleven Marshall amplifiers at once, it felt significant. “I was like, shit, they know we exist. That’s step one of making the dream happen.”
When ‘Airbourne’ announced a tour, Robinson was on it at six in the morning, hunting down contact details for their booking agent. Months later, they got the go-ahead. They did it once, then got invited back again. By the second time around, they were mates. The camaraderie culminated in one of the more memorable nights of Robinson’s career, though not entirely for the right reasons. In Cologne, after the show, he and ‘Joel O’Keefe’ from ‘Airbourne’ found themselves on the tour bus at three in the morning, drunk, when ‘Joel’ decided they needed a stop sign. Robinson wrestled one off a barrier. Then ‘Joel’ decided they needed another one. “For fuck’s sake, Joel.” No sooner had the second sign come loose than twenty German police officers appeared. They ran back to the tour bus, turned off the lights, and prayed. The knock came anyway. They were taken to the station, paid a fine, and ‘Joel’ covered it in the end. “He says I owe him a beer,” Robinson recalls. “I said to Joel when we sat there in the police station, did you manifest this? No, Joel, this has gone way too far at this stage.”
The album’s track “World at War” has a story of its own. The lyrics were written by ‘JJ Winter’ before he died, around twenty years ago, and the band had been trying to fit them into a song ever since. They finally managed it on this record, with a few lines updated but the core intact. The fact that the words are still entirely relevant two decades later says everything about the subject matter. “The leaders of these countries aren’t affected by the lives lost. So we thought, fuck it. Let’s get them into a song.” The musical setting takes an unexpected turn, with guitarist ‘Stel’ introducing a more delicate melodic figure that initially surprised everyone. “I thought, God, what’s going on here? This doesn’t sound like us. But the beautiful thing is as soon as I start shouting over it, then it sounds just like us because of my horrible voice every time.”
The legacy of ‘JJ Winter’ runs through more than the music. When Robinson talks about what it means to step into his uncle’s role in the band, he doesn’t reach for stage presence or rock and roll iconography. He goes somewhere more personal. “It’s probably more than even just being on stage, because how he lived his life was with such courage and conviction. He would never let anybody say shit without standing up for himself. Don’t take no shit. And he lived that.” Robinson tells a story of his uncle calling out a room full of hostile rugby players after a show, one man against a crowd, and watching them back down. “To live up to that kind of courage and charisma. It ain’t about the guy you are on stage as much as who are you off the stage. And I think the stage will take care of itself.”
As for what comes next, Robinson confirms that the current UK headline run is only the beginning. Festival slots are stacking up for 2026, European touring is coming, and the reception to “Set Your World On Fire” has generated more buzz than anything the band has previously released. After years of playing to two men and a dog in venues where they’d load in all the Marshall stacks and perform regardless, something has shifted. “We know we’ve got something here and we weren’t great and we’re still not great, but we know we’ve got that potential to keep working on ourselves.”
Asked which song he would want ‘Lemmy’ to hear if he walked into a show, Robinson doesn’t hesitate for long. “Louder and Louder. It’s just a fucking good song. And Joel from Airbourne says, man, I wish I’d written that song. Louder and louder again, again, again. Like a nursery rhyme, man. I was like, I don’t know if we can do this. It sounds stupid. But as soon as I sang it, I’m like, fuck yeah. This is cool, man.”
He pauses, then adds: “I’m sure Lemmy would get behind the sentiment. Turn that shit up. Let’s rock.”
“Set Your World On Fire” is out now. ‘Asomvel’ are on the road throughout November across the UK, with Leyendas Del Rock Festival in Villena, Spain confirmed for 2027 and many more European dates to be announced.
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