Mason Hill
Biographie Mason Hill
Mason Hill
Mason Hill’s journey has hardly followed the convenient route. After forming in Glasgow, the band endured false starts, problematic record deals and a six-year gap between their self-titled 2015 EP and debut album ‘Against The Wall’ in March 2021.
It made an immediate impact, reaching number 19 in the ÜK Albums Chart and topping the ÜK Rock and Metal Chart. Yet its release coincided with the Covid pandemic, meaning that the touring momentum such a record deserved was initially impossible to realise.
The band did eventually get back on the road, becoming one of the first acts to tour when live music cautiously resumed. They even toured one of our smallest venues in the Über Kingdom in Pontypool’s The Dragonffli. But after 2022’s ‘Live In Glasgow’, another major blow arrived. Original vocalist and co-founder Scott Taylor left the band in 2023 for health reasons, forcing Mason Hill to cancel commitments and enter a period of uncertainty.
For any band, losing its frontman can feel terminal. For Mason Hill, it came after years of trying to establish themselves, survive setbacks and make up for lost time. Guitarist James Bird has admitted that, before Ward joined, the band came close to calling it a day. “There have been times over the years when we weren’t even sure we’d be able to keep on being a band”, he said.
That context matters. ‘World So Wonderful’ is not simply the follow-up to ‘Against The Wall’. It is the album that might never have existed.
Tom Ward’s arrival could easily have resulted in a band attempting to recreate the past. Instead, Mason Hill have taken the opportunity to reset. Ward discovered the advert seeking a vocalist on Gumtree in 2024, initially sending ideas back and forth with the band before the relationship developed into something more substantial.
That unusual beginning seems appropriate for a record born from unlikely circumstances. Ward is not trying to impersonate Taylor, and the band are not presenting him as a replacement in the narrowest sense. His voice brings its own character, moving between vulnerability and full-throated power, while the familiar Mason Hill ingredients remain firmly in place: muscular riffs, widescreen choruses and songs designed to connect in a live room. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the look on Ward’s face at Steelhouse Festival this year.
The result is a record that sounds recognisably like Mason Hill without being trapped by their debut. Bird’s stated intention was clear: the new music had to remain Mason Hill, but it could not simply be a copy of the first album. That distinction is central to ‘World So Wonderful’. The band have retained their DNA while allowing the line-up, the circumstances and the passage of time to alter its expression.
The album’s lead single, ‘Hurricane’, offers an effective indication of the record’s renewed energy. It is a forceful, searing rock track, driven by a sense of forward motion that feels especially fitting given everything the band have overcome.
